I grew up in Owen Sound on Georgian Bay, part of Lake Huron. The landscape of Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven was my childhood landscape and I even had an imaginary room upstairs from my bedroom with a glorious imaginary water view. I loved rocky outcrops, white pines and cedar swamps. Lake Huron is very large and you can’t see across it except in the inlets so it did have that in common with the Atlantic Ocean. When I first moved to Nova Scotia, I loved living on Kearney Lake, a real water view. As well, Chebucto Head was my favourite place to sit on the rock and watch the ocean waves. When I moved to Portaupique, the scenery was extremely different. It is flat and pastoral and there are vast areas of mud flats that are exposed and covered and exposed with each tide cycle. The tide is constantly coming and going. It took many years before I could truly say that I loved this scenery. One time we had a visitor to the gallery who had grown up here and now lives in Ottawa. “How I miss this beautiful scenery” she exclaimed . I immediately wondered if everyone internalizes their first scenery when young and then we spend the rest of our lives searching for reminders of it.
My love of the scenery of Portaupique did gradually inch its way into my heart over a period of twenty years, bit by bit, tide-cycle by tide-cycle. When I started painting in this area, I usually avoided painting the Bay of Fundy landscape and I was attracted to the clusters of houses, the porches, the windows. For the past thirty years, I have felt an affinity with the the coming and going of water and the expanses of mud and marsh. When actually trying to capture it in a painting, I quickly realized that the tide affected the character of the painting. Thinking about what tide I want to portray is a crucial part of the early painting planning. If the tide I want in the painting is the tide I am looking at when I start, then I start the painting with the tide. If the tide is not yet the way I want it, I start with the sky and foreground and leave the water until later in the painting.
Tomorrow, Jim and I are off to Germany for seven weeks. I will be posting sketches and word pictures on Facebook and on my blog (www.joylakinggallery.com) if you don’t do facebook. If you are interested, I loved to have you along “vicariously”. My high school art teacher, Bill Parrott, used to write me wonderful letters and he always said how much he enjoyed living vicariously through the eyes of his students.
