WAITING FOR THE THAW
Sometimes paintings call me. Most always I paint real places and real moments in time. My images are not usually contrived; rather they reflect a snapshot of time and place that I am experiencing. It may be a place I’ve seen or visited hundreds of times before, or it may well be the first time I’ve stood in a particular area. The fact is, sometimes my paintings call to me. I know they are there. I can feel them. I can hear them. I just have to find them. Usually I actually say the words, identifying the fact that I can feel a painting to be found, and I go looking. I’ve found them in minutes or in hours or days, but I’ve usually looked and found what I’ve felt was there all along.
In the spring of 2003, I visited my mother and family in Perth, Ontario for a about three weeks. During that time, I drove to Muskoka Lake, about two and a half hours drive north of Toronto in the Muskoka Lakes holiday area. I wanted to visit my old high school teacher and close friend George Fenn and his wife Linda. They live in a beautiful home on the idyllic shores of Muskoka Lake. Snow and ice still completely covered the Lakes area that spring of 2003. For me, coming from Gibsons, where not a flake of snow had been seen that past winter, this was a winter wonderland to be savoured and enjoyed.
At breakfast one morning, as we sat at the table overlooking the frozen lake, I told George and Linda that I could feel a painting calling to me. “Sometime today George I’d like to take a look around to see if I can find it.” George of course agreed but I’m sure he was somewhat skeptical of these mystic “voices” that were speaking to me. I looked up from my breakfast to speak to George. “It’s very real to me. I seem to know when a painting is out there. I can feel it. I can hear it.” I looked over his shoulder, out the window and down the shoreline of the winter lake. “And there it is – right there!” I’d found my painting. I knew it as soon as I saw it.
George and I did take a walk that day, looking at all of that very beautiful Fenn’s Point area, but nothing else hit me the way that image from his breakfast window had. No, my painting was back there at the shore of the lake just up from their home. That red canoe, stored on rickety sawhorses in the meager shelter of the forested point was my image. It said so much to me. It spoke of summers past, of family fun and journeys taken. It spoke too of anticipation. That canoe was waiting patiently, there in its snowy storage space, for the gleeful sounds and wistful breezes of summer. It belonged on the lake when the waters run clean and warm. This frigid environment is merely to be endured. The thaw will come. Just wait patiently and quietly.
As the sun set that day I walked through deep snow down the shoreline of the lake and photographed the scene just as the last strong rays of sun found their way to gently touch the canoe with faint promises of the warm summer sun to come. I returned to British Columbia shortly thereafter and completed this snowy image from my studio overlooking Howe Sound (today we know it as the Salish Sea). Worlds apart, both in geography and environment, I found myself taken back as I painted. Even now, the image completed, I can be back there with my friends in their inviting warm home on the shores of Muskoka Lake. In the image I have created, as my senses recall the bite of the last vestiges of the winter past, I can see and feel that old canoe lying and waiting in its frigid resting place. Quietly, patiently, it is WAITING FOR THE THAW.
