Landscapes

Our feet are firmly planted here; on the planet we call ‘the earth’. This glorious litter is on the way to becoming earth. The guy whose toes you see planted at the bottom of the frame will also return to the earth. We cannot be transplanted; we are rooted here.

One of this city's greatest assets is our extensive system of walking trails. This painting is of a section of the trail near the south end of the old train bridge - now the walking bridge.	They are known by several names; Canada Jay, Gray Jay, Whisky Jack or Gorby. The best way to meet them is to go into the woods, start a small fire, put on the billy can for some tea, get your lunch out and wait.
From time to time we see a red fox on our property. They are usually in a hurry but I got to watch this one for quite a while. It was early morning and it was obvious that he, or she, was hunting mice in the overgrown field just outside my kitchen window.	This view is from a second floor window in Fredericton. We had closed up our country home to come here to test my readiness to leave the place I had lived for many years. (See Nov 2016 post in link to Artist's Musings)	This is the back of the property where I grew up beside the Nashwaak River. There is a geography of memory; places where we are transported to an earlier time. To visit them is always a reawakening and a means to establishing continuity in our lives. This is such a place for me.
This has been a vacation place for me since I was a small child. On our earliest visits with my family we tented here in a field just above the beach. When I was eight years old my Dad built a camp at nearby Haggerty’s Cove (still a much-loved and much-used retreat). When my own children were young we spent three or four weeks there every summer and often spent time on the beach with Jim and Mary Stokes-Reese and their two boys. I did this commission for them.	The end of March and five feet of snow on the ground! Many have called the winter of two thousand thirteen/fourteen an old-fashioned one but it will more likely go down as further evidence that weather extremes are the new normal in our warming world. This is one of many birdhouses I have placed around our property. It hangs just outside my studio and the painting was inspired as I snow-shoed out to go to work on a morning at the end of the month in the midst of a heavy snowfall.	What a gift it is to have the world around renewed through the eyes of a child. This is my firstborn grandson, Elliot, exploring the property. I fear for him, knowing the changes that are inescapably overtaking us. I am angered by the greedy corporate colonialism that controls our resources and cynical about the gutless and short-sighted governments that have neither the will nor the vision to change that reality. Yet I know that we all must set our cynicism aside.
This is along the upper Nashwaak River just above Stanley.	One of those early spring days when the snow is sneaking away into the air. Many of the beech leaves stay on the trees all winter until the new buds push them off.
		This is an old place near the coast in Albert county. The house has been abandoned and the flower garden out front has gone wild. The flowers depicted bloom at different times but I could see no reason not to let them all bloom together here.
		In early October the fall colours are at their peak. The maples are the first to turn, with their brilliant reds and oranges. Later on all the colours are more subtle, rust and yellow and gold. The poplars are among the last to turn and the last to fall.
	This is the mouth of the Restigouche at Dalhousie. It is awe inspiring to see the ice run.	Buddy Ross is a neighbour who, until very recently, raised a few beef cattle and worked hard to maintain his fields in a community where most of them are now overgrown and neglected. I drive by his barn on the way home.
		This is on a stretch of gravel road between Parker's Ridge and Green Hill that I have travelled frequently.
Just north of the intersection of the Killarny Road and the old Route eight there are spring-fed ponds beside the road that never freeze over. It always cheers me a little to see the fog hanging over them on the coldest days in defiance of winter's frigid grip.	I do love my home! This is what I see from the deck outside my studio as I head in for supper on a winter evening. I don't bother shoveling a path. Later in the winter, when the snow is really deep (see photo on the contact page) I strap on my snowshoes as I go to and from the studio.	There is a long time in our country between the snow shovel and the lawn mower. The skis are stashed away but it is too early and too messy for the bicycle or the gardening tools. There is a snow squall one day; warm sun, melting snow and running water the next. You can walk on frozen crust in the morning and, by suppertime, there is slush and mud underfoot. You yearn for the sight of new green leaves but you know it is going to be a long wait.
	I worked from old photographs and the family's descriptions of where some of the old buildings used to be to make this image of their home.	As I paint I often feel that I get bogged down in detail and wish I could work with more feeling; quickly with bold strokes. Sometimes I can. This is a modest example.
That's Don MacDougall in the bow of the canoe. Biologist, Spiritual Director and Outdoorsman, he led groups of men on canoe trips in the Tobiatic Wilderness in Nova Scotia for many years. He can no longer lug canoes over portages but still loves to get on water closer to home when he gets the chance.	During a visit to the Art Gallery of Ontario I was moved when I learned that J.E.H. MacDonald's painting The Beaver Dam is a memorial to Tom Thomson. In the painting, Thomson's empty canoe is hauled up on the dam, symbolic of the end of the creative outpouring which came with Thomson's death. In this painting it is spring rather than fall, the water is flowing without obstruction and, although the canoe is empty, there are signs of life nearby. This is a response to MacDonald's painting.
