Pictures at an Exhibition

Last week, we headed up to the National Gallery in Ottawa to view the Canada 150 exhibition. The building itself is always a highlight of any visit to the Gallery. The exhibit was surprisingly low-key, with minimal interpretation offered to visitors. On view were a combination of historic paintings, a bit of sculpture, and a selection of indigenous relics and art work. Many of the paintings were well-known old favorites and I thought I’d offer a sampling here.

This dramatic night scene is Cholera Plague, Quebec, by Joseph Legare, 1832.

In sharp contrast is this serene sunset, The Port of Halifax, 1835. It is attributed to John Poad Drake, but is likely by another unknown hand.

The charming Croscup Room has been recreated to allow visitors to walk into the space as it originally appeared in the Karsdale, Nova Scotia home of the Croscup family. It was painted around 1845, probably by a British sailor, and must have been a marvel in its day. Scenes include a boat launching, celebrating the industry and growing economy of the region…

and this view of London.

Cornelius Krieghoff, who specialized in scenes of habitant life, must be one of the best-known 19th-century Canadian painters. His scenes are still appealing. This is White Horse Inn by Moonlight, 1851.

Robert Duncanson was an African-American landscape painter of the Hudson School who moved north during the American Civil War. This is Owl’s Head Mountain, 1864.

I looked up Owl’s Head Mountain later and found this photograph of the mountain as it appears now, festooned with ski runs.

Niagara Falls has long been a favorite subject. This painting by Robert R Whale (attributed) was likely completed as part of a project for the Canada Southern Railway.

I smiled at this 1895 self-portrait by Frederic M. Bell-Smith, in which he portrays himself painting a rather grumpy-looking Queen Victoria.

Artist Laura Muntz Lyall is best known for her painting titled Interesting Story, featuring two children reading together. However, this portrait, titled A Daffodil, 1910, is typical of the many sweet portraits she painted of children and women in a loose, impressionistic style.

I liked this early Lawren Harris work titled The Drive. It captures the broad timbered landscape that men once thought was inexhaustible, and some of the men who stripped much of the forest from the eastern continent.

Alfred Laliberte was a talented Québécois sculptor who completed this bronze, Young Indians Hunting, while living in Paris, about 1905. Such works are criticized as presenting a clichéd representation of indigenous peoples to a European audience. However, the intensity and sheer joy of these two boys is impossible to dismiss.

It was a pleasure to see J.E.H. MacDonald’s The Tangled Garden. Although a popular image now, the painting was controversial in 1916. It always reminds me of my own fall garden.

Tom Thomson’s Northern River, painted in 1914-15, is among the most iconic of Group of Seven paintings.

Canadians might be excused for thinking that only the men of the Group of Seven produced creative, adventurous paintings in the early years of the 20th century, but it wasn’t so. This marvellous, sparkling, movemented snow scene was painted by Mary Wrinch in 1918. It is titled Snow Magic.

I liked this lively portrait of Amy, painted by Dorothy Stevens in 1930. Stevens was an active Toronto artist who, among other accomplishments, became president of the Toronto-based Women’s Art Association.

Women artists were also making a place for themselves in Montreal. This powerful portrait of Rollande was painted by Prudence Heward in 1929. Heward was a member of the Beaver Hall Group, which, unlike the Group of Seven, included both men and women.

Yvonne M. Housser painted the town of Cobalt in 1931. The town grew up without planning along erratically curving streets after silver was discovered in the area in 1903 and miners and fortune hunters flooded into the area. By the 1930s, silver mining activity was in decline.

More than 35 years later, Christine Pflug painted the view outside her Birch Avenue, Toronto, apartment: Cottingham School in Winter 1968. The square angles make an interesting contrast to the higgledy-piggledy layout of Cobalt.

By the 1950s, Canadian artists were experimenting with abstraction. This is Jean Paul Riopelle’s 1954 monumental triptych, Pavane.

Painted a year earlier than Christine Pflug’s cityscape, Claude Tousignant’s Chromatic Accelerator of 1967 offers a strong optical experience as the colours spin together the longer you stare.

Aboriginal Canadian artist Norval Morrisseau adapted abstraction to create powerful interpretations of native culture and myth. Untitled (Shaman) was painted in 1971.

