Winter sun illuminates a piece of bushland in Bechtel Park in Waterloo. Located near a housing area, this recreation area is much used for dog walking.

This painting comes directly from correspondence with a lady on Painting Doctor. It is most unusual for me to use someone else's photo as the base for a painting, but as I worked through this piece with her I saw possibilities that I quite admired.

I ended up visiting this piece of bushland in Kitchener just north-east of the Grand River adjacent to the Highway #8 bridge. I was asked to join a group who wanted to save this lovely piece of land from housing development as a nature reserve. I believe that since that time it has been decided that development was unsuitable for ecological reasons.

This autumnal view of a corporate picnic displays the sense of family that is felt by employees of the company. Developed for the Twenty-fifth Anniversary of the ecological engineering corporation, this piece celebrates the success of their business.

Water features are quite common in British gardens. These bits of blue provide a contrast in colour and texture in many gardens crammed with blooms. Gertrude Jekyll, a famous garden designer of the last century, was a strong promoter of this watery addition, but this small private garden in Winchelsea, an ancient walled town just off the English Channel, had not, I suspect, such a famous designer. We were fortunate to get to see this hidden garden as it was open for only one day a year to the public under a scheme to raise money for the local hospital.

Commissioned by the longtime organist, this piece shows the unique setting of a church which has stood on the hill overlooking Fergus for over 100 years. A dramatic strike of lightning in the early part of the twentieth century damaged the elegant tall steeple, so a decision was made to take off the remains at the base which has left this stone building with an unusual, easily identifiable face.

This painterly piece was produced plein air from a small piece of the creek near Lexington Road, Waterloo. I think that the shady quality of the painting echoes many Victorian era works.

This plein air painting was one of a number of things I did describing the river’s course near Freeport. I always hope when I paint such a piece that I will see possibilities for an extended work but I seldom find them compelling enough to pursue.

When I attended art college I was introduced to a sketching discipline that demanded that a subject for a painting be found twenty minutes after leaving the starting location. The idea was to force the art student to really see what was close by, rather than continuing to travel in search of a perfect subject. I greatly benefited from that approach which made me aware of small topics that were worthy of a treatment. This quiet bit of shoreline forms an almost abstract pattern.

This watery treatment of a scene on the north end of Guelph is an experiment. Normally I seek a much more defined image, but I think it good for an artist to venture into new waters or revisit old with a different eye.

This painting shows a view that has changed greatly. Near Lexington Road, this section of this quiet creek remains pretty much the same, but the landscape around it makes this view a fairytale picture from another world. As things change so much around us, we have an ever increasing list of reasons to get out and see our present environment.