My Uncle Fred watched as a back hoe dug trenches for the drainage field for a new septic system I had to install. He grinned at the ease with which the back hoe moved a boulder. Just the top of it had been showing. You could stand on it and cover it easily with your feet. It was clearly visible just after the snow had melted but hard to locate after the field had greened up again. Fred told me he was well acquainted with that rock; it had thrown him off a horse-drawn plough or tiller many times.
The colour that hangs in the trees for a few weeks lays on the forest floor a little longer. Freeman Patterson, the internationally renowned New Brunswick photographer, says that November is his favourite month for his craft because that is when he sees the most colour. And when you look, you see he is right. Take a photo of the leaf litter on the ground on a bright day in November and see if you can't find all the colours in the spectrum in the resulting print.	This church is closed like so many other small country churches. My great grandfather hauled rock for the foundation for this building, assisted by my grandfather who was working with his own team at 14 years old. The fields begin to bare up while the snow is still deep in the woods, which brings the deer out to graze. This is early May.
It's about a two mile walk from the house to this place. If the little brook has been given a name I haven't heard it. This is one of the many places where a little more water is added to the flow of the Southwest Miramichi.	Gerald was an old timer in the first congregation I served in Quebec's Eastern Townships. 'When I die', he told me, 'toss me onto the compost pile and get the last good out of me that you can'. At his funeral, I told people what he said because, even though he wasn't at all religious, I thought he had things in perspective.
	This is looking out over the Minas Basin at Maitland, right across the road from the museum on route 215. The largest wooden vessel ever built, the W.D. Lawrence, was launched on the spring tides just about here. The tides in the Minas Basin are the highest in the world.
This isn't a brook, just one of those swampy spots where the ground doesn't freeze and the snow melts first.		This was commissioned by Avenor Incorporated when the main lodge at the Rocky Brook Camp was renovated.
Green Hill, if you don't know the place, is just north of Cross Creek and east of Maple Grove.		During the summers she was at university my niece, Heather, worked on the whale watching tours off Brier Island, Nova Scotia. (Brier Island was the home of Joshua Slocum, who was the first man to sail solo around the world - April, 1895 to June, 1898.) While she worked there Heather lived in an old house which had belonged to another sea captain. When she graduated from UNB I did this painting of the place for her.
		Purple loosestrife, I am told, is a scourge. Introduced relatively recently, it is taking over wetlands and displacing native plant species all across the country. This little bit of takeover is on a marsh near Sackville. The Goldenrod is holding its own.
	I recall reading an interview with a Canadian author who said he let 'God be the gardener' in his huge and untended back yard. No flower in a well groomed garden is more beautiful than these wild Iris that grow in swamps and along our streams.	Oil on panel
	Every spring there are sunflowers sprouting here and there near the birdfeeders after a winter of fattening up the feathered folk in our neighbourhood. The background is the old woodshed my grandfather built. It has since been replaced. I reused many of the old boards so that the replacement addition, for all its newness, would still have something of the spirit of my grandparents.
I once ran out of gas on a hot summer's day on a stretch of road through fields. Hot, sweaty and angry with myself, I started walking to a gas station I knew was a couple of miles away. Gradually I became more attentive to the buzz of insects, the smells and the flowers and the walk became easy and pleasant. I could have been the one to produce the poster wisdom that adjures us never to walk so fast we can't smell the flowers. The trouble is, we are usually in the car.	Too many of us do not see clearly that we are absolutely dependent on the land we walk on. I have often observed that farmers and gardeners usually have an easier time with setting priorities; they see more clearly what is important and what is not.	Trillium are one of those wildflowers that just can't make the transition from shaded forest floor to vase on the table. It's not only because they wilt quickly; they look so out of place anywhere but where they grow.
	This small canvas is an impression of the Saint John River near Lower Jemseg.	If cows get into daises in the spring the milk tastes terrible. Honey from bees in the clover is another matter.
	24 X 36	Either a dog or a coyote passed this way. There are lots of both around. It wasn't a fox -their tracks fall in a nearly straight line. The presence of snow makes one so much more aware of the movement of animals. One day I came upon fox tracks made so recently that his pungent smell still hung in the air.
A field on its way back to the state it was in three or four generations ago – inevitable if the land is no longer worked.