In the 21st century, it seems that anything goes. The process by which art finds its way into galleries is mysterious, but curatorial taste seems to favour the grotesque and the too-clever-for-words.

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Happy Thanksgiving 2014

Our three daughters and their partners were all able to attend our Thanksgiving weekend get-together this year and we enjoyed their company from Friday night through Sunday. Here we are, assembled for a group portrait on Saturday afternoon. We had the traditional Thanksgiving dinner of turkey, potatoes, Brussels sprouts and rutabaga, with pumpkin and grape pies for dessert. It has been a perfect fall weekend, with brisk, bright, sunny weather to set off the pleasure of spending time together.

Once all our visitors headed for home on Sunday afternoon, the house felt quiet and empty. We decided to take Pookie the corgi for a walk at Baxter Conservation Area to top off the weekend and soak up some more sun on this perfect fall day.

Baxter Conservation Area is located along the Rideau River, just north and east of the town of Kemptville, Ontario. The 68 hectare site offers five kilometers of trails through forest and wetland and peaceful views of the Rideau River.

It was a lovely spot to appreciate the last of the autumn leaves, now past their height and beginning to fall from the trees, but still colourful.

A boardwalk and elevated lookout viewing stand allow a closeup look at the marsh and wetlands.

The park was quiet, with just a few late-flying meadowhawk dragonflies to be seen. The walk was a perfect a way to wind down from a busy weekend, for both us and the dog! I hope you have been enjoying a pleasant Thanksgiving or Columbus day weekend too.

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The Day the Flood Came

The road to Willow House crosses our little river before turning sharply left and following the riverbank to the house. The river, the headwaters of the South Nation River, is usually little more than a creek, but it responds rapidly to increased inflow from rain or snowmelt. The year before we moved to Willow House, the culverts that carry the stream beneath the road were all replaced with larger and more numberous culverts. The new culverts have always been sufficient to contain the stream’s most active flow.

That all changed on Tuesday. With a few mild days, our extensive snow cover has been melting rapidly, and on Monday night a heavy rain supplemented the snowmelt. The engorged river overwhelmed the culverts and began creeping across the road.

RailGuy moved a vehicle to the far side of the bridge so that we wouldn’t be trapped, and then we watched with fascination as the river continued to rise across the day. The water never exceeded 6 or 8 inches in depth over the road, and we were able to walk to the other side, but the power of the flow was impressive. The current soon began to erode the gravel on the roadway. The line of rills along the road mark the edge of excavations in the gravel.

Whirlpools marked the spots where water was being sucked into the culverts below the surface.

By Wednesday morning, the flow over the road had fallen to a trickle and we were able to survey the damage the water had done.

Viewing the effects of just a few inches of water flowing over 24 hours gave me a much more visceral understanding of the forces that must have created the Grand Canyon! Here’s Pookie, looking over the main channel the flood grooved into the road, about a foot deep.

On Thursday morning, workers from the Township arrived with several loads of gravel and a tractor to repair the damage.

It didn’t take them long to tidy things up and we were able to drive over the bridge again.

This Friday morning, the river is still flowing strongly, and is higher than the culverts, where whirlpools are still swirling. But it’s well below road level, and ice-free.

Here’s a short video of the river in full flood on Tuesday afternoon.

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The Trouble with Food Banks

These days, there’s scarcely a retail store you can enter without being confronted with a collection bin for a local food bank. Even the LCBO has one! (The liquor store. Are they hoping for donations of beer? The poor could probably use one.) And every time I see a collection bin, I wince. It’s embarrassing. I feel so ashamed of us Canadians. Here we are, one of the most fortunate of nations, and yet we expect our poorest citizens to beg for food from strangers.

The biggest problem with food banks is that they simply can’t meet the needs of the hungry. Many food banks are so overwhelmed that they must limit households to one hamper per month. The supplies they are able to provide do not insure users will have nutritious diets. Food banks can only supply what is donated, often canned and boxed goods, with few fresh items.

