Swimming Pools and Seadragons

Another hot and humid day with the temperatures reaching 81F (27.2C) and with the humidity making it feel like 85F (29.4C), but there is a storm in the air and I know with tomorrow being even warmer with higher humidity we should have thunderstorms, which I always enjoy watching.














We had gotten a swimming pool for my dog, Kyora earlier this month and she was quite happy to take a nice long refreshing dip in her very own pool. An added benefit of this is at least it keeps her out of the horse trough in the barn yard.














Since we are on the subject of animals in water I thought I would share this live camera feed of Weedy Sea Dragons that I came across at the Aquariums of the Pacific website.  The Aquarium is located at 100 Aquarium Way, Long Beach, CA 90802, USA; this is another of the many places I would like to visit.

The live cam feed is courtesy of the Explore website, I thought you may enjoy watching them and check out some of the other cam feeds and films on their site.

Art Show at the MacKelvie Gallery.

Today it is bright and sunny day with the temperature at 75F (23.9C) and a pleasant breeze which will help keep the mosquitoes away unlike yesterday with the same temperature but the lack of a breeze and the high humidity making it feel like 87F (30.7C). But I am not going to complain at all after the long and very cold winter we have just experienced.

For me it is going to be a very busy day.

My friends and fellow artists Cindy Allan and Norma MacEachern are taking my paintings to Lang Pioneer Village Museum in Keene, Ontario to hang in their MacKelvie Gallery.

The exhibit there by the KAGS Outdoor Painters' Group will run from the 28 May - 25 June.

Meanwhile I will head to Toronto to be with my daughter, Christine where she will undergo surgery at Princess Margaret Hospital.

Norma's Peppers - A Work in Progress

I sort of miss the goslings but I know they will be well looked after at Shades of Hope Wildlife Refuge and integrated into another family of Canada Geese out in Pefferlaw, Ontario.

Today I worked on another still life painting for the upcoming show at The Lindsay Gallery later this month.

The background was painting in using a mixture of French ultramarine blue, burnt sienna and alizarin crimson.

Once the background was dry it was time to work on the peppers.

The stems were put in first using various mixtures of French ultramarine blue, Antwerp blue and raw sienna.

The red pepper was painted using different combinations of raw sienna, alizarin crimson, cadmium red and cadmium yellow. There are at least eight to nine layers of colour on the pepper to build the depth of colour.

For the yellow pepper I brushed in a base of new gamboge, aureolin, cadmium yellow and burnt sienna.

I set it aside to dry and I will post this painting at a later date once it is completed.

Goslings

Last night we had a fair amount of excitement with Kyora having found a family of Canada geese at the top of the front field and chasing the parents away while scooping up a gosling in her mouth. She decided not to come when called and that it was great fun to have Ron chase after her until he finally caught her and took it out of her mouth. Needless to say she was scolded and sent to her bed for the night.

At first Ron didn't think the gosling would survive since it lay on the grass panting, but after I looked at it and found no puncture marks and the back wasn't broken I wrapped it in a piece of flannel and we went to look for the parents, which we could hear calling for their baby.

They were across the road in a farmer's field but as soon as I entered the field they flew off. We went along the road to where one of the pairs of Canada geese had nested hoping to find them, but they were nowhere to be found, so we decided to take the little one that was starting to perk up and calling softly for its parents back home.











Before we arrived home we saw walking across the road at the bottom of the hill another gosling. So I got out of the vehicle and picked it up so it wouldn't get hit by a car and set it on the seat with its sibling. Getting almost to the top of the hill what should run out in front of us, but two more goslings which I caught and it was a good thing too as I was putting the fourth one into the car another vehicle came speeding over the hill in the opposite direction and would probably have run them over.

Now we had four goslings to look after for the night, so we put them in a large cardboard box lined with a bath towel, filled a dish with water and put some chopped grass and bread into the water for them and left them on the porch for the night.

In the morning they were all doing well and had eaten some of the food and almost all of the water was gone and even the smallest one seemed much better after its experience of being carried around in the dog's mouth. So I put them out into the child's pool that we have for the dog and added more grass and bits of bread.











We called the Peterborough Humane Society to see who would take in the goslings if we couldn't get them adopted by a pair of Canada geese that had goslings of about the same age and they gave us the phone number for Shades of Hope Wildlife Refuge in Pefferlaw, Ontario.

After going through the Snelgrove Brook, over to Chemong Lake and then to the Peterborough Riverview Park and Zoo where you can almost always find geese (in fact they even have signs posted "DO NOT FEED THE GEESE") we managed to find one lone Canada goose, but no pairs or goslings.

So we made the trip to Shades of Hope and they felt that in another week or so that there would be many more families of geese and that they could successfully be adopted by another family.

Morning Shadows I - A Works in Progress

It is a nice warm 78F (28.5C) sunny day with a wonderful breeze; great weather to be out working in the gardening, unfortunately I will be at the Executive meeting at the KAGS this afternoon.

I was not going to let that stop me from doing some drawing and in the fields behind the barns with the early morning sun the trees cast long beautiful shadow causing beautiful dancing patterns on the waving grasses.














I took a number of photographs to capture the beautiful colours and the stunning contrasts.

I will post this piece at a later date once I have transferred the sketch to paper and started adding colour.

Thank you for taking the time to visit my blog and enjoy the artwork. I hope you will return often.

Bath Time - A Work in Progress

I wanted to do a little more work on this painting that I have been working on for  a while (see posts on 11 and 16 July and 28 December 2014, 21 January and 08 February 2015) and hopefully have it completed in time to take to the Motion in Stillness show at the The Lindsay Gallery next month.