Our back field is surrounded by woods. It's a great spot for deer. I imagine this to be a deer's eye view just before it steps out for some of the last green grass.	Normally I work from my own reference photographs but very occasionally will do a commission requiring that I work from photos that others have taken. I got to know Wilf Pilgrim when he came to our place to set up an acid rain monitoring site that we have been operating for over twenty years now. Wilf had worked in Labrador and had fallen under the spell of the landscape there. When he showed me what he had to work from I just couldn't refuse.	This gully has a trickle of water at best in mid-summer. With the snow melt in the spring it is a torrent.
We are talking wind chill factor here. This is a spot just inland from Eel River Bar near Dalhousie. Many days through the winter the east wind off the bay just does not quit.	Shadows on snow are endlessly fascinating to me. Mornings and evenings, when the sun is low, I imagine a frame around almost everything I look at.	To be snowshoeing among evergreens in this sort of snowfall is not to be cold. My memory of this place is of warmth and the muted silence one can only experience in the woods when it's snowing.
The ground does not freeze if the first snows come early. The winter I painted this we got lots of snow in early November and it stayed. Any time through that winter I could shovel through three or four feet of snow and find soft earth beneath. Just to the north and west of us there is a low swampy area filled with springs that flow together to form the beginnings of Carson Brook. The brook doesn't freeze here except for a skin of ice on the very coldest days. Even then you can hear the water ru	My grandfather's old horse road used to go down over the hill in the foreground. As a child I upset a wagon load of loose hay here, trying to 'steer' the team. The maple just under the hill was one tree that Gram wouldn't let Grandad cut down. Living here, I am especially aware of my own personal history and the ways in which our stories are connected to places.
A high tide under a full moon in April usually takes the ice here. This view of the Restigouche is from an escarpment above Dalhousie Junction. That's Pointe-à-la-Garde across the river on the Québec side. In the water behind it English vessels awaited a French fleet for the last naval battle between the two nations in the new world, the battle of the Restigouche.		The Restigouche and the Escuminac were two tugs that worked around the paper mill at Dalhousie. Part of their work was pulling rafts of pulp across the lower Restigouche. Here, they are pictured late in the summer bringing in the booms for storage on shore.
The NB Medical Society commissioned me to do this for Dennis Furlong at the close of his term as president. I chose Lupins because they are as essentially New Brunswick as you can get – and because the good doctor is one of those guys who could take a little more time to stop and smell the flowers.	For the first years I lived here I cut the hay every summer. As the timothy got thinned out the natural grasses and wildflowers gradually took over.	In this deliberately two dimensional painting I was more than usually interested in the way that growing things repeat pattern and form and colour.
	The more closely one looks at the natural world the more aware one becomes of the delicacy of things.	This is a field just north of Doaktown on route 8. When I stopped to take photographs the fellow who lived next to the field came over to chat. He collected the seeds to give away, plant and spread around. A good plan I'd say. (Text: 'If God so clothes the grass of the field...will he not much more clothe you – you of little faith?' - Matthew 6:30)
There are old apple trees scattered all over the property offering a great variety of shapes and flavours for pies and jelly. This is one of them. The blossoms in the foreground are blackberry.	There are lots of deer around home, especially in the winter. They come to eat the apples under the snow beneath the old trees right beside the house – they don't seem to care for them until after they are frozen. As the snow gets deeper they move into the nearby deer yards. In areas where they winter it is hard to find young hardwoods that they haven't pruned back.	This is a portion of our back field as the shadows cast by the spruce along its west side make their way across the snow.
White Birches strike me as being more naked than other trees in winter.	This is the house that my great grandfather Fowler built on land granted to him. The land was divided among his three sons. The place Uncle Will built burned with him in it. Jerry – he preferred that to Jeremiah – built the house I live in. Jim lived in the old place.	What a thrill to see the first bare patches after being buried in snow for so long.
This is a look up the road from the lane field. Uncle Fred's place is on the far hill. He had a big family to raise on wages from woods work and guiding. Aunt Thelma dubbed home 'poverty peak'.		15 x 22

