WWQP Bulletin Board Chat

A Rainy night in southern Ontario, Canada

I haven't posted in awhile so thought some colour might be nice on the board as outside, we still have either two feet of ice and snow or dirty brown patches of dead grass showing through.  The first dead grass to be uncovered is over the septic tank just off my studio.  I can say that we've had a brutal winter weather-wise and yet, it's been very pretty too.  However, the amount of snow piled up in parking lots in town look something like the iceberg in the top photo only they are all dark brown mud, not a speck of white showing.  It looks like dirt shored up in great piles over twenty feet high or more but it's all solid ice beneath and the brown is from the sand and salt applied to the surface of roads and parking lots.  Never have I seen anything like this in the 26 yrs. we've lived here.

And the painting...I barter a B&B room with an encaustic artist when she's teaching a workshop at the Alton Mill Art centre not far from here (she lives an hour away and it's easier coming here overnight) and I had a credit built up.  The artist's husband painted this, which spoke to me of colour and many things.  Encaustic painting is beeswax with oil pigments heated up and melted into the wax.  You apply the colours of wax to a board then when it's slightly drying, you take a blow torch, a hair dryer, sometimes a hot iron to move the paint around.  You can imprint photo transfers into the waxy paint before it dries by burnishing the images in reverse into the surface of the paint with the back of a spoon, continually going over and over the image until it's transferred to the painted surface.  It takes a lot of skill to do the painting such as above.

So, we have a wide swath of rain falling at the moment (8:49pm) and it's to continue well into tomorrow with possible mixed precipitation , which means, slippery sliding taking the dogs out to go potty.  The little red-tri Aussie (Stonehaven Bayshore's One Smart Cookie aka NutMeg or Megs) is a little princess.  She does not like stepping into mud puddles.  Can't blame her for that.  Not sure how she's going to be missing them tomorrow.
Rosey

posted by RoseyP @ 7:52 PM