Last day of AEDM 2009...

This month has flown by…as most months seem to be doing these days with alarming regularity and increasing speed…wouldn’t it be nice to have back all those days from my youth when I thought I was bored!

This past Saturday, Yvonne, my elder daughter and I went out to the new Shenkman Arts Centre…this is where our Gloucester Pottery School has moved to…not a very convenient move for us, really…driving to Orleans is not a pleasant exercise during rush hour…which, if we were to keep taking our classes, we would have to do…but it is a beautiful spot…this was our first time out there since the pottery school had moved…

We originally went to see the Gloucester Pottery School Christmas Show and Sale…which runs until December 15th…it was great to finally have a look at the new location and there were some wonderful pieces…but the real surprise was seeing Hans Blokpoel’s show called “Patterns in Nature” in the Trinity Gallery: Salon A exhibit space at the Shenkman Arts Centre…Hans’ sculptural pieces are wonderful…I love rocks and nature and his use of slate, rocks, nails and hardware bits really appealed to me…

On Sunday…after a much needed sleep-in…Cariño, my elder daughter and puppies, Shea and Teddy, met my younger daughter, her Beau and their puppy, Kaiah, at the Bruce Pit…what a great place…my younger daughter, her Beau and Kaiah had been there before, but the rest of us hadn’t…there were great trails through the woods…lots of dogs running about…it was a fun outing…we also saw this awesome tree…it's base was huge and very complex...


















In the confines of the woods, I couldn't get the whole tree in one shot...so I made this composite...which I think is more interesting...


















We came home to the wonderful smell of the stew I had started earlier in the slow cooker…we roasted some veggies to go with it – there wasn’t room for everything in the slow cooker…it was a delicious late fall dinner…

This afternoon I plan on spending the last day of AEDM up in the studio painting…I’ll post pictures later if anything interesting happens…

Checking in...

It seems that the last week and a bit have got away on me...life has a way of doing that...mine does anyway!

It also seems that I have not been destined to spend very much time at all in my studio this month…but I have been doing some photography…though none of that in these past few days either…but today I did spend some time playing with some photographs that I had taken previously and have been meaning to fiddle with…

When I was at Ryerson in the Photographic Arts program, I started exploring and experimenting with things like distortion, repetition and panoramas…it was much more labour intensive back then when I had to develop film and print the pictures…one of the final pieces that I did in second year - which was made up of 36 negatives - took me 56 hours to print…now, with Photoshop and digital images…my how things have changed…although I can still get lost for hours fine tuning and tweaking…

These have not been tweaked to their final pluck…no doubt I will go back and fiddle some more…but here are some of the things I have been playing with…

This is a panorama of my favorite place on earth..."The Island"...last year for Christmas I made 5x7 prints of these 5 pictures for my 2 nieces...I would love to enlarge them a bit more and have them printed on canvas...





From the other side of Georgian Bay...at my Mom's beautiful Cobblestone Cottage...these 2 panaorama series were taken just after a storm had rolled through...storms on Georgian Bay can be very awe inspiring...








PS...if you click on each picture you will be able to see a larger view of it...

AEDM ~ Days 14 to 17…

Had a great weekend…nice birthday dinner for Cariño Friday night out at Oma’s…then on Saturday Cariño, Oma, elder daughter and I went to the Ottawa Guild of Potters Fall Sale…saw lots of pottery eye candy…I went back again on Sunday with Yvonne…there is always so much to see that I usually go 2 or 3 times…

On Sunday Cariño, Yvonne and I went out for breakfast at a place in Orleans that Cariño’s niece, along with a friend of hers, have just bought…many family members and friends are helping with all the work that needs doing…a number of family members and friends work there as well…

On the way to pick up Yvonne, Cariño stopped so that I could take a picture of this tree that had caught my eye…I seem to be noticing trees a lot more since that full moon drive…


















I managed to spend a bit of time in the studio yesterday…started working on a big canvas painting for my Georgian Bay series…stylized rocks and trees…I had done this ATC card months ago...this is what I am using as reference for the new painting…it is in the same style as my Northern Series…


















Last night Cariño and I ended up driving out to Orleans to the restaurant again…only this time it was dark and during rush hour…since I wasn’t driving I could play a bit more taking pictures out of the window as we were driving along with all the other cars…

I was trying to get interesting blur photos...to show the chaos of rush hour...










































As I played...things became more and more abstract...I also altered with these in my photo editor...

