Behind the Art: Swallowtail Welcome

Painting the sea is all about understanding how light and water interact.  In many respects, painting calm water can be quite challenging.  The interaction between light and water is much more subtle, and this subtlety is really less forgiving when you don’t do it justice.

Water allows light to pass through it, but the surface of water also acts like a mirror, reflecting light.  How much is light you see from within the water and how much is reflected depends on the angle at which you are looking at the water.

My painting “Swallowtail Welcome” illustrates painting a very calm sea.



If you look at the painting, you will see that the water in the distance more closely resembles the colour of the distant sky.  That is because the water is very calm and, like a sheet of glass, it reflects the sky of the distance.  The closer you get to the horizon in the water, the closer to the horizon is the sky reflected.

As you come toward the foreground (if you can call it “ground” in a seascape) the water becomes darker.  If you look at the sky, you will notice that the sky becomes darker overhead, and is paler near the horizon.  Just as the water near the horizon reflects sky near the horizon, water nearer to you reflects the sky more overhead.  So in the middle distance the water reflects the darker overhead sky.

As you come close, it gets more complicated: here in the very slight wave in the water, on the back side of the wave you have a reflection of the sky; on the near side you look into the water and see the greenish colour of looking down into the water.  If anyone remembers their high school physics, you can remember that water acts like a prism and “bends” the light at the surface, bending it so you are looking more directly down into the water.  It is because of this refraction that you see the green colour of looking down into the water even if your angle is not that directly down.

The sketch above crudely illustrates this.  Relating the sketch to the painting, light from within the water is depicted greenish-blue on the near side of a ripple, the very light parts of a ripple are reflections of the horizon sky on the far side, and the blue parts of the ripples are reflections of the overhead sky on the near side of shallow wavelets in the middle distance.

Now, you may also notice that the water in front of the rocky point shows reflections of both sky and rocks, as bands of sky colour and bands of rock colour.  In that case, the reflections on the ripples nearer to the horizon would be the rocky point and the reflections on the ripple with sky colour would be on a part of the ripple that would reflect more directly overhead. The white of the lighthouse would be reflected directly under it, in place of the rocks, with whie and sky being interspersed.

Note the thin light line where water and shore meet; a light ripple occurs there.  Also note the dark seaweed covered rocks near the water.  It is important to note that the band of seaweed should never vary too much in level from the water, as seaweed always grows in well defined tidal zones.

We’ll take a look at how light and water interact in other sea and light conditions in future blogs, but this calm sea helped illustrate some basics.

Swallowtail Welcome

I am a “Grand Mananer”; I was born on Grand Manan Island and I live here. And for reasons that defy logic I am ridiculously tied to the place.  Sure, I enjoy visiting other places, but I have often commented that my favourite part of any trip is seeing Swallowtail Light on my return.  And others who live here have echoed the same sentiment.

“Swallowtail Welcome” is aimed at all ex-pat Grand Mananers who, as they approach our special Island, feel that same sense of belonging when the ferry rounds Swallowtail Light, signalling that the ferry crossing is almost complete, the journey is almost done, they are almost “home” (even if “home” on Grand Manan has not been reality for forty or fifty years).

“Swallowtail Welcome” depicts the lighthouse and its distinctive promontory as it would be seen from the ferry approaching Grand Manan on a calm sunny day.  (As an aside, the person for whom I did this painting was particularly averse to ferry crossings in rough weather, so I tried to depict as calm as possible a sea in the painting)

And what would a welcome to Grand Manan be without a couple of seagulls to make it complete.  If Grand Manan were to adopt its “national bird”, I think it would have to be the seagull, or “herring gull” to be more specific.  Powerful, independent and graceful, gulls are beautiful to watch as they soar with little apparent effort and relish gale force winds so strong that other birds are grounded or forced to seek shelter in the trees.

And so, to all ex-pat Grand Mananers, who still harbour an illogical craving for this austere rock at the outer fringes of the Bay of Fundy, here is the perfect gift from one ex-pat to another, a gift that shows that you share this special understanding of a “Swallowtail Welcome”, a sentiment that the less privileged world without a tie to Grand Manan would never understand.



Swallowtail: Iconic Lighthouse

Swallowtail Light is one of those icons of the Maritime Provinces that never ceases to attract photographers to snap their own personal image of the commanding structure on a bleak promontory.

For those of us who live on Grand Manan, the name "Swallowtail" is something we just take for granted without thinking about it much.  But when you stop to ponder the name, it does seem rather odd for a lighthouse.

The name actually referred originally to the point of land on which the light was built.  It fans out from a narrow isthmus to look, if you have a flexible enough imagination, like the tail of a swallow; or the "swallow's tail".  Whatever your imagination might fancy it to resemble, it is the bold and rugged promontory that really sets this lighthouse apart as being so striking. And so the rugged rocks of Swallowtail are important and must be integral to any image of this lighthouse.

This painting of Swallowtail Light, which I call "Swallowtail Surf" was one of my earlier lighthouse paintings, and the prints from this painting have proved to be a perenial favourite among those who love images of our rugged Atlantic coast.

"Swallowtail Surf" is my feature print today in From Our Cove's Etsy shop.  This print really resonates with those who have loved scrambling over the rocky coves and points along our Atlantic coast, pausing from time to time to be invigorated by the tang of cold salt spray.  The actual lighthouse plays a distant second fiddle to the rocks and surf in the foreground.

I had a lot of fun painting the rocks and surf and many people have told me that they enjoy the power of the sea conveyed in the print.  I hope you have an opportunity to enjoy it too.

Lighthouses in winter

The wind has pretty much blown itself out, taking with it a lot of the leaves and twigs and branches.  All this reminds us that our fall season will soon give way to winter, and we all know what that brings. Well, a couple things actually, snow, and Christmas.  Songs like "White Christmas" and even old carols like "Good King Wenceslas"  tie snow to Christmas.  All this sort of explains why Christmas cards usually feature snowy scenes.

Painting snow; let me re-phrase that, depicting snow with paint, is really painting the way light behaves when it reflects off snow, a variety of subtle colours and shadows.  A couple of my lighthouse paintings are snowy scenes, and in note card form would be a real Maritime way to extend the best of the season to friends this coming Christmas.

The "West Quoddy Winter" card illustrates a feature of northern lighthouses that not many people may have thought about.  Red markings were used on these white lighthouses to help mariners see them more clearly against a backdrop of winter snow.  This lighthouse, at West Quoddy Head, near Lubec, Maine, is the easternmost point of the United States.  The first lighthouse was built here in 1808, with the present brick tower being built in 1858.

The other winter lighthouse scene is "Swallowtail Snow".  Swallowtail Light at the northern end of Grand Manan Island, stands tall at the outer end of a promontory.  All by itself high up on the end of a rocky point, with no backdrop of snow in the winter, it does not have the same need for bold red markings that are to be found in the red stripes of West Quoddy or the bold red cross on Head Harbour Light.