Thanksgiving Cat Meld...

I spent this past Thanksgiving weekend at the Island...the same place I have been blogging about lately…my favourite place in the world…only this weekend was Thanksgiving…so a lot of the family was there…my Mom, my sister and her husband and 2 girls, my brother, my younger daughter and I. It was wonderful…family is such a good thing and spending time with them is bliss…

As well, we brought my younger daughter’s 7 month old wee bit of a puppy, Kaiah. Matisse – my sister’s family dog…a Papillion (even smaller than Kaiah) and their 2 Siamese cats…Whiskers and Lisa, were all there too…

Here are Kaiah and Matisse on our walk about the island...














It was a cold weekend, so we had the fire going almost all of the time…the 2 cats snuggled on a stool right in front of the fireplace...


















Whenever I would go near the fire…to put on another log, or to warm myself, I would notice the 2 snuggling cats…then I became interested in the abstract patterns of their bodies…I call it “Cat Meld”…

Spiders, Snakes and Shadow Waving…

Part of a cottage experience for us his identifying the various things – plants, bugs, birds and animals – that we see…there are a number of field guides at the cottage and LT’s beau brought some neat survival books that had insect, snake and plant info…

For all who know me, photographing this spider (which we did identify but I can’t remember its name in the aftermath of my fear!) was a major case of forcing myself to do something that scares me! I hate to admit that it was kind of fascinating though…LT and I watched it spinning a fresh web one morning…it took down and made a new web every day…and its web had a very distinct zigzag pattern in a couple places coming out from the centre…it appeared to be after the yellow jacket wasps that come in late summer and we even tried to kill and toss some into its web, but none stuck and I got too creeped out by it all…


















Now snakes, on the other hand, don’t scare me at all…I do have a healthy respect for the Massassauga Rattlers that live on the island, but snakes don’t scare me like spiders do…so when LT and I were loading up the canoe after one of our painting sessions, I didn’t freak when I saw the snake lying under the canoe…right about where LT was going to step when she reached over to put the painting gear in…but she is afraid of snakes…so I said, very calmly, for her to step back from the canoe…now…and she did…so all was good!













The snake was a fox snake (even though the book says they only go up to Point au Baril and we are north of that)…on first glance, their colourings are similar to the massassagua, but fox snakes are longer and thinner…they ‘rattle’ their tail like a rattler though…I was going to pick it up for LT and my dog to have a better look at it, but it was vibrating its tail like mad and I had a momentary thought that went something like this - if I was wrong and it was a young rattler and I got bit out on this flat piece of rock and had to paddle back to the cottage before heading in to Britt (which would take about half an hour in the small motor boat) which is the closest place for the anti-venom shot…so I didn’t pick it up…

I take lots of pictures at the cottage…of the amazing landscape that I love so much…rocks and trees and water…I also take pictures of the tribe - people and dogs (cats when they come too)…a few years ago it was just my younger daughter and Cariño who made it to the cottage and I took this ‘waving’ shot…the lighting and location had to all work for this…it was taken out at the group of islands we call the ‘inner outers’…it is a great place to go for a shore lunch and if the weather is right, to play in the waves on the outer shore…as we were walking around I noticed our shadows following us…


















A couple years ago when I was up with my 2 daughters, 2 of their friends, LT and her Beau, the 4 kids and I had walked over to the other side or our island to see the sun set and I took this picture for my waving series…













Then this year, we all went out to another one of the ‘inner outers’ for a picnic and I took this shot of the group of us waving…I love how the shadows are distorted…















I also took one of just Cariño and me…


















I have years of dog pictures…some of my favourite pictures of our dogs have been ones taken at the island…here are a few of them…

Artists in their Environment ~ the Chelsea/Wakefield Studio Tour…

This is the 3rd or 4th year that I’ve gone on the Chelsea/Wakefield Studio Tour...it is one of my favourites…I imagine that is not only because I've seen some wonderful artists on it, but also because it is so close and is easy for me to get to, as well, it is a tour that takes you through such a pretty area…though I bet the Haliburton County Studio Tour is pretty amazing for both artists and countryside too…but it is a 4 or 5 hour drive from Ottawa…


















This time of year is not only beautiful with the fall colours, it is full to overflowing with studio tours…the Perth Autumn Studio Tour and the Merrickville Tour are both ones I wish I could go on…I’d love to go on all of them…but there is no way…even though Cariño is becoming a wonderfully seasoned studio tour goer and tour driver (this year 6 of us piled into our van and Cariño drove)…it was lots of fun, but if you tried to go to each and every one of them it would take all of your weekends for a month or so! If money was no obstacle, maybe…then you could travel about, staying in charming country inns, eating out…ya…dream on…the other thing, though…is that all that beautiful eye candy can become overwhelming…and it can get difficult if you see too many things that you just have to have and you can’t buy everything…these things can end up speaking to you and haunting you…I also get so inspired by all that I see that I can imagine, if I kept going and seeing without the time in between to get back to my creating, I might just explode…













I do love studio tours though…I love seeing artists in their environment…love looking into peoples homes…my job takes me into peoples homes to work on their computers, so I am used to entering peoples living spaces…some of the places on this tour were simply breathtaking…beautiful remote locations…in the woods, overlooking the river, on twisty, scenic back gravel roads…I saw more that a few places I would love to live in!














