Sorting Out the Red Mess

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?

 

I should be done this painting in a week or so…that is my deadline!  Then on to the last piece in the series, the barite vein of Cross Point Cove which should take me up until August.