After painting the bill with mixes of cadmium red, alizarin crimson and cadmium yellow I finally completed the rubber ducky.













Next I worked on the bottle of bath oil. The yellow from the duck had already been put in and I added the blue from the towel once it had dried I washed over the bottle with raw sienna.

The label on the bottle was put in with a pale wash of alizarin crimson.

I will post this painting at a later date once I have painted the bars of soap.

Thank you for taking the time to visit my blog and look at the artwork.

Ripley's Aquarium of Canada

Today started off fairly cool this morning at 27F (-2.8C) and a layer of frost on the grass, but at least the sun is shining and it supposed to get warmer as the day progresses.

After the chores were completed we headed out to Toronto to go to Ripley's Aquarium of Canada, which is a place I have wanted to visit since it first opened to the public in October 2013.

With the Toronto Blue Jays baseball team playing today it took a while to find a parking spot as most of the closer parking lots were already filled. We were fortunate and finally found a parking lot south of the Aquarium that had a few spaces available.

While Ron got the tickets to enter Ripley's I enjoyed looking at the various kinds of goldfish they had in tanks at the waiting area.

Once inside we took our time to enjoy the nine different galleries into which the Aquarium is divided. One gallery flows into the next. They include:
Canadian Waters,
Rainbow Reef,
Dangerous Lagoon,
Discovery Centre,
The Gallery,
Planet Jellies,
Ray Bay,
Life Support Systems and the Shoreline Gallery.

Seahorses

In the Canadian Waters Gallery there is amazing range of fresh and salt water displays featuring Atlantic lobster in a wide range of colours, Pacific octopus, a vast array of game fish, a large, shimmering silver, school of alewife and an impressive display of a Pacific kelp reef.

This towering display tank has a ramp which starts at the main level and wraps itself around the tank allowing you to view the inhabitants from the top all the way to the base of the tank. Needless to say this was one of the displays where I walked back up the ramp to enjoy the wide variety of fish before returning to the bottom where Ron was patiently waiting for my return.

From there we entered the Rainbow Reef Gallery which is a stunning display of the colourful reef fish of the Indo-Pacific region. To dive in the reefs surrounding the Fiji Islands and visit Micronesia and dive the many WWII wreck in Truk Lagoon is on my wish list and after seeing the multitude of fish in this display makes me want to go sooner.

We had just missed the every other hour interactive dive show, which leaves something to look forward to enjoying on my next visit.

From there we entered the vast Dangerous Lagoon exhibit.

It starts out as a large tank and changes into a tunnel where you are surrounded by the underwater world and as you look up you can see a variety of sharks, reef fish and green sea turtles swimming overhead.

Seahorses I

This display features a moving sidewalk running alongside the main display area where you can watch the ever changing reef, or you can step off the sidewalk and stroll along beside it and observe the sharks and other sea life on the opposite side of the tunnel stopping whenever you please to enjoy the fish.

This was another display that I had to go through a couple of times. I took the sidewalk to the end which leads to the Discovery Centre where Ron decided to wait for me as he watched the people in the pop-up research submarine replica located within the waters of the Dangerous Lagoon.

When I joined him there after walking back to the beginning of the Lagoon and taking the sidewalk back again, he decided he would find a table at the far side of the Discovery Centre and pick up lunch for us while I went back through Dangerous Lagoon for the third time.

On my return I strolled through the Discovery Centre which is a wonderful place for children to view fish up close in the viewing bubbles as well as having the opportunity to touch horseshoe crabs; which are living fossils, unchanged since prehistoric times.











Seahorses II

After lunch we continued on our way through the Aquarium to The Gallery which is home to many of my favourite fish species from around the world and also houses an impressive display of propagated corals (grown in an off-site facility) showing the wide variety of types and colours in one amazing location.

Ron and I enjoyed watching the deadly beauty of red lionfish as they slowly glided about their tank. Their bold coloration of black, brown, or red and white stripes and showy pectoral fins, serve as a warning to potential predators that they have defenses such as being poisonous which is backed up by their venomous spiky fin rays.

We moved on to the tanks filled with my favourite family of marine fish Syngnathidae which includes seahorses, pipefish, leafy and weedy sea dragons. Ron at first didn't believe that the weedy sea dragons were real, since they look just like floating seaweed in the tank, but once he saw their eyes moving he was amazed at how well they were camouflaged.

The next Gallery is called Planet Jellies, which is an enthralling room filled with back lit and colour changing display tanks featuring five different species of jellyfish. Even the ceiling has a delightful display of aptly called translucent moon jellyfish.

Ray Bay is made up of two Galleries in one; the lower level features three species of stingrays and like the Rainbow Reef Gallery features daily interactive dive shows.

The upper level called the Shoreline Gallery, which has a small beach area and offers a two hour package called the Stingray Experience where you can have a closer, hands-on experience with the stingrays.

I have always considered rays to be the butterflies of the underwater world and have had many experiences with them as they gracefully glide through the water past us while diving and snorkeling in the Caribbean. We snorkeled with nurse sharks and rays when we visited Marinarium Park, in Cabeza de Toro, Dominican Republic and while in the Bahamas we spent an afternoon on Nassau Balmoral Island and had unlimited time in the sting ray pool feeding and swimming with the rays.

The last Gallery is probably the most important one to the well-being of the many wonderful animals at the Aquarium and is called Life Support Systems Gallery. It gives a behind the scenes look some of the massive life support and filtration equipment needed to maintain the water quality and conditions for the survival of the marine life. What you see there is only the equipment for the Dangerous Reef and Ray Bay and there is much more not being shown that is required to maintain the other Galleries.

I enjoyed my visit to the Aquarium and will return again in the not too distant future.