AEDM ~ Day 13…

Happy Birthday Cariño!!!

Both my Mom and Cariño were born on the 13th day of a month…so Friday the 13th days hold no fear for us…they are happy days…especially when a birthday falls on one!

Last weekend Cariño and I went to the 260 Fingers pottery show…it was fantastic…such talented clay artists…there were many pieces I would have loved to have had follow me home…some of my favorite artists were there…

I love Chandler Swain’s work – especially the ones with the crows or ravens…I have also been lusting after Saskia Praamsma’s pieces for a few years now…one of Cynthia O’Brien’s women wall figures cried out to me…it was hilarious…I also wanted one of Tim Storey’s wall birds…his dragons are great too…it was nice to see Diane Sullivan there…when Yvonne and I were on our way to the Fall Fire pottery workshop weekend back in September, we stopped in at her studio in Williamsburg and so I already have some of her pieces…as well it was nice to see Leta and Don Cormier’s pottery creations, but I didn’t get a chance to say hi to Leta – she was one of the presenters at that Fall Fire workshop and has inspired both Yvonne and I to learn throwing…lastly I fell in love with Colleen O’Reilly’s totems…on going to her web site, I realized that my sister has some of her pieces…the colours are so wonderful and bright…she is from Hamilton and I am going to have to go check out her and her partner’s James North Art Collective next time I am down in that area…

This weekend, on top of being Cariño’s b-day weekend, the Ottawa Guild of Potters Fall Sale is on…it actually started Thursday and runs until Sunday…this is most definitely a must attend…dangerous though…

It was cold again last night, so I took my camera this morning on the puppy walk...it didn't seem as glorious as yesterday...but then maybe it just got blown up into the memory of something wonderful because I didn't have my camera yesterday!

AEDM ~ Day 12…

The temperature dipped down below zero (Celsius) over night…on my walk with the puppies this morning the grass and the leaves on the ground were all painted with frost…each blade of grass and edge of leaf emphasized so that it stood out - separate from those around it…it added so much to the depth of this simple scene on the ground…I didn't have my camera with me...

On my way to a job this morning, I passed by a newly formed ghost town…CFB Rockcliffe closed down at the end of July 2009…leaving hundreds of empty, boarded up military homes…I stopped by after my job…hoping to be able to walk around and take some photos…but there were all kinds of no trespassing signs, so I didn’t venture too far into the deserted neighbourhood…
























I am feeling kind of stumped on that painting I started yesterday…sometimes I just have to leave it for a bit to let it sit…I don’t know…I also have a painting that I started over a month ago and then I got side-tracked by life and have yet to get back to it…it was like I got interrupted mid-thought and am having a hard time picking up the thread again…

Since my elder daughter has moved back out again, we have gone from 5 cats down to 2…my younger daughter’s 2 cats will be with us for a while yet…one of them – Maddy – has become super affectionate once more…he didn’t like one of the other 3 and it really affected his behaviour…here he is tonight…helping me…




















He is very hard to resist...

AEDM…Day 11…Remembrance Day…

Prince Charles and Camilla were here in Ottawa today for the Remembrance Day ceremonies…I can only imagine the crowds…it was a nice day too…I don’t like crowds, so I didn’t even attempt to head down to the National War Memorial…but we could hear the CF-18 jets fly over and the cannon boom from home…

Today I played…it has been a while since I have had a chance to do anything in my studio…first I had to sort it out a bit…things tend to fill it in when I am not holding the household chaos at bay by spending time in there…

I started with a canvas painted red…










Added some cheese cloth…










I love the way it folds on itself creating texture…














Then I squeezed out a bunch of colours and dipped a felt flower that I had picked up a few weeks ago at The Papery (wonderful store in the Glebe)…I actually bought 3 of these felt flowers and I imagine that I will use them collaged right into a painting or paintings at some point, but I wanted to see how they worked as a stamp…then I got out my various taps that I have been saving…I have 3 now and a metal tap end circle that I found on the road way back and used them to get some paint on the canvas as well…now I have to wait for this to dry…

























Here are the "tools" I used...