Of the 22 artists participating in this tour, we saw 14…that was all we could fit in on the 1 day that we could all get together to go…Cariño and I played the game of virtual shopping…deciding at each place what we would buy if we could…we spent a lot of virtual money! It would have been impossible for me to decide on only 1 virtual purchase from the day…it seemed that each place we went to became my new favourite…


















Now, after almost a week of it settling in, I think Marie-France Nitski resonates the strongest for me in the painting category…I love the bright, bold colours she uses and the wild and free expression in her pieces…I fell in love with her piece called “Bread and Roses”…but there are a few of Linda Wright’s paintings that I am still thinking about too…especially one that had wonderful aqua blue colours, textures and worn paper with a fish skeleton image and a canoe…also her impressionistic textured pieces that looked, to me, like landscapes were wonderful…her web site doesn’t show the pieces I’m talking about, but you can get the idea from her page on the studio site…and John Barkley had a massive portrait that he was working on…it isn’t on his web site yet…it was huge! I like the way he uses tons of paint…I love tons of paint…great globs of it…so I was attracted to that aspect of his paintings…


















We also saw Ross Rooke’s wood turning…absolutely beautiful…he gave us a tour of his workshop and I think I saw a glimmer of interest in Cariño’s eyes…maybe something he would like to do…Glen Foster makes finely crafted, unique tables…letting some of the natural form of the wood remain in the design…there was a sumac table where he had split the piece of sumac and mirrored it together side by side to for the table top…it was exquisite…Russ Zeitz, another woodworker creates wonderful mixed media, sculptural 3D pictures, rustic furniture and funky sculptures…
























































Diane Lemire is an artist I have admired for a few years now…her works in cement intrigue me…I fell in love with a bird bath I saw at her place a few years ago…it had different types of cement, leaf impressions and a blue and white china ball partly submerged in the bowl part of it…it has been speaking to me for a long time now…


















Something out of character happened to me on the tour…I usually don’t get overly excited about jewellery, but I fell in love with a necklace that Susan Glazer made…it was a scrumptious blue…she had made it by crocheting the coloured copper-cored wire…really neat…her dancing diva’s were fun too…


















We stopped in Wakefield for lunch at Chez Eric…had a lovely lunch and good wine…I had the quiche which came nicely presented…












The tour is on again this weekend if you are in the area and can go…it is well worth it…lots of yummy eye candy…I would have liked to have seen the rest of the artists on the tour, but right now I find myself sitting in another beautiful spot – my Mom’s cottage on the Bruce Peninsula overlooking a wild and restless Georgian Bay…from almost the exact opposite shore of my sister’s cottage…same bay, but so different on each side…


















I missed the Bruce Peninsula Autumn Studio Tour…but there are is a nice gallery just up the road a bit in Tobermory…Circle Arts…I should be able to make it to 260 Fingers though…

Plein Air Painting, Lamps and Miniatures…

So...for all the talk of cottage crafts…this year we didn’t have one! There were lots of creative things going on…but we didn’t have a craft organized that we all participated in together, like in other years…

LT’s beau had brought some of his metal miniatures to paint and that interested my 2 daughters and my younger daughter’s beau…so they worked on those over the course of our cottage time…the miniatures involved painting tiny details and each one took hours and hours to do…

My elder daughter also put together a sculptural piece from a piece from a falling apart, weathered wooden boat and some interesting branches; she painted it white and blue and made herself a really neat piece to hang her jewellery on…

LT and I had 4 plein air painting sessions and we also did some funky painting on furniture…

At first we thought that we would canoe all around and set up to paint at a different location each time we went out…but in the end we decided to set up in the same place each time, paint the same scene and see how we progressed…it isn’t that easy to just bop about painting plein air…you do get so that you can carry everything in one load – we had got to that point part way through our course in Haliburton…but it still takes at the very least 3 hours per session…our first 2 and last sessions were 3 hours, our 3rd was a bit over 4…it would be a different matter if LT and I were there solely on a painting trip for ourselves…but we couldn’t just disappear on everyone…so choosing a spot right close-by worked well…

We settled on painting one of the out buildings on the island…we call it the Ice House – it was once used to store the ice that was chopped in the winter…in the days before refrigerators, when people had ice boxes…it is a cute little structure perched on the rocks with cedar trees beside it and pines behind…also, it was just a short paddle across to a flat island where we could set up…

What a beautiful place to paint! Here we are all set up and the view around us...














LT Painting...














Our session 2 paintings with the Ice House in back...














My dog would swim beside the canoe and stay with us as we painted…he was a good painting companion!














Shea on location...keeping an eye on the island...


















Of the 4 sessions, 3 of them were in a row and I really noticed progress in my paintings…then we couldn’t get out for a few days…my 4th painting has improved perspective…but I found that unless I moved from doing the monotone-initial-roughing-in-the-lines-phase into adding colour, then I would get too carried away with monotone details and didn’t want to add colour…

Here is my session 1 painting...


















Our session 2 paintings about to go into the ice house to dry...


















LT's session 3 painting...


















My session 3 painting...I am gatting happy with my rocks (one of my goals) but my trees are a bit wild!


















Here are our paintings from the first 3 sessions up in the ice house drying...













My painting from our 4th session...


















LT working on her 4th session painting...


















I am a long way and many practice paintings away from producing anything anywhere close to being ‘finished’…but it is nice to see progress in the little bit that I have done!

As our gift to the cottage this year, LT and I painted 2 lamp stands…we are also going to paint one of the couches but only managed to get it primed this year…the lamps took way longer than we realized they would…they also are not finished, but are looking pretty good so far!

The lamps before we started...


















Here they are so far...


















The couch as far as we got this year...we primed the parts we are going to paint...we are going to leave the arms and the front board natural, so those got sanded down and one coat of varathane applied to protect them until we get back to it next year...