The Year 1942, The fishing vessel "bernadine"

Built as a sardine seiner, this 85 foot vessel is the equivalent of two vessels I knew as a child summering on Grand Manan Island. Built in Blacks Harbour, New Brunswick and renovated at Meteghen, Nova Scotia as a good will ambassador in Upper Canada, she has been modified with the addition of additional quarters at the rear of the pilot house.

The "Lois and Isabel II" sailed out of Grand Harbour on similar missions to the Victoria weir on the south coast of the island. I never "sailed" on her but did play cabin boy to the "Lois and Isabel 1" in the days when she fished off Castalia. She was named for my mother, Lois Guptill (Mackay) and her sister Isabel Guptill (Bosein). This craft is entered here for comparison with a very similar offshore vessel of exactly the same age.

Terror on Main Street

I know better than to offer the offbeat to a paint on site market but couldn't resist the drift wood pterodactyl hanging from a tree in front of this property. It is one of a tableau. Below it are three very large marine creatures created from the driftwood thrown ashore in Nova Scotia by the infamous Hurricane Juan. This painting was the first completed on site and suffered somewhat from the fact that I had left burnt sienna at home in Lunenburg. That's not beyond remedy, so I'll play with this one a bit more and then re-offer it. There are some obvious corrections I need to make. This was the only painting which gave me fun in the execution. I did sell one at silent auction: a back-lit sailing ship with a dramatic breakthrough of sun through fog as a backdrop.

Sunday's False Start

This unfinished canvas might have worked except for an unseen difficulty. While I had left Lunenburg for Mahone Bay without burnt sienna on Saturday, I came on site without cadmium yellow on Sunday. In addition, I had an insufficient amount of water at this location and faced a glaring sun. Things got muddier and muddier as the water I had filled up with pigments. Then it promised rain, and I retreated to the shelter of the church hall. It never did rain but this posed a problem for Ruth when she failed to find me at the place where I should have been. At this juncture, I decided the foreground flower gardens in this scene were too complex to complete within the time limit, and hastily switched to the bandstand seen below. I will also complete this painting but probably in the studio.

Saturday's Child

This one did not get beyond the preliminary sketch as I had second thoughts about its reception in a market which is more in tune with panoramas of the harbour, individual homes, the three churches and the like. I will finish it from a photograph taken at the time. Here again, I realized, after the fact, that I had no burnt sienna and this scene had to have sunlight and deep shadow, the latter being an impossibility without this colour.

The Bandstand

This was my final on site painting completed on Sunday afternoon. The weather was very changeable and this scene moved from fog into bright sunlight. I had no burnt sienna to mix with ultramarine as a shadow wash and was forced to use Mars Black which I generally reserve for painting the edges of canvases on the few occasions when I offer a painting unframed. The subject matter is pedestrian, but in self-defense I have to say I had been, by this time, too many hours on public display in an environment that started cold and ended a bit too hot. I had intended to paint in the sailboats which were a part of this scene and may yet do that, although I am ambivalent about this canvas.

Mahone Bay

I very much like Mahone Bay and envy those who live there, but it is inferior to Lunenburg as a painter's resource. Lunenburg was awash with on site painters last week most congregated at the Dory Shop, which unfortunately is not quite as picturesque as it used to be. This is part of the problem with organized paint-on-site events. Individual painters can do a bit better publicizing themselves by appearing in a less formal, less crowded situation.

Rod at Mahone Bay

On the waterfront working on a painting of the local bandstand. The weather was largely co-operative but the event did conflict with a major craft show in Lunenburg and the number of artists on the ground was down to 21. I can't speak for the accompanying art show (I did sell a framed painting there) but I think paint-on-sites have had their day. The raffle of a Tom Ward painting was a huge success by contrast. There are simply too many of these plein aire events, and unfortunately they bring full-time painters into competition with themselves since paintings usually sell as less than their full value. The cause is just, but I have not seen much feed back in terms of public exposure from paint-on-sites I have attended over these past five years. Break even "holidays" of this sort will soon have to be relegated to my personal history of art