	36 x 36 – This is high above the Southwest Miramichi well away from the nearest camp. Being in the woods is like being in a cathedral. You want to be still and quiet.



at the Mouth of Fall Brook - 16 x 12 - Commissioned by C.I.P Woodlands	Commissioned by C.I.P Woodlands

Someone gave me a whack of acrylic paints a few years back. This is the only time I used them. After using oils for so long I didn't like the fast-drying acrylics and the unfamiliar pigments – so I passed them on to someone else.		Commissioned by the Restigouche Medical Society – A canoe is one of the greatest pleasures of the summer. Good etiquette requires respect for the anglers one comes across. On one of our runs down the Restigouche my family and I came across this sportsman and his guide playing a fish. We held our canoe against the bank at the upper end of the pool until the salmon was in the net.

	This is a very special place to me. On the right you are looking at the downstream end of an island on the Upsalquitch River. Underneath the cedars there is space to pitch a tent on the bank and on the bar there is lots of room to haul up a canoe and make a campfire. The last time I camped there I was alone. When I woke up in the morning, there were Eagles in the trees above me.
	This is just off our front lawn in Holtville. My grandmother planted the crab apple tree and the wild rose bush.

They cover roadsides, riverbanks and spread like crazy through whole fields, but there could never be so many of them that I would consider them to be weeds.
at Dalhousie	A place that looks comfortably placed within a landscape rather than an intrusion.	I remember the warmth of this day and the stillness of the water seen through the trees. Were you to close your eyes and imagine a place where you could go to rest and be renewed, what would that place be like? My place would have white birches and water, a green meadow and a light breeze.
Vernon was minister in the United Church at Campbellton. Some claimed he spent as much time salmon fishing as he spent in the pulpit.	This was a commission for the Town of Dalhousie during their bicentennial year. I wanted to paint the lighthouse at Inch Aaron point but from a perspective not everyone sees - which is what led me to hitch a ride with Captain Warren-Perry on his tug. The Pig is a name I have heard some of the locals use for the formation between the Bon Ami Rocks and the shore.
I love to hunt partridge, mostly for the walk in the woods. I don't shoot many because my camera is always more ready than my shotgun. On this day, the way the light fell through the trees struck me as particularly beautiful.	This is a beaver pond I used to visit frequently. On this day I hiked in to have lunch, feeling the need to smell woodsmoke and have a cup of tea made over an open fire. There is a small spring just to the right of the foreground.	During the years I served the United Church in Dalhousie we held a sunrise service at Inch Aaran point every Easter morning. Some years there would be no sign of the sun. Other years were sheer glory.
This could be any of a thousand autumn hillsides. I like the contrast between the bright leaves and the dark evergreens.	There is no place more silent than the woods during a snowfall, the kind that comes straight down with big soft flakes. This is after the storm but the silence is still there.	Ever since I was a child I have considered this to be one of the happier perspectives from which to view the world.
Cold, damp and overcast, a day to spend inside with a book.	I took photos in a burn where a forest fire crossed the road just a few miles north of the Chatham bridge. After a fire the woods is still left with some dignity – unlike the shameful mess left by the forest industry.	Some of the beech and maple here die off and stay standing so that when it is cut it is already well dried. It burns hot. Granddad called it 'biscuit wood'.
