Winnipeg River and Tunnel Island (oil on canvas 7 x 9 in.)

23 October 2014 finds me at a boat launch on the Winnipeg River, at the end of the Miller Rapids Road, north of Kenora, Ontario, looking upstream toward "Tunnel Island" and admiring the contrasting colour bands of the late afternoon sky to the west. Fred and Teika Newton are inspecting the shore of the bay on my left, picking up handsfulls of rich snail drift and observing Deer, Beaver, Raccoon, and

Pipestone Creek Marsh (oil on canvas 8 x 8 in.)

16 October 2014 found me astonished at the broad swath of cattail marsh that is Pipestone Creek, hemmed in by its forested valley wall, southwest of Broadview, Saskatchewan. The high sharp line of the flat prairie outside of this valley world is visible on the horizon though a gap in the trees. We are a little over a kilometre upstream of where the Transcanada pipeline crosses the Pipestone. We are past the places where we have the pipeline route mapped - so today we navigated by dead reckoning and were pleased to find

South Saskatchewan Bluffs (oil on canvas 7 x 9 in.)

8 October 2014 finds me gazing at the castellate bluffs of eroded loess along the South Saskatchewan River upstream of Alberta Hwy 41, west of Burstall Saskatchewan. We could see that there were interesting bluffs as we gradually descended along the highway toward the bridge, but here at river level, they are much more impressive - and the river itself is clear and green, ruffled by the wind into wavelets that weave green and blue into a new intensity of colour that even in a narrow strip, balances the strange bold shapes and stark contrasts of the wind-carved bluffs. We drove from the bridge to a kilometre-long area of campsites to a broad rutted area at the river that serves as a boat-launch.

The Transcanada Pipeline crosses the South Saskatchewan River 8.2 km upstream of here. I settle on a view of castle-like formations directly across the river and perch my folding chair on a low

Distant Bluffs on the Red Deer (oil on canvas 6 x 12 in.)

7 October 2014 finds me sitting behind the guard rail in a camp chair, at the bridge over the Red Deer River, 3 kilometres northwest of where the Transcanada pipeline crosses it at Bindloss, Alberta.  We came here past the village of Bindloss, which is a compact island of treed buildings in an oceanic expanse of prairie. There at the top of the bluffs, the prairie appears vast and slightly rolling, hiding its creeks and rivers in the creases of the landscape. Coming to the bridge we find the Red Deer River again, and I'm taken by the way the evening sun guilds the edges of the distant bluffs that wall this valley. 

Red Deer River Sandbars (oil on canvas 8 x 16 in.)

4 October 2014 finds me on a long, wood-plank bridge over the Red Deer River, 16.3 kilometres upstream of the Transcanada Pipeline crossing. The bridge is just north of a tiny place named Buffalo, near a smallish oil drilling operation, a couple of hours north of Medicine Hat, Alberta.  I am, again, enjoying sandbars, looking downriver with the prairie wind and the afternoon sun both

Athabasca Evening (oil on canvas 12 x 24 in.)

20 September 2014 finds me looking over the Athabasca River from the "highload bypass" of the Thickwood exit from Highway 63 in Fort McMurray, Alberta.  We checked this site out yesterday evening at dusk, our first day in Fort McMurray, and found a good parking spot for me to paint from against the guardrail on the broad plateau of the ramp that curves high above the Sandbar Willows which line the river.