Top of Skye, Cape Breton
This is the top of Skye Lodge Pool on the Margaree River on Cape Breton in Canada, another attempt at portraying this beautiful and wild place. Sometimes there are salmon in the pool, and sometimes not. You never know but the anticipation keeps you coming back.
This is probably my last fishing related submission to the inspiration challange but possibly some other subject will click as I look through photos. Until then I'm painting at a botanical conervatory at a local college and not working from photos. Mostly orchids, but it's the closest I'll get to a jungle this winter!
The colors of the painting are a little towards the yellow/green, and that's the actual painting rather than a reproduction artifact. I might try this one again but I'm ready to move on. I find these near landscapes particularly challenging, but keep getting drawn back to them because of their human scale; I am stubborn enough to continue working on them dispite the difficulties.
Sally, so glad you are enjoying the Margaree paintings. I always feel my paintings aren't complete without a human presence. I too like the way this figure turned out. And it's a place I hold quite dear.
The river flows through a seemingly timeless valley on Cape Breton's Acadian shore, with its own rhythms and idividuality. Of course things do change there, they even got the internet there three or four years ago, but much of the land is still held by families that arrived in the early 18th century -- Harts, Gillises, MacDonalds, Chaissons, and Rosses. There are highland cattle and some sheep. Unfortunately I don't have any photos of the cattle or sheep in the landscape though that would be a wonderful subject.
Through necessity, many working age people have left, at least seasonally, for the oil fields of Alberta. And tourism plays a greater and greater role in their lives every summer and fall as fishermen from around the world come to ply their craft. I've gone there every year for the last 40 - and expect to go as long as I physically can still do it.