36 x 48 This is a view from the fields above the river at Point la Nim. Some days, especially in the fall, the colours on the river are incredible. There was a cold west wind blowing this day.	You are looking south here on Sugarloaf Mountain above Campbellton. The prevailing wind is off the river. The pine tells you its direction.	The first snow of the winter fell as my brother, Phil, and I were deer hunting at a camp on McConnell brook, a tributary of the Dungarvon. The tracks were easy to follow and, as we walked, Phil and I talked about what we would do if we actually came upon a deer – but we never did.
I left out a lot of the undergrowth in this painting to lend emphasis to the strong lines created by the fallen trees, blown down after the budworms' work.
One of the Mountains of the Eastern Townships of Quebec where I lived for several years.	One can become visually intoxicated in our woods on a fall day when colours are at their peak.	Line up the lighthouse with the panel on the inland side and you know you are in the channel. This is a relatively new arrangement. In days gone by the pilots would speak with Father Godbut and the lights atop the steeple of the catholic church would be on at the right times.



The New Brunswick Art Bank purchased this piece in 1983.
	24 x 18	This is the mouth of the Restigouche looking across to Miguasha Point on the Gaspe side. The ice run is always dramatic here. I have tipped the horizon line in an attempt to add to the sense of power in the ice flow.
24 x 30		24 x 20

Landscapes

Our feet are firmly planted here; on the planet we call ‘the earth’. This glorious litter is on the way to becoming earth. The guy whose toes you see planted at the bottom of the frame will also return to the earth. We cannot be transplanted; we are rooted here.

One of this city's greatest assets is our extensive system of walking trails. This painting is of a section of the trail near the south end of the old train bridge - now the walking bridge.

They are known by several names; Canada Jay, Gray Jay, Whisky Jack or Gorby. The best way to meet them is to go into the woods, start a small fire, put on the billy can for some tea, get your lunch out and wait.

From time to time we see a red fox on our property. They are usually in a hurry but I got to watch this one for quite a while. It was early morning and it was obvious that he, or she, was hunting mice in the overgrown field just outside my kitchen window.

This view is from a second floor window in Fredericton. We had closed up our country home to come here to test my readiness to leave the place I had lived for many years. (See Nov 2016 post in link to Artist's Musings)

This is the back of the property where I grew up beside the Nashwaak River. There is a geography of memory; places where we are transported to an earlier time. To visit them is always a reawakening and a means to establishing continuity in our lives. This is such a place for me.

This is along the upper Nashwaak River just above Stanley.

One of those early spring days when the snow is sneaking away into the air. Many of the beech leaves stay on the trees all winter until the new buds push them off.

This is an old place near the coast in Albert county. The house has been abandoned and the flower garden out front has gone wild. The flowers depicted bloom at different times but I could see no reason not to let them all bloom together here.

In early October the fall colours are at their peak. The maples are the first to turn, with their brilliant reds and oranges. Later on all the colours are more subtle, rust and yellow and gold. The poplars are among the last to turn and the last to fall.

This is the mouth of the Restigouche at Dalhousie. It is awe inspiring to see the ice run.

Buddy Ross is a neighbour who, until very recently, raised a few beef cattle and worked hard to maintain his fields in a community where most of them are now overgrown and neglected. I drive by his barn on the way home.

This is on a stretch of gravel road between Parker's Ridge and Green Hill that I have travelled frequently.

