Moose Jaw Riverbank

Oil on canvas               $425

11 October 2014 found us 9.5 km east of Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, approaching the north bank of the Moose Jaw River on foot. We forced a path through waist-high vegetation, downhill toward the riverbank. It seemed that everything was growing there, not mixed together, but in patches. Clumps of wild

Bend in the Assiniboine (oil on canvas 6 x 12 in.)

18 October 2014 finds me painting a bend in the Assiniboine River 5 km south of Miniota, Manitoba, 7.5km downstream of the planned Energy East pipeline crossing.  A Bald Eagle flies across the river and I paint it into the scene where it lands to sit briefly, high in one of the tall Ash trees that reach their split, scarred trunks through the tangle of the riverine forest on the far bank.

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. 

Wild Rice and Sweet Rush (oil on canvas, 6 x 12 in.) Sold

21 August 2014 finds us at dusk looking across a marsh on Long Creek just above its confluence with the Canaan River, 13 km northeast of Cambridge Narrows, New Brunswick.  I have found my scene for a Fragile Crossings painting, just before the road enters the covered, wooden "Starkey's Bridge". We are looking out over soft green flats of what is apparently Wild Rice.

Trent River Oak and Willows (oil on canvas 6 x 8 in.) Sold

10 May 2014 found me admiring spreading willows and a magnificent old Burr Oak on the bank of the Trent River at a Conservation Area near Glen Miller, Ontario. We'd come for spring drifted mollusc shells, and we only noticed the "Line 9" pipeline river-crossing signs just as we were leaving. Our colleagues Amanda Bennett and Matt Keevil evidently hadn't noticed the pipeline crossing either, during years of launching their boat here as they studied the turtles in this stretch of the river. Our formal description of this “limestone savannah rare habitat” is “lawnpark bank of rapid canal-river, in residential area.”

After a day of collecting spring-drifted shells from creeks and rivers in Toronto we zoomed alog the 401 to the parking lot here and slept in the seats of the van until dawn. While I made breakfast, Fred sprinted for our traditional drift sample up near the

Madawaska River Crossing (oil on canvas 10 x 10 in.)

3 June 2014 found us just downstream of where the Trans Canada Pipeline crosses the Madawaska River, starting a painting of the steep north shore with its rocky outcrops and White Pines tossing their branches against the sky. The buried pipeline goes steeply down into the river from the far shore just to the left of this scene and then comes up through the meadow-like rightofway beside me.

We'd come in from Stewartville Road along the south shore of the river, and upstream of

Summer Calm South Nation (oil on canvas 8 x 8 in.)

19 June 2014 finds me three kilometres northwest of Winchester Springs, Ontario, painting a view across the South Nation River from a steep grassy bank on its north shore. Tall grasses screen the river's edge. I have flattened some of the Bromus and Reed Canary Grass into a nest for sitting in the combined shades of a licheny sprawling Manitoba Maple and a stocky low-spreading Ash tree.

The elegantly up curved twigs of the Ash frame the right-hand part of my

Vulnerable Natives

Aleta's watercolour of the rare Hickorynut mussel, Obovaria olivaria

In May 2013 we found ourselves rushing back from Lake Erie to address the St Lawrence Institute's 20th Annual Symposium on the Great Lakes / St. Lawrence River Ecosystem, on the subject of "St Lawrence tributaries in Ontario as refuges for Unionid Mussels." Several of these tributaries are crossed by the Enbridge/Transcanada pipelines, and consideration of their refuges must be part of planning for any changes to the pipelines.

Hoople Creek in Winter "Icebound Treasure"

19 March 2014 found us on County Road 14, 2.3 km NNW Ingleside, Ontario, looking across a snowy field where Hoople Creek winds toward the bridge on Highway 401. An intermittent stream of long trucks flowed from east to west and from west to east, while the creek itself appeared motionless, its stream running beneath ice and snow. Its path where water had melted and re-frozen, showed pale sea-green and amber. We were 700 metres east-south-east of where the Transcanada and Enbridge pipelines cross Hoople Creek. This was the first of our visits to stream crossings along the route of the pipelines that are proposed to carry the Energy East bitumen to New Brunswick.