Further, food banks only reach a minority of those in need. A survey by Human Resources Development Canada showed that only one in four “hungry” Canadians used food banks. Others would rather go hungry than accept charity, or they choose to leave what is available for those who they believe ‘really’ need it. See It’s Time to Close Canada’s Foodbanks by Elaine Power)

Beyond feeding the hungry, food banks serve less conspicuous functions. Food banks unintentionally divide citizens into ‘Haves’, those who make donations, volunteer or participate in food drives, who can feel good about helping out, and the ‘Have Nots’, who may be demoralized at having to accept handouts. This reinforces an old charitable model, where one group of privileged people helps the underprivileged, perpetuating an us-and-them atmosphere.

Food banks are good for corporations, especially food corporations, who may use food banks to offload edible food they can’t sell while advertising themselves as caring businesses. Grocery stores invite shoppers to buy extra supplies to donate in their collection bins. Some even offer pre-packaged bundles you can purchase for donation. Corporations may thus be content with the status quo.

In providing a band-aid solution, food banks allow governments to sidestep their obligation to look after the well-being and security of all citizens. The failure of governments to deal with poverty has been a growing problem in Canada, with income inequality, the gap between the rich and the poor, increasing every year.

In Ontario, 375,814 people were assisted by a food bank in March of 2013. Of those 35% were children. That compares to 314,258 in March of 2008, an increase of 19.6%. This is not a problem that is going away. (Numbers from Food Banks Canada’s report Hunger Count 2013, linked here.

No one wants people to go hungry. That’s what prompted the establishment of food banks in the first place. But they were only ever intended as a strategy to hold things together until better solutions were found. Now here we are, decades later, and things haven’t improved. Food banks represent our failure as a just society. It’s time for governments to start tackling the real issue behind food banks: poverty.

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Snowy Trip

Brewer Lake, Algonquin Park

Thanks to daughter Seabrooke, who kindly volunteered to animal-sit for a couple of days last week, we were able to make a little jaunt out to the Bruce Peninsula to visit relatives. We followed a loop through Algonquin Park in the hope that we might be able to stop and do a bit of hiking. Alas, it was not to be. The sky was overcast when we left home, and by the time we reached Ottawa, it was raining. At the outskirts of Algonquin Park, the rain had become snow. The weather deteriorated and we drove straight through to Huntsville on some sometimes slippery roads.

Lake of Two Rivers, Algonquin Park

We were glad to reach our hotel and settle in for the evening. The morning brought better weather, but it was still cold, and the ground was covered in snow. Here’s the view from our hotel room over Fairy Lake, Huntsville.

Fairy Lake, Hidden Valley, Huntsville

I enjoyed watching these geese foraging in the snow.

Snow Geese

We continues on our way via the road that follows Georgian Bay from Wasaga Beach to Owen Sound. We stopped in Collingwood briefly so that I could take a few shots of the water. Wow! The wind blowing in from the water was icy cold.

Nottawasaga Bay, Collingwood

Later in the day, the sun triumphed and all in all, we had a pleasant drive out to Wiarton. The next morning, we enjoyed the sun shining on Colpoy’s Bay.

Colpoy’s Bay, Wiarton

I like the way the trees line the edge of the Niagara Escarpment.

Niagara Escarpment, Wiarton

These icicles attest to the fact that, though the sun was shining, it was still cold.

Niagara Escarpment, Wiarton

We had a very pleasant, if too short, visit with family. It included a little outing to see Sauble Beach dressed in snow…

Sauble Beach

…before heading home the next day.

Sauble Beach

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A Day at the Fair: Perth 2013

On the long weekend, we had some rain on Saturday and Monday, but Sunday was a beautiful day, and we took advantage of the good weather to attend the Perth Fair. Over the years, we have been to most of the fairs in the area, but this was the first time we made it out to the Perth Fair.

There’s always lots to see at a country fair. Most feature classes for various farm animals, sheep and cows and sometimes poultry and pets. There are classes for the best vegetables, the biggest pumpkin, the tallest sunflower, the best hay.

There are displays of handiwork and I like to look at the quilts. The skill and creativity always amazes me. All the quilts were beautiful, but I especially liked this fishy design, a bit out of the ordinary as patterns go.

And of course there is a midway, with rides and games and lots and lots of booths featuring hot dogs and cotton candy. I like to check out the horses on the merry-go-round. These were well-maintained and pretty, but rather unimaginatively painted, with all the horses white.