AEDM ~ Day 10 ~ Ghost Town...

After getting lost a couple of times this summer while trying to navigate from one back road route across Ontario to another, I got totally fed up with my ripped and tattered, years out of date basic Ontario road map and treated myself to 2 new back roads map books…one is from the Backroad Mapbook Outdoor Recreation Guide series…and is the Cottage Country Ontario one…the other is from MapArt Publishing and is the Ontario Back Road Atlas…

The MapArt map book shows ghost towns…and while Cariño and I were heading back to LT’s to retrieve my forgotten laptop on October 31st…we figured what better day of the year to visit a ghost town than on Halloween?






















































































Balaclava is an interesting little ghost town because there are still 2 inhabited houses…how spooky would it be, I wonder, to live in a ghost town…it is just a short distance north of Dacre and used to be a lumber mill town…





















Ron Brown has written a number of interesting books about Ontario…I decided that I needed his one entitled Ontario’s Ghost Town Heritage…this could make for some fun outings!...I picked it up at one of my favourite stops when I pass through Orillia…Manticore books…

November 6th to 9th…

I had started writing this post about a week ago...but hadn't had a chance to get it finished and posted...I have a few of these almost finished postings...I haven’t had any time for painting these last few days either…but I feel some coming up...

Late Fall Drive…

This year I have driven back and forth across Ontario more times than in any other year…I have been crisscrossing the province via a number of different routes…I realized on one of my last trips across that I had never done it at that time of year before (October 24th)…so I was seeing things that I have never seen before…most spectacular were the tamarack trees in their full fall glory…

On the route that I was driving, most of the leaves from the deciduous trees had fallen by this time…the height of the fall colours having passed a couple of weeks prior…I was driving across the province then as well, but couldn’t stop because of time restrictions…I did take a couple pictures of the beautiful fall colours...taken out of the van window as I drove…but wasn’t able to stop and photograph...































I left Ottawa on that Saturday morning, a few weeks ago, in the misty rain…it was really quite beautiful even so…there was a lot of ground fog…so lakes were mostly soft grey blurs, revealing only the outcroppings of trees and rock close to the road…the rest of the scene strangely missing in the foggy haze…swamps meandered, snaking back and forth between the landscape forms, disappearing into the mist…the dead trees showing as stark black lines against the muted golds and browns of the dying grasses…the water reflecting back varying tones of grey…the mostly leafless birch added their bright white highlights to play against the beautiful, rich dark greens of the pines…then the shock of the yellow tamaracks…


















































































I wanted to stop so many times…but I wasn’t set up for photographing in the rain…and while beautiful in real life, my simple camera would not have been able to catch the subtleties of the colours and the light…the depth and mysteriousness of the landscape would have been lost…

I drove along in awe…relishing the fleeting sneak peeks at mostly hidden lakes and swamps that disappeared around the outcroppings of rocks and the stands of trees…the back roads that I take to get from Ottawa to near Midland or to the cottage are so magical…Ontario is such a beautiful province…

When I reached LT’s, there were still some deciduous trees with their leaves still clinging…we walked the dogs on some paths near her house...part of the network of the Simcoe Forest County Trails…it was a beautiful world in bright yellow…looking up into the trees…and the path blanketed with leaves…





































































I would love to, someday, do a number of photography trips through the back roads of Ontario...so that i could concentrate on the photography and not just snap pictures as I fly by…I would have to go a number of times...in the different seasons…I have since bought myself a couple of really good back road map books…that was how Cariño and I ended up at the ghost town of Balaclava…