A star in the east

No, not another Christmas story.  This star is a sea star that I found on Middle Cove beach today.

We've had a couple of days of wild weather which whipped up the seas and sent waves crashing up the cliffs to the tree line.  It was too wet and windy to try to get photos yesterday so early this morning I bundled up and went down to the beach in Flatrock, Torbay and Middle Cove to watch the water and take some photos.

This little sea star was ripped from its ocean bed and placed on the beach, overlooked by seagulls and crows luckily.  I immediately thought - gyotaku printing! and the little fellow came home with me.

I've played around with prints on several papers, including watercolour, card, print paper and tissue.  I will continue to experiment over Christmas to see what I can come up with.  I rather like the effect on tissue paper and recall seeing some experimentation with a sort of collage technique using tissue and printing over it.  I just need to remember where I saw it!

I put a slideshow on my blog of some of the photos that were taken today and will try for a video once I can get it uploaded.

Have a wonderful holiday everyone and the best of new years.

A rocky weekend

I hate to follow hot on the heels of Vivien's post on rocks, but they were squarely in my world all weekend.

Flatrock is named for - well - its flat rocks. they stretch like building blocks out into the sea with a beach of sorts of huge slabs of glacier-smoothed rock. Early on Sunday morning I got up before sunrise to catch the light on the ocean and take some photos and do a little sketching.

I wanted to get a sense of the layers of rocks and how they are formed. This will be a build up to a major drawing in detail of a section of these rock formations. I think that pencil will allow me to create the detail that I want in this piece and its availability for closer inspection is ever present.

On Sunday, I hiked the Manuels River trail downstream and found out that the Avalon Peninsula of Newfoundland was once a section of Africa - albeit 200 million years ago. This river trail is beautiful and the shallow pools are a magnet for young families and children to paddle in. Further down the trail the shallow river is littered with boulders as if a giant hand scattered them there - a paradise for geologists.

The Journey to the sea

Flooded path sketch

9 x 12 watercolour

We don't often think about the origins ocean water and how it is continually fed by rivers and streams and rain. Its one of those things that is taken for granted without thinking about the journey from land to sea that water takes and its shape changes along the way.

It all starts with a drop of water...


While the ocean environment has conditioned every aspect of the Newfoundland and Labrador experience, the province also has ample fresh water, the source of which is abundant precipitation. More than 8% of the area of the province is occupied by lakes, slightly greater than the average for Canada, and as elsewhere water is also stored in the soil, either close to the surface where it can be used by plants or deeper in the rock as groundwater where it may be tapped by wells or returned to the surface in springs.


Besides lakes and groundwater, Newfoundland and Labrador also has many rivers. These rivers show marked seasonal variations of flow. Throughout the province peak flow occurs in late spring or early summer as the result of spring run-off, when winter snow melts and runs over the surface directly to the nearest stream. Some of the melting snow infiltrates into the soil (if the soil is not frozen), moving slowly downslope. Some of this soil water percolates deeper to the groundwater, moving even more slowly.

This Google map shows Flatrock and the abundance of freshwater ponds and lakes that are in the area. I don't think I'll have a problem with my well drying up anytime soon.

I would like to track one small trail of water as it searches for its way to the Atlantic here in Flatrock. The journey starts with groundwater, which is my water source through a well. Also the groundwater feeds some of the ponds close to my house. They in turn spill over into rivulets of water that wend their way through forest, meadows and ditches and feed my pond.

One of the wetland areas near my house is a small lane to the marsh. Its rarely dry and until the heat of summer dries up the flow, the path is like a river itself, if only a static one. I have painted this path several times and wanted to try it again, but in watercolour, to get a more delicate version of this rocky, muddy piece of semi-aquatic landscape.

I will continue to track the water as it heads towards the sea and show you where it takes me along the way until we reach the Atlantic ocean.

Breakers

Breaker
9 x 12 watercolour

The sea can be calm and glassy during the summer, but winter storms create a whole new beast. The power of the ocean can tear away wharves, move boulders that weigh more than cars, wash away roads and change landscapes.

Breakers, due to a storm surge, washed over Flatrock, the small town where I live, and caused 2 million dollars worth of damage one winter day in 2005. Not a day to be standing around watching the storm effects, but some did. This storm in 2007 was similar and you can see the remaining pillars of the wharf being washed over by the waves.

Capturing the movement of breaking waves is challenging as there are so many parts and values in them. Watching the repetitive movement helps fix it in my mind and lets me translate it more easily onto paper. I use a camera to catch the wave's crest and the various movements from a slow build out to sea to the moment it eases its grip on the shore and moves back out to be swallowed into the ocean again.

In this piece I should have used some masking fluid to keep the spray clean, but decided to see if I could work around it. I could go back in and add more spray with gouache or thinned acrylic, or even scratch some out with a knife blade, but for now I'll leave it.