But it is the horse show that I enjoy the most. On Sunday, there were three separate events underway. The Team Penning is held in a pair of circular rings joined by a gate. A herd of eight cows waits in one of the pens and each cow is numbered. Pairs of riders wait at the gate and when the judge calls out the number of a cow, the team must separate that cow from its mates and move it into the empty pen.

Additional cows must then be cut out and moved, in successive order from the first number called, with the goal of moving as many cows as possible in the correct order in 60 seconds. If a cow with a wrong number slips into the second pen, the team is disqualified.

In another ring, an Obstacle Race attracted a lot of competitors. Each horse and rider is judged as they tackle a course of obstacles and tests. Above, a horse and rider walk through a screen of streamers.

Horses have a very sensible aversion to stepping into or onto surfaces that might be dangerous, so crossing a hollow bridge can be scary.

Horses had to back through a U-shaped pathway without dislodging the barriers.

The horse is required to stand still and wait while his rider moves a wheelbarrow between two points. It’s fun to watch each horse’s reaction to each of the tests. Many did very well. Others clearly thought that their riders showed a distinct lack of judgement.

And then there was the harness show, that featured heavy draft horses, lighter commercial drafts, and miniature horses! The mix of classes allows competitors time between events to harness their teams. Here is a four-horse team of heavy draft horses.

Here is an eye-catching four-horse entry in the commercial class for lighter draft horses.

And here are the four-horse minis!

It really was a pleasant day of horse-watching. I’ll leave you with a couple of photos of the six-horse hitches, a very impressive sight indeed.

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Dry Lake

I followed a round-about route home from Peterborough. It brought me through Marlbank, and I stopped by Dry Lake for a few minutes. It was very quiet and serenely peaceful. You’d never guess that this was once the site of a large factory employing 200 people.

There are a number of short histories of the town of Marlbank to be found online, varying slightly in their details. The local soil type, marl, determined much of its early development. The marl was ideal for making Portland cement, and in 1891 the first cement factory was opened. It conducted business under various names until it closed its doors in 1914. At its height, the factory employed 200 people and supported a busy town.

Photo: Municipality of Tweed website

Explanations for the closure of the factory vary, but Marlbank supplied some of the cement used in the construction of the Panama Canal. Perhaps demand for cement fell after the completion of the Panama Canal in 1914, and more remote and thus less economical operations were forced out of business. A few remains of the old buildings can still be seen as they succumb to new forest growth.

The area from which the marl was dredged now forms Dry Lake. When I stopped, there was a family of loons close to shore. They quickly retreated and I was only able to get a distant shot. Still, I was pleased to think that they were now the beneficiaries of that long-ago human enterprise.

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The Royal 2012

Here I am, posing with the Great Pumpkin at The Royal. The Royal Agricultural Winter Fair, that is. Now in its 90th year, every November The Royal brings a little bit of the country to the city of Toronto. I first attended the fair many years ago with my parents. Tickets to see the horse show were my birthday treat. Later, I took my own kids. And this year, my sister and I enjoyed a night out together at the fair.

The Royal is a bit more commercial, a bit less agricultural than it once was, but you can still see cattle and sheep and chickens and prize-winning pumpkins and many other great displays. This pumpkin from St. Thomas, Ontario took first place in the largest pumpkin contest, weighing in at 1414.6 pounds.

This piggy on his scooter took first prize in the butter-carving contest.

All the enteries were well-done. I particularly liked this goose.

The third place entry presented an interesting juxtaposition of babies.

After we had had a good look around the displays, we moved on to the horse show.

The horse show offers a good assortment of classes. On the night we attended, we saw the six-horse percheron class. I was pleased that a team from my region, the Wilson’s of Vankleek Hill, took second place against stiff competition.

The coach-and-four class is a spectacle you don’t have a chance to see most anywhere else.

This year, there was an exhibition by the Lit Dressage Quadrille, who performed to James Bond theme music. You can watch the whole performance, complete with music, on Youtube, linked here.

The 48th Highlanders were on hand for a brief Remembrance Day ceremony.

The highlight of the horse show evening is always the international jumping class. On the evening we attended, the $50,000 Weston Canadian Open was featured. This is a timed event in which horses must jump a challenging course of huge fences. The best combination of low faults and time secures first place. The winner was young American rider Kent Farrington and his horse Voyeur, who had one of just 5 clear rounds in the field of 18 entries, and a blazing time. As the winners, Kent and Voyeur took home $16,500. You can read more about the class here.

