WINTER’S PROMISE
It was early December in 2006. Joy and I had traveled to Tofino with friends to celebrate the 60thbirthday of our friend Holly. The skies were grey and threatening, and the weather forecasts were even gloomier. Throughout the fall we’d been warned by the media and their meteorologists that we were in for a winter of unsettled weather. We’d just finished an unusually dry summer, and up until a month earlier the fall had been the same. Our annual sojourns into the forests to pick wild mushrooms in the fall had been the least productive we’d ever experienced, simply because it was so dry. Now though there was a promise or better said a threat, of change.
One afternoon in Tofino we witnessed a sky like no sky I’d ever seen before. The clouds hung over the inner harbour. They hung like some grey tapestry draped in a lazy random fashion. We were under that ceiling of fabric looking up in awe. Everyone commented on the unusual formations of grey and ominous cloud swathing Clayoquot Sound. Gary Richards, one of our group, is a pilot and he told us that such formations are to be avoided in flight as their confused winds and strong downdrafts can be killers. These clouds seemed to carry a warning, a promise of things to come.
As I write this story, in January of 2007, so far we’ve endured a winter of wind, snow and rain that has been unprecedented. Stanley Park has been decimated with over 3,000 trees toppled. Record rains have flooded, snows have avalanched. Property has been damaged and lives have been lost on the west coast of North America. I know now that those clouds were a warning, a harbinger of things to come.
Years earlier I’d motored past Merry Island lighthouse with my friend Blaine Hagedorn in his yacht Toucan. I’d taken a photograph of the lighthouse but never used it in a painting. To tell the story of those ominous clouds I’d seen in Tofino, I could think of no better setting to use than that isolated lighthouse. And so the story of this painting is not so much about the lighthouse, rather it is of those clouds like no other I’d seen before. They were threatening, portentous and ominous, but most of all I know now they were telling us something. They were telling us of the days to come. That cloud formation was the messenger that carried with it a warning to prepare ourselves for a winter like one we’d never experienced before. Those clouds brought with them – “WINTER’S PROMISE”.
