It's all about the rocks

Last year on my trip to Dantzic Cove I felt I hadn't really spent enough time at the site and went away too soon, not investigating properly what Howley described as a "great deal of disturbance".  This summer I planned a family vacation to the Burin Peninsula in order to get back there.  My husband, son, his friend and I spent four days in Garnish which included kayaking, golfing, swimming and a hike back to Dantzic Cove.

This time I got up close and personal with the rocks.  It's so much better to be able to touch and observe the rocks then look at them from a camera lens, because of an impending thunderstorm that's all I did when I first visited there in 2014.  This time I walked all over them, all the way out to the end as far as I could safely go.  In Howley's field book of 1870 he states "here all was confusion" and I certainly saw that. There was no clear pattern in the structure, nothing but a jumble of  textures, shapes and colours in this little gulch.

As an "arm chair" geologist I don't know how to describe what kind of energy was required to create such a convoluted structure.  I recognize folding and a geological map of the area shows that a fault runs through here.  But despite all that cataclysmic action in the past, I got a peaceful, quiet feeling from the place, as if the earth's processes had finished all it had to do here and left the rocks in a tight squeeze with each other..like a geological group hug!

Catching Up - Accolades for James P. Howley

I haven't posted anything in a while, it has been a long Spring and I've had two bad colds and a stomach bug, but I'm back on my feet again and still working on the Three Rock Cove piece.  I am very pleased with how it is coming about.  I love fleshing out the shapes and textures I find in these structures.  Things I didn't even notice until I have brush in hand, standing in front of the canvas and intensely studying the photographs from the site; curved lines, jagged lines, broken lines, smooth here, rough there, split apart, caved in...what stories these rocks tell!






In an earlier post (October 2013) I mentioned that James P. Howley's name was put forward to the Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada to be considered as a person of historical significance.  I found out recently that the Board had accepted the nomination and Howley is now a person of historical significance in Canada!  This means he will be marked by a plaque at The Rooms.

Here's an excerpt from the Minutes of July 2012 Board meeting:

Four significant points for which he was recommended for designation:

1. His study of the Beothuk Indians published in 1915 remains the cornerstone of all subsequent research on the subject;
2. He is regarded as the creator of the institution that became the provincial museum in Newfoundland and Labrador and served as its first curator, overseeing the consolidation and expansion of core collections;
3. He trained under Alexander Murray, his work as an assistant and then as Director of the Geological and Topographical Survey of Newfoundland between 1868 and 1909 produced much of the scientific basis for understanding the geography of the interior Newfoundland, its geology and mineral deposits;
4. His memoirs are a valuable record of Newfoundland's earliest scientific explorations from a personal perspective and constitute a unique historical record of late 19th and early 20th century Newfoundland life beyond St. John's.

In my early days of research I was fascinated with the writings from his field books.  The geology was interesting in itself for me but his tales of travelling around the province on foot and visiting the outports were truly a glimpse of Newfoundland at that time.  I enjoyed seeing the landscape through his eyes, the grand vista of the Humber Valley from Mount Seemore and the pleasures of canoeing a "verdant" tree-lined steady.  From sleeping in "comfortable quarters" to shivering in a "miserable tilt", his enthusiasm for fieldwork was infectious and I found myself wondering why he wasn't really well known to the general public.

Many thanks to Gerald Penney and Derek Wilton for submitting this nomination.

All roads lead to here

I have secured a space for the exhibition of the art work for the Howley project!  The First Space Gallery at the Queen Elizabeth II Library will host the exhibit during the Winter semester of 2017.



The library is a perfect fit for the exhibition, it is also my work place and my job in the Map Room led me to research Howley.  I have easy access to his maps and his personal papers and field books are just one floor away in the Archives and Special Collections Division.  Would I have done this body of work had I not worked in the Library... maybe not, thus the title of the series "All Roads Lead to Here".


I am glad to have a deadline at last!

Three Rock Cove, Port au Port Peninsula

Finished the Brigus cross-section and now doing some preliminary work on the next one: Three Rock Cove, on the Port au Port peninsula. Three Rock Cove was one of the early entries in my Howley research journal, I had read the official survey report for 1874 and for some reason the place stuck in my head.  

Here’s a quote from the report:  "At a place called Shoal Cove, about 8 miles from the extreme end of Long Point from the Gulf side, rocks of the lower carboniferous horizon form a narrow strip along the shore south westwards to a place called Three Rock Point where they run out into the sea.  These strata consist of red miceaceous sandstones and conglomerates with a few thin beds of limestone which contain carboniferous fossils.”

There was something in the “red miceacous sandstone” that Howley described that made me want to have a look at this place, perhaps it was the word “miceacous”, it has a textural ring to it. I could just picture these bands of rock dipping down to disappear underneath the waves, I really felt there was something there.

I did this journey as part of the NLAC project grant which also included an investigation of Long Point, (the tale told in an earlier post) and once again I was not disappointed in the structures found here.  Three Rock Cove is an easy area to access, a nice beach flanked the red striped cliffs.

 There was a lot of red sandstone and the unmistakable limestone but I was unsure of the conglomerate.  Even though my viewpoint was from the beach and not the water the formation did clearly end at Three Rock Point where the cliffs level out to the shore.  The red sandstone layer gets smaller and limestone dominates the cliffs until it runs out at the three rocks, thus named Three Rock Cove.

All along this shore there were huge slabs of limestone that I would have loved to bring home to make a patio in my backyard.  There were interesting rocks on the beach as well, some were polka dotted with limestone and reminded me of Pop art.  The cliff faces were the most interesting however, full of textures and patterns.

The painting I will be doing is from the image below, not exactly at Three Rock Point but a little further north along the shore where I felt the composition was more interesting. The layers seem to disappear underneath the beach. 

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.