Clock Tower Portage

This painting depicts the symbolic portage enacted by staff and volunteers of the Canadian Canoe Museum on National Canoe Day in June 2009.

It seems to be that there is a rite of passage for artists in Peterborough, Ontario: we’ve each got to try our hand at painting the clock tower, one of the city’s most recognizable landmarks. In late 2008, I started thinking about tackling the clock tower myself, and began to think about how I could possibly include a canoe in the painting so that the work would somehow fit the theme of most of my other paintings (I do love canoes). At the time, I couldn’t find a way to do it that made sense.

As luck would have it, a short time later, the Canoe Museum (where I was working at the time) was planning the events of their upcoming National Canoe Day, and they wanted to do something that would attract a lot of attention, as well as hopefully produce a great photograph. It was decided to plan a downtown portage, and get a picture of a group of people carrying canoes through the busy downtown streets.

So, on June 26th, 2009 we converged on the city centre with five canoes, a photographer, and a gaggle of support crew. We got plenty of great pictures, and I looked through them all later to put together the image that I knew, because of the height of the clock tower, could only be created in a painting. I took some new pictures of the clock tower myself from the angle I wanted, and put everthing together in the composition shown here that I thought would work.

I’m not making prints of the entire painting available out of respect to the photographer(s) who took the shots of the portagers, as they weren’t aware that I was going to interpret them into a painting.