Our Discontent
“Our Discontent”, Watercolour on paper, 6 ¾ x 9 inches”, 2026
The watercolour painting I am showing you here was painted at Kerr Lake south of Cobalt, Ontario a couple of days ago. A relatively short walk from the road through thick bush brings me to a tranquil lakefront painting place in a quietly beautiful pine forest. It takes a little less than two hours to hike here from Cobalt. I spend the day painting and reading. I cook a lunch on a little stove that I bring. The forest has too much dead wood and it is too dry to consider a fire these days.
The words included in the painting are from Shakespeare’s “Richard III” but I have altered the words and the meaning. I am using the emblems of our culture to confront us with the catastrophe of our way of life. It is surprising how many sound beams can be unearthed in the wreckage of this building we call the west.
As I was walking back to Cobalt I saw two loons on the lake gliding along in the twinkling summer evening light. When I looked through my binoculars I was surprised and delighted to see a small baby loon on the back of one of it’s parents, out for an evening ride.
Underneath this family, on the lake bed lie hundreds of tons of mine tailings left from a mill on the shore of the lake from more than a century ago. The arsenic and mercury readings in the lake are quite high but the lake is slowly recovering with the passage of time and no new disturbances.
In this painting I have examined what is immediately ahead of us. In future works I want to speculate about what happens after the coming disaster. A path of hope exists if we can emulate this loon family. But we must first recognize the terrible mistakes we have made and continue to make.
