"Wharfside Reflections"
©2024, 30" by 22", Watercolour
 
In March of 2023, I moved to the South Shore region of Nova Scotia. While it's certainly been an adjustment, it's also been inspirational. It seems that there's a paint-worth vista around every bend in the road.
 
That was certainly the case on July 1st of last year, when my family and I went for a drive along the foggy coast of the Hubbards area to celebrate Canada day and to see more of our still-new neighbourhood. As we rounded a long curve on the coastline road, I happened to catch this view out of the corner of my eye, so I found a safe place to park the car, climbed over metal barrier on the side of the road, ducked through some dense underbrush, and scrambled across some rocks until I had this scene in front of me. I snapped a few pictures, and made my way back to the car, satisfied.
 
A few days later, I got to work on transforming it into a painting by picking and chosing what I wanted to go in it and what I wanted to remove. In the original picture, there were a bunch of branches on the right hand side and, since I wanted the background to be white to look like it was lost in fog, I eliminated those immediately. Next, was the building. With apologies to the fishermen who own this building, it was too modern and way too messy, so I took it upon myself to neaten things up and turn the building into an rustic-looking wooden structure with a smattering of lobster traps out front. Then, I went to work on the fishing boat. In the original painting, the boat was moored further back and wasn't big enough for my tastes, so I enlarged it and moved it forward. Lastly was the flag. The flagpole was flagless in the original picture so, since it was taken on Canada day, I took it upon myself to add a Canadian flag.
 
About half a year later, when I had finished painting this area (I'd been delayed several months by studio renovations), I was unsatisfied. Although I wanted the background to be completely white, I felt it was missing something to balance it out. That's when the idea came to me to add a ghostly silhouette of the Bluenose II in the distance shrouded in fog (in Nova Scotia, it's pretty much un unwritten rule that the celebrated schooner has to be in your painting). Luckily, I had taken a number of pictures of the Bluenose II in July when she happened to sail by a beach that I was on while my sons were metal detecting (did I mention how much I love this Province?). So, with those photos as reference, I painted her in.
 
The very last thing I added was perhaps the most stressful. I know I claim to be a watercolour artist, but I have a secret: I absolutely suck at washes. This is why I avoid large patches of sky and calm water in my paintings if at all possible. I knew that the detail was necessary, so I set to work. It took a little bit of finessing with a big brush and a lot of water, but the gentle ripples in the foreground finally started to work for me, and I'm glad for their addition.
 
For the title, since the painting was similar in composition to my painting "Dockside Reflections," (with the majority of the subject being on the left side of the paper with the background fading into fog) I decided to give it a similar name.