I forgot to take my camera. Doh! Thanks to my sister for allowing me to use her photos and sharing a fun evening with me.

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Return of the River

Over the last week or so, I have been preoccupied with assorted small trials, including the extraction of a couple of wisdom teeth. While I have been distracted, the season has moved inexorably onward, with the leaves first changing colour and then falling to carpet the ground. One positive event has been the return of our small river. As the drought we suffered through this summer deepened, the stream began to dry up until, by mid-September, I was able to walk more than a kilometer up the dry stream bed.

I took the opportunity to see what lies hidden from the eye most of the time. The mud-bottomed river is perpetually cloudy, and one can’t enjoy watching the fish and other small waterlovers. During the drought, any fish were confined to small, increasingly oxygen-deprived puddles, where they were easy prey for raccoons. There were plenty of raccoon tracks along the river course.

Near our house, where there have been human inhabitants living near the river for more than a hundred years, the river bed was littered with broken glass and bottles. I took a couple of buckets and collected up a couple of large pails full of garbage, mostly glass but also a few shoe soles and sheets of plastic.

I soaked the glass in water for a few days so that I could clean up the glass a bit and put it out for recycling. When I was cleaning off the mud, I was surprised by a crayfish! He was perhaps hiding in one of the bottles. I put him in a pail and returned him to a puddle of water. He matched the colour of the muddy bottom perfectly.

The area north of here was hit harder than we were, and many farmers experienced a diminished harvest. With global warming bringing rising temperatures, it is likely we will experience hotter and drier summers more frequently.

Farming must be more dependent on reliable weather patterns than just about any other occupation. Unless you have been living in a hole at the bottom of the sea, you know that our current Conservative government has turned its back on Kyoto targets and is now failing to even meet their own downsized goals for emissions reduction. You might expect farmers to be circling their tractors on Parliament Hill, demanding action! But you would be wrong. At election time, rural areas are a sea of Conservative signboards. In effect, the farmers voted for drought. Very strange. Talk about shooting yourself in the foot with your unregistered long-gun.

It has been a comfort to see the river slowly return, first to a trickle and then to a small stream. I’m certain that all of those creatures who depend on its water for their very lives are unimaginably relieved. Here’s a Great Blue Heron that has returned to search for a meal once again. He watched me warily as I walked down the laneway, ready to make a quick escape.

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Rock Dunder Revisited

We have hiked out to the Rock Dunder lookout several times and promised ourselves to get back in the autumn to view the fall colours from this spectacular platform. A combination of bad weather and competing events postponed our return visit until this weekend. With the autumn leaves now rapidly giving way to the forces of rain and wind, we made a hike a priority and revisited the Rock Dunder trail last Friday.

It was interesting to visit the rocky woodland in a different season. The reindeer lichen (Cladina rangiferina), which was shrivelled and dried up in the summer, is now springing back to life in brilliant silver patches.

With less vegetation attracting attention, the trees themselves were more conspicuous. I hadn’t noticed this Shagbark Hickory (Carya ovata) on previous hikes.

The green fronds of Rock Polypody ferns (Polypodium virginianam) brighten rocky surfaces.

Patches of Pale Corydalis (Corydalis sempervirens), also known as Rock Harlequin, were growing amongst the lichens and mosses. This dainty looking plant is actually very tough. It produces pretty, tubular pink and yellow flowers held on long stems across the summer.

The effects of our hot, dry summer could be read in the number of dried out oak seedlings and brown juniper shrubs along the trail. Those junipers that survived the summer were now thriving after recent rains.

I noticed this patch of silk in a half-curled leaf on the trail. It’s probably a hiding place constructed by a spider.

Finally, we reached our destination, the Rock Dunder lookout, and were rewarded with a beautiful view. It was a cool day, so cool that we spotted a few snow flakes, and the open rock surface was windy, but we stopped long enough for a quick lunch and a hot cup of coffee. Here are a few photos taken from the lookout. Rock Dunder looks out over the northeast arm of Whitefish Lake, north of Gananoque, Ontario.

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