Ontario

New Colours and Stories from Cobalt

  Cobalt is an amazing town to visit for local colours! A century ago it had a floating population of 12,000 people living in it, mined almost 1,000 tons of silver in a single year (30,000,000 ounces), and even had the cheek to dub Toronto as, “the place where you catch the train to Cobalt”. …

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Warsaw Pilgrimage

I doubt if the previous camper at the site knew that she’d been collaborating on an art project with me … Last week my family and I headed to Eastern Ontario, in Canada, to explore the area around the village of Warsaw. While there I went on a few pilgrimages, purposefully looking for certain local …

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Northern Ontario Greens

As I wrote about in my previous post, my family and I spent a couple of weeks exploring northern Ontario last month. While the residency at Pukaskwa National Park was a big part of that experience, we also took the opportunity to undertake a number of local colour pilgrimages along the way. What surprised me …

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AiR at Pukaskwa National Park

[fve][/fve] Earlier this month I was invited up to Pukaskwa National Park to be their Artist in Residence, and I was pretty excited by the opportunity. I’ve always loved the landscape of Northern Ontario and the Park was welcoming to my family. So, we packed up our van for the adventure and began what my …

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Conestoga Pigment Hunt

It was a beautiful weekend here in Conestogo! And, what with the water being low and my family looking for an adventure, we spent a good part of the day down by the river. I was looking for some of the bright, eby ochre I’ve found in the past … but we also found clay, …

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Lowbanks Green

A couple of weeks ago I got an email from my friend Reiner that he had found “what must be the best  glauconite in Ontario”. Glauconite is the mineral that gives green-earth its colour, and the chance to find a good source here in Ontario was very exciting. So, last week, on a gorgeous fall day, …

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Kirkfield Excursion

A chance encounter put me on an irrational trail yesterday … and its been a lot of unjustifiable fun. While visiting the Art Gallery of Peterborough I asked the opinion of the only other person in the exhibition, Theresa. That conversation led to others and it was a great talk which inspired. Since we had …

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Greetings from Kenderdine!

This past week I’ve been instructing a graduate soil-science/art cross-over course at the Emma Lake Kenderdine Campus of the University of Saskatchewan with Ken Van Rees and Allyson Glenn—and I don’t know the last time I had so much fun.

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