Digression – Science Non-fiction good reads

Still working on the Brigus cross-section which I have nicknamed “the beast” because of its size and challenges but I look forward to the challenges it brings me.  It’s unlike anything I have done so far.

I am hoping to get it finished soon.  I have been down with a bad cold all week so not getting much painting done, haven’t been to work either. 

Even though my full-time job limits my painting time I do enjoy working at the QEII Library.  I have easy access to the majority of Howley’s papers as well as inspiring geological maps and reports from all over Newfoundland and the world.  I love going to the 4^th floor to browse the QE section (in Library of Congress terms, these are the classification letters for the subject of geology) and I’ve found some great reading up there.

•           The Dating Game, the story of Arthur Holmes who championed the plate tectonic theory of Wegner.  His book, the Principles of Geology published in 1944 was recognized as the most concise work of its day and was used as a text book in universities, I have a second edition. 
•          The Map that Changed the World, a biography of William Smith who created the first geological map of Great Britain in the early 1800’s.
•          The Man Who Found Time, the story of James Hutton a Scottish farmer and trained doctor who, in the late 1700s, recognized that the Earth was much older than was first believed and was created by forces of nature not the hand of God.

The Library holds some volumes of Hutton’s Theory of the Earth.  I’ve been reading volume III this week. In 1787 he spent a period of time studying the rocks of Arran Island in the south west of Scotland and I was intrigued by his descriptions about how the island was formed.  Here’s a few quotes, completely void of jargon and a little naïve but it was 1787 after all, groundbreaking and controversial stuff for that time!

            “No idea can be formed of the shape of this island, when first proceeding from the bowels of the earth or bottom of the sea.  Neither is it possible to say how much has been already worn away from the tops of the granite mountains…”

            “We are thus led to believe that the island of Arran and the shire of Ayr had been  raised from the bottom of the sea at the same time, or in the operation of the same causes ; and that therefore these two coasts were once continuous land, which was afterwards preyed upon by the water, and disjoined by the sea.”

            “…that all those valleys which intervene between those decaying mountains had been hollowed out of the solid rocks by the hands of Nature operating for the purpose of this world, or in the course of time, by causes which continue to produce the same effect.”

Back to the studio…

Field book, 1870, Dantzic Cove, August 10: “Here, all is confusion…”

August 10, I completed the journey to Little Dantzic Cove on the Burin Peninsula and was not disappointed in the formations found according to Howley’s description.

 The gravel road down to the shore south of Little Dantzic Cove wasn’t too bad, we drove part way down and found a spot where we were able to get off the road.  We were about a quarter mile walk from the water where we picked up an ATV trail which hugged the coast, this took us to Little Dantzic Cove.

 My mother, son and loyal dog, Jake were with me.  I read in some of his field books that Howley did take his older sons Richard and William on some of his west coast surveys and one of his dogs, Flockko, accompanied him on some excursions in the interior but I don’t think he ever took his mother!!

We had to hike to the far end of the beach because the formation I was looking for was on the cliffs north of the beach.  I went to look for the formations alone, it was a hot day and all hands were pretty much done in by the time we got to the cove.  I was too nervous about having the dog up on the cliffs so he had to stay behind too.

The white quartzite that “runs underneath the cove” wasn’t hard to spot.  It was snow white on top, with some yellow-brownish weathering and it was everywhere on the north end of the cove. 

  I kept walking northwards along the edge until I spotted what looked like many colours and types of rock in a cliff face below me. Howley opens his description of the area as “here all was confusion”.  I had to climb down a small gully in order to get down to the shoreline.  It wasn’t easy, the rocks were slippery but I felt I had found a “great deal of disturbance”. 

His words were leaping out of the rocks here, I seen what he described as “rocks that appear to be burnt” and the “bed of limestone that is thrown up and folded over sharply in one place”.

The whole atmosphere there also seemed to be one of confusion for me.  I felt it was a lot to take in, this massive, contorted mess of colour and texture.  Huge black rain clouds began to form in the sky and I didn’t want to get into any precarious spots, there was no beach, only chunks of rock at the water’s edge.  I did a sketch, took plenty of pictures and left satisfied that I was in Howley's footsteps once again.

Listening

My west-facing studio is boiling hot in the evening.  Not much painting getting done during the week but I still have the weekend mornings which are pretty pleasant.  I’m finding this piece not flowing as well as the previous.  There’s a bit of distance in this structure and I have to resist the urge to get too detailed.  I just want to get in there with my detail brush and bring out every surface.

This chunk of rock is huge!  The picture below, using my Mother for scale, shows the immensity of this beautiful striped cliff face.

I love these fascinating finds. Everything I have found in Howley’s footsteps has opened my eyes to the colour and texture of rocks and I realize I haven’t really seen the rock before.  Now I see so much in every rock face that I encounter.  In one of the Earth Science courses I’ve taken the professor, in the first lecture of the semester said “Rocks speak to us if you know how to listen.”  I am learning how with each journey.

Coming up

After six months, the Change Islands peculiar red and green shale is finished!  It is the largest one of the series so far, 30 x 50 inches.  I have posted some pictures of a 7 inch square section to show the level of detail that has gone into the painting.

