Tom’s motivation to “record” this particular observation – the colours of fog and light from the sky and of course the buzzing sounds of insects in his ear... please let me explain...
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Sky "The Light that Never Was" - 1913
6.8 x 9.8 inches, oils on canvasboard
plein air sketch |
The direction Tom was looking depends entirely on the time of the day and the season. It must either be early morning or late afternoon given the very low sun elevation. The sun is the bright glow in the middle, upper portion of the painting. It was about a half hour from sunrise or sunset. More importantly, really appreciating and understanding Tom's observation depends on the weather and that is where I come in.
The solution to this skyscape is simply that Tom painted thick radiational fog that was just starting to burn off with the heat from the summer sun. That sun was rising in the sunrise sky. Tom was looking easterly.
Radiation fog tends to become increasingly thick and persistent after summer solstice. The days gets shorter at the expense of the lengthening nights. Warm and moist air masses penetrating into Algonquin from the Gulf of Mexico are common in the summer. Those air masses also collect additional moisture from the drying vegetation and crops - evapotranspiration. In 1913, the skies were still clean and clear. There were no jets or contrails and temperatures still dropped significantly overnight through black body radiation from the earth's surface.
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| Actual image of radiational fog in the sunrise light |
Clear skies overnight allow land surfaces to get getting progressively cooler. This cooling in turn chills the overlying air mass to saturation. Radiational fog is thickest in the late summer and fall. Tom was simply making a weather observation of “C0X0F” which is aviation terminology for “
Ceiling zero feet obscured (
X), zero miles visibility in
Fog”. Modern aircraft tend to be grounded under such conditions. Fog is a meteorological challenge to accurately forecast! I loved it but the fog beat me more that I care to admit.
Gravity causes the larger and heavier water droplets to fall faster and to accumulate nearer the ground where the fog is thickest - just as Tom observed and painted. Smaller droplets float in the atmosphere.
The light from the sun diffracts around the water droplets producing the bright, circular aureole as we described in Tom Thomson's
Moonlight. Looking directly toward the sun would be quite impossible in just a few more minutes as the heat from the sun raises the temperature causing the fog to disperse.
The sunrise on Canoe Lake in Algonquin Park on July 21st 1913 was 4:46 am local time. "Daylight Savings Time" started in Ontario in 1918 so Tom's watch (non-water proof - waterproof watches were invented in the 1920's) would have said 4:46 am Eastern Standard time. Tom was busy painting perhaps 30 minutes after sunrise. The angle to the sun above the horizon looks to be about two fingers - see the accompanying hand calculator. Tom laid these oils on his small panel held within his sketch box around 5 am. The painting would have been done by 5:15 am and I expect he would have changed his brushes for his fishing rod in order to perhaps catch breakfast.
The above is my best meteorological opinion as to season but the finest clues, which I also consulted, were those inscribed by someone who was there! In this case, Dr. James MacCallum wrote on the back of “The Light That Never Was”,
“Thomson saw this early morning – he had spent all night in a canoe out on the lake because of the flies – 1913 MacCallum”.
My friend Professor Lozowski made the observation that "maybe it wasn't so comfortable sleeping in the canoe and Tom got up with the sun!" The ribbing in the bottom of a cedar strip canoe is never very comfortable and made more so if even a single mosquito was buzzing in your ear. A careful forensic investigation might discover the body of more than just a few mosquitoes embedded in Thomson's paints. I often smash the corpses of annoying, biting bugs into my paintings. The colours of the buggy oils can become an interesting and unique shade of grey.
This irrefutable evidence points to this painting being completed in the mid summer of 1913. The biting insects that would be required to pester Tom enough to make him escape in his canoe, tend to disappear by early August. The second hatch of my buggy friends, the dragonflies typically occurs in early August and they help to put the run on the mosquitoes. As a result, the odds are pretty good that Tom completed this painting in July of 1913 during an intrusion of hot and humid Gulf of Mexico air into Algonquin Park.
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| PowerPoint Graphic from my presentation |
In any case, this is also one of the very few paintings done looking into the sun. The large block arrow in the accompanying graphic points easterly in the direction that Tom was painting. The wind would have been calm under the radiational inversion and within the fog. The weakly flying but persistent mosquitoes would have been cleared for take off even given the poor flying conditions for human aircraft. Any buzzing sound in Tom's ears would have bugged him so he probably just gave up and started to paint when the sun cleared the horizon - and we are lucky that he did.
Judging from the portfolio, Tom was on the verge of losing his horizon and becoming totally devoted to the sky. In this situation the horizon must be a lake surface due to the presence of the “white line” of very reflective sun glint. He would have made a fine meteorologist.
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| Mie scattering explains the colour of clouds. There are very many cloud particles and light of all colours must be scattered in all directions. As a result the observer sees all colours which simply add up to white. As the particles get larger, a greater percentage of the light is scattered in a forward direction with less light scattered backward in the direction from whence it originated. |
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| Arthur Lismer and Tom Thomson in Algonquin Park, 1914 |
Tom purchased his classic 16 foot Chestnut Cruiser in 1915 so that the painting platform for this 1913 painting of fog was another canoe. The canoe is question was quite possibly the one pictured with Lismer in 1914. Tom would have been using his plein air box to complete this 7 by 10 inch portrait of fog. The ribbing in the bottom of this canoe would have made a very poor sleeping surface.
Based on paintings like this, the art world has speculated that Tom was on the verge of going abstract with his art. I respectfully must disagree.
Tom was inspired by and actually painting real weather conditions. However, if one is unfamiliar with weather, this could be easily overlooked. Tom’s handling of both his oil paints and the weather could be misconstrued as abstract because of two factors:
1. Weather can change very quickly and it is difficult to capture unless one paints quickly and boldly while allowing the unimportant details to slide. Sometimes if the sketch is not completed within tens of minutes, the weather may have changed and the memory of those details lost. This boldness of strokes and colour can appear as “abstract boldness”. As a generalization, abstract paintings tend to be painted with a style relying on large, bold strokes and equally strong colours.
2. In our increasingly urban society, people are progressively more unfamiliar with the nuances of weather. Weather can look abstract. Fog and stratus are wonderful examples of “abstract” weather.
I suggest that we all get out more to surround our self with nature. Maybe be a weather watcher like Tom Thomson …
Warmest regards and keep your paddle in the water,
Phil the Forecaster Chadwick
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