Just north of the intersection of the Killarny Road and the old Route eight there are spring-fed ponds beside the road that never freeze over. It always cheers me a little to see the fog hanging over them on the coldest days in defiance of winter's frigid grip.

I do love my home! This is what I see from the deck outside my studio as I head in for supper on a winter evening. I don't bother shoveling a path. Later in the winter, when the snow is really deep (see photo on the contact page) I strap on my snowshoes as I go to and from the studio.

I worked from old photographs and the family's descriptions of where some of the old buildings used to be to make this image of their home.

As I paint I often feel that I get bogged down in detail and wish I could work with more feeling; quickly with bold strokes. Sometimes I can. This is a modest example.

It's about a two mile walk from the house to this place. If the little brook has been given a name I haven't heard it. This is one of the many places where a little more water is added to the flow of the Southwest Miramichi.

This is looking out over the Minas Basin at Maitland, right across the road from the museum on route 215. The largest wooden vessel ever built, the W.D. Lawrence, was launched on the spring tides just about here. The tides in the Minas Basin are the highest in the world.

This isn't a brook, just one of those swampy spots where the ground doesn't freeze and the snow melts first.

This was commissioned by Avenor Incorporated when the main lodge at the Rocky Brook Camp was renovated.

Green Hill, if you don't know the place, is just north of Cross Creek and east of Maple Grove.

Purple loosestrife, I am told, is a scourge. Introduced relatively recently, it is taking over wetlands and displacing native plant species all across the country. This little bit of takeover is on a marsh near Sackville. The Goldenrod is holding its own.

I recall reading an interview with a Canadian author who said he let 'God be the gardener' in his huge and untended back yard. No flower in a well groomed garden is more beautiful than these wild Iris that grow in swamps and along our streams.

Oil on panel

Too many of us do not see clearly that we are absolutely dependent on the land we walk on. I have often observed that farmers and gardeners usually have an easier time with setting priorities; they see more clearly what is important and what is not.

Trillium are one of those wildflowers that just can't make the transition from shaded forest floor to vase on the table. It's not only because they wilt quickly; they look so out of place anywhere but where they grow.

This small canvas is an impression of the Saint John River near Lower Jemseg.

If cows get into daises in the spring the milk tastes terrible. Honey from bees in the clover is another matter.

24 X 36

A field on its way back to the state it was in three or four generations ago – inevitable if the land is no longer worked.

Our back field is surrounded by woods. It's a great spot for deer. I imagine this to be a deer's eye view just before it steps out for some of the last green grass.

This gully has a trickle of water at best in mid-summer. With the snow melt in the spring it is a torrent.

We are talking wind chill factor here. This is a spot just inland from Eel River Bar near Dalhousie. Many days through the winter the east wind off the bay just does not quit.

Shadows on snow are endlessly fascinating to me. Mornings and evenings, when the sun is low, I imagine a frame around almost everything I look at.

To be snowshoeing among evergreens in this sort of snowfall is not to be cold. My memory of this place is of warmth and the muted silence one can only experience in the woods when it's snowing.

The Restigouche and the Escuminac were two tugs that worked around the paper mill at Dalhousie. Part of their work was pulling rafts of pulp across the lower Restigouche. Here, they are pictured late in the summer bringing in the booms for storage on shore.

For the first years I lived here I cut the hay every summer. As the timothy got thinned out the natural grasses and wildflowers gradually took over.

In this deliberately two dimensional painting I was more than usually interested in the way that growing things repeat pattern and form and colour.

The more closely one looks at the natural world the more aware one becomes of the delicacy of things.

There are old apple trees scattered all over the property offering a great variety of shapes and flavours for pies and jelly. This is one of them. The blossoms in the foreground are blackberry.

This is a portion of our back field as the shadows cast by the spruce along its west side make their way across the snow.

White Birches strike me as being more naked than other trees in winter.

This is the house that my great grandfather Fowler built on land granted to him. The land was divided among his three sons. The place Uncle Will built burned with him in it. Jerry – he preferred that to Jeremiah – built the house I live in. Jim lived in the old place.

