Hogsback Falls (original oil painting, 5 x 7 in.)

26 December finds me on my 59th birthday, at Ottawa's Hogsback Falls, to do my "birthday painting." I sit on my paint box behind a wrought iron fence and below me the water, leaping and churning like blended toffee and whipped cream, rushes through a channel between vertical limestone cliff and a massive rock that crouches like a "hogs back" in the middle of the river.  The wider view upstream is a fantasy of raging falls, leaping spray and river sculpted ice, but I have only half an hour before sunset and I choose a simpler composition, closer at hand.

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