Both entries submitted to Insights, a juried show in Southern Ontario, were accepted. Especially nice because there was a lot of very good art in the show.
An extra treat was that one of my submissions was an ink wash painting that I’d worked up from a sketchbook. It was the first painting I’d ever submitted, anywhere….except maybe a cow drawing submitted to a Fall Fair when i was six. I’ve improved over the years :- )
Seems that complaining won’t change the dull, winter weather outside so I painted this sunny afternoon on Georgian Bay. I used a close to the water, canoe perspective.
Bit of a switch from engraving. I used walnut ink that I’d made to paint this. The colour is great but the ink is quite susceptible to moisture, including its own, so there’s not much layering of colour, the separate tones are mixed in a dish then painted on.
An oldie from a drawing looking out to Georgian Bay from the Thirty Thousand Islands, an archipelago on the east side of the Bay. A very peaceful place to sit and sketch.
Stretching up the east side of Georgian Bay is an archipelago called the ‘30,000 Islands’. I haven’t counted them but viewed from an airplane it seems there could be that many.
However, if you’re still out in a canoe after dusk the 30,000 become one large, never ending island and good luck finding the island you camped on. That meal you’re longing for is there just waiting to be cooked and eaten :- )
Something new for me. Rather than an engraving, a lithoprint using a ‘Pronto-plate’.
This was a 2 colour trial print titled ‘Shoreline’. Still lots and lots and lots to learn.
It was all happening on paper inside while the cold and storm was happening outside!
One morning I canoed out into a thick fog and down a wide channel towards open water. When I left the channel and headed towards the shore islands slowly began to appear out of the fog. It was quite magical.
This is a 27×14.5 cm, five colour reduction print.
I had a spatula of dark ink after cleaning up from printing and ‘painted’ this tree with it. I liked the tree so I created a background for it. 
The Luther Marsh is a large, man made lake that affords sanctuary for many, many birds, migratory and otherwise. Areas of it still have the trees that died when the area was flooded and some of these support nests like the Blue Heron nest in my print.
A few posts ago I had a sketch of some rock in the north end of the Georgian Bay; here’s a nine colour, 9×12 engraving from that sketch. Sit still long enough to sketch and birds come by, turtles, lizards and snakes poke their heads out from hiding and, usually, an enormous ant takes a bite of some bit of exposed butt cheek.
It must be February, the winter seems never ending so I haul out the sketchbooks and imagine myself doing lichen impressions on a rock in Georgian Bay or thereabouts. This is one such rock in one of my reflective moods.
This gallery contains 10 photos.
Georgian Bay conjures up visions of pines bent from the incessant wind but the very edge of the Bay is populated by tough little cedar trees that somehow defy some very nasty winter winds to grow in little or, seemingly, no earth.
A week camping and canoeing through the Georgian Bay archipelago brushes stress away like a broom through cobwebs. Perfect canoe weather with lots of sun and more sun and even more sun. 
clive lewis, printmaker 