What a thrill to see the first bare patches after being buried in snow for so long.

This is a look up the road from the lane field. Uncle Fred's place is on the far hill. He had a big family to raise on wages from woods work and guiding. Aunt Thelma dubbed home 'poverty peak'.

15 x 22

36 x 36 – This is high above the Southwest Miramichi well away from the nearest camp. Being in the woods is like being in a cathedral. You want to be still and quiet.

at the Mouth of Fall Brook - 16 x 12 - Commissioned by C.I.P Woodlands

Commissioned by C.I.P Woodlands

Someone gave me a whack of acrylic paints a few years back. This is the only time I used them. After using oils for so long I didn't like the fast-drying acrylics and the unfamiliar pigments – so I passed them on to someone else.

This is just off our front lawn in Holtville. My grandmother planted the crab apple tree and the wild rose bush.

They cover roadsides, riverbanks and spread like crazy through whole fields, but there could never be so many of them that I would consider them to be weeds.

at Dalhousie

A place that looks comfortably placed within a landscape rather than an intrusion.

I remember the warmth of this day and the stillness of the water seen through the trees. Were you to close your eyes and imagine a place where you could go to rest and be renewed, what would that place be like? My place would have white birches and water, a green meadow and a light breeze.

Vernon was minister in the United Church at Campbellton. Some claimed he spent as much time salmon fishing as he spent in the pulpit.

I love to hunt partridge, mostly for the walk in the woods. I don't shoot many because my camera is always more ready than my shotgun. On this day, the way the light fell through the trees struck me as particularly beautiful.

This is a beaver pond I used to visit frequently. On this day I hiked in to have lunch, feeling the need to smell woodsmoke and have a cup of tea made over an open fire. There is a small spring just to the right of the foreground.

During the years I served the United Church in Dalhousie we held a sunrise service at Inch Aaran point every Easter morning. Some years there would be no sign of the sun. Other years were sheer glory.

This could be any of a thousand autumn hillsides. I like the contrast between the bright leaves and the dark evergreens.

There is no place more silent than the woods during a snowfall, the kind that comes straight down with big soft flakes. This is after the storm but the silence is still there.

Ever since I was a child I have considered this to be one of the happier perspectives from which to view the world.

Cold, damp and overcast, a day to spend inside with a book.

I took photos in a burn where a forest fire crossed the road just a few miles north of the Chatham bridge. After a fire the woods is still left with some dignity – unlike the shameful mess left by the forest industry.

Some of the beech and maple here die off and stay standing so that when it is cut it is already well dried. It burns hot. Granddad called it 'biscuit wood'.

36 x 48 This is a view from the fields above the river at Point la Nim. Some days, especially in the fall, the colours on the river are incredible. There was a cold west wind blowing this day.

You are looking south here on Sugarloaf Mountain above Campbellton. The prevailing wind is off the river. The pine tells you its direction.

The first snow of the winter fell as my brother, Phil, and I were deer hunting at a camp on McConnell brook, a tributary of the Dungarvon. The tracks were easy to follow and, as we walked, Phil and I talked about what we would do if we actually came upon a deer – but we never did.

I left out a lot of the undergrowth in this painting to lend emphasis to the strong lines created by the fallen trees, blown down after the budworms' work.

One of the Mountains of the Eastern Townships of Quebec where I lived for several years.

One can become visually intoxicated in our woods on a fall day when colours are at their peak.

Line up the lighthouse with the panel on the inland side and you know you are in the channel. This is a relatively new arrangement. In days gone by the pilots would speak with Father Godbut and the lights atop the steeple of the catholic church would be on at the right times.

The New Brunswick Art Bank purchased this piece in 1983.

24 x 18

This is the mouth of the Restigouche looking across to Miguasha Point on the Gaspe side. The ice run is always dramatic here. I have tipped the horizon line in an attempt to add to the sense of power in the ice flow.

24 x 30

24 x 20