Coming up, I will be starting the Brigus lighthouse cross-section piece, which is bigger, 36 x 60.  This summer I will be travelling to Dantzic Cove on the Burin Peninsula to look at a cross-section along the shore which has limestone described by Howley in his 1870 fieldbook as “caught up and twisted curiously amongst the overlying rocks” and also Bellevue Beach on the isthumus of Avalon where there are “yellow and green rocks all jumbled together” (1869).

Can't wait to find both of these structures!

Colours of the season

I’m more than half way finished the next in the series, the peculiar red and green shale that Howley describes from the north end of Change Islands Tickle.  When I was there sketching and photographing I was struck by the colours, two separate pieces of red and green rock side by side on the water’s edge.  As I’m painting and looking back at photographs I see the many variations of red and green in these rocks, ranging from yellow to a deep dark red, a bright orange and an almost lime green.  Is this what Howely describes as peculiar?  I feel I am revealing the secrets of this peculiar structure. 

In one of his miscellaneous note books that I found at the Provincial Archives I was delighted to find this handwritten recipe for ginger cake. 

Soft Ginger Cake

2 eggs

1 cup brown sugar

1 cup molasses

½ cup melted butter

2 cups flour

1 tsp ginger

1 tsp cinnamon

1 tsp allspice

1 tsp soda in 1 cup of boiling water (add this last)

Whether James P. baked this himself or not I cannot guess; but to quote him from page 66 of the book Reminiscences of Forty years of Exploration in and about Newfoundland:

"... I can assure all who contemplate a life in the woods that a knowledge of cooking is a very important one to acquire."

Merry Christmas to all!

Long Point, Port au Port Peninsula, July, 2011

I thought I would write about one of the journeys I made in 2011 to look for Howley's rocks.  He spent some time on the Port au Port and St. George's Bay area in 1874 "studying out the complicated geological structure of that region". 

For years I was interested in going to Long Point, just looking at the needle like feature on the 1:50 000 topo map enticed me to go out to the very tip just to see…I'm glad Howley was there too, it's an easy place to follow in someone's footsteps!

There’s a dirt road beyond Black Duck Brook out to a place called Blue Beach.  It’s a summer fishing community, lots of cabins and trailers, piled on top of one another.  Beyond Blue Beach there’s a flat trail that follows the shore through coastal meadows or you can amble along the shore for a while until the limestone ledges crop out.  There’s an electric light house at the end of the trail then you can climb down to the rock and stroll out to the tip. 

I kept going as far as I could to the point where the water started flowing over the rocks.  

Standing there at the tip as far as I could go I felt I was at the end of the earth, the  broad Gulf of St. Lawrence on one side and the imposing Lewis Hills on the other. 

Howley in his memoirs remarks “As previously stated, the natural rock sculpture of the limestone rock is in many places very striking. This is caused by the wearing away, through atmospheric influence, of the more yielding portions of the strata, leaving the harder parts intact."

I’ve decided to post one of the finished paintings.  

This is a painting of a section of the limestone ledges along the eastern side of Long Point. It's 30 inches x 30 inches, acrylic on canvas.  I was really intrigued by the different shapes and subtle changes in colour of each of the layers, (pinks and yellows show up here and there) and especially the dark insides of the cracks (if that's the right word). The more I looked the more I saw.  There seemed like a whole other world going on in these sections. 

Howley states "Fossils of the Lower Silurian age are abundant and well preserved in most of the rocks of Port a Port...At the extreme end of the Long Point facing the open gulf the limestone ledges are filled with ancient corals, sponges and such like fossils and some of the surfaces exhibit the trails of some animals, probably trilobites, which left deep tortuous grooves in the mud, crossing and recrossing each other many times."  

So there was a whole other world going on in these rocks or at least the remains of one that existed some 420 million years ago.

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I was having trouble finding my way around this blog but I know now a few things.  If anyone would like to make a comment, click on "no comment" and then there will be a text box to make a comment, then below that is a drop down box and choose Name/Url. Hopefully that will work!

Report of Progress

On October 15, 1870, Howley sailed into Brigus Harbour and noticed a pinkish red limestone on both sides of the harbour.  After landing he walked out to the north head to study the rocks and he created a cross-section.  He continued working on the cross-section on October 16…

October 16, 2013, I walked out to the north head to look for the same cross-section.  His sketch in his 1870 field book showed layers of red sandstone, a thin bed of red limestone, a layer of red shale, another larger bed of limestone, a bed of red and green shale and a layer of blue limestone which formed the “sea wall”, the cliff edge so to speak.

There is now a lighthouse at the head, sitting on this big lump of shale and limestone, the layers are tilted, facing westward.  I didn’t have much difficulty identifying the shale and the limestones, they were sitting alongside one another but I’ll have to confirm that with those in the know.  According to his journal, the thin bed of red limestone he describes is only 3 inches wide and I didn’t see that at all. 

The trail was pretty rugged, up and down over huge outcrops but it was a beautiful day and the peacefulness of the place was well worth the stiff legs.

Still on the subject of Howley, his name was put forward to the Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada as a person that should have national recognition in Canadian history.  Gerald Penney, a local archaeologist and Derek Wilton, a geologist, put Howley’s name forward in 2012. I heard last week that the nomination is being considered.  After studying Howley’s journals I was struck by the fact that this man who left so much information about the province and contributed to the establishment of the Newfoundland Museum was practically unknown. Hopefully he will be given the status he deserves.

Here are some pictures from my day out.