A la “you can always make something out of nothing,” this small painting is done on a scrap canvas that I had been using as a palette on which I’d been mixing acrylics for another painting — thus the random background pattern. The frame is some cheap edging that I bought and stained, so it cost me just a few dollars. Click for a closer look as always (the full-size one is quite big).

Edit: I should note that I ripped off the idea of drawing an owl from Caitlin who is doing a painting with an owl in it, so when she posts that, in chronological terms, her owl came first…

Usually my paintings take me about twenty to thirty hours to complete… which means that, since I have to fit painting — which is inherently “optional” work — in between “real” work that I can’t avoid, sometimes it takes months to finish a piece. So from time to time it’s nice to just blast out a one-hour painting like this one.

Caitlin and I visited our homestead on Cape Breton Island this morning, under the blessing of the good omen of a fresh snowfall making it absolutely dreamlike — as if stepping through the wardrobe into Narnia…

The property itself, located about ten minutes from Sydney, Nova Scotia, on Cape Breton Island and just off the Mira River, is about thirty acres with a large clearing at the northern end. Covered in smaller clearings with well-defined trails connecting them, it is fully treed with mature pine and birch (as well as an abundance of moss, lichen, and rabbits), and a trout-filled brook flows through the southern section. It has significant road frontage on an all-season maintained road and is on grid (including cell phone coverage)… and we got it for pennies via Dignam.

Some photos from our walk:

Our home will surely contain a good supply of rubber boots for guests who want to explore (the property is high and mostly dry but like I said, a brook flows through the lower section at the southern end). We can’t wait to see it in the summer, and over the winter will explore our requirements for building permits and so on.

Finally, a few more pictures from the surrounding landscape:

Oh yeah, and we need to come up with a name… Maybe one of my winter projects back in Toronto will be carving an entry gate, piece by piece in small sections, that I can reassemble on location this upcoming summer.

The real photos come tomorrow evening, but here’s a wholly inadequate taste of the beautiful landscape. We drove here through a snowstorm but it didn’t really slow us down. As always, click to zoom in on the pictures…