I am nearly done the painting of the confusing geology of
the section near Little Dantzic Cove.
While this whole structure has many features, the part that is the most
challenging is the enormous bed of red shale that takes over the foreground of
the painting. Howley writes in his field
book: “the limestones and red shales are
troughtt (?) up by a fault and broken and distorted in all manner of forms”
“All manner of forms” is correct, the bed is abundant with
different shapes and textures and seem to make no sense.
It is an immense area to paint in detail and I had to keep building up the colour and texture before I was able to really put in the detail.
I was also unsure about the composition at first, I thought the red would overwhelm everything else but I don’t feel that way now because of the shape of the bed, it comes down to a point, leading the eye to the rest of the structure.
There is more of the red shale out towards the end of the structure. Howley describes this section of red shale as being “much compressed and altered"
I think he was dead-on in his description and for a lay person, these adjectives I could understand.
As I study the photographs I am seeing the “bits of blue” running through this red bed, here and there, this blue rock shows up on the top of this bed underneath the limestone blocks and again towards the end of the structure.
Howley describes a “small
trap dyke cutting through these rocks at right angles to the dip and running
very straight…” The blue seems to unite
the structure as bits of it appear throughout the whole piece. Is this thin line of blue above the limestone in the middle of the image the trap rock?
