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Princess Louise Caroline Alberta was the fourth daughter of Queen Victoria, married to the Marquess of Lorne, Governor General of Canada from 1878 until 1883. I remember from my childhood in Canada that the Governor General is the appointed representative of the British monarch who acts with no real power while maintaining a full schedule of ribbon cutting type activities and savoring the presumably happy perks associated with old money. Nice work if you can get it, but silly. The Marquess himself doesn’t seem to be remembered for anything other than being one of Victoria’s many sons-in-law, but the princess in typical privileged fashion lent her first name to Lake Louise and the nod to her father (“Alberta”) to the province in which the lake sits. You go girl. The Stoney Nakota First Nations people had named it Lake of the Little Fishes, which is vastly more charming. Like everything else relating to European colonization, though, the original name ultimately got swept under history’s rug. Queen V herself – not content with having an amazing waterfall on the Zambia/Zimbabwe border and a Masterpiece mini-series named for her – is memorialized by Mount Victoria, the glacier carved peak viewed smack dead center from the lower end of Lake Louise.

Here endeth the history lesson.

This posting discusses a detail of a painting. The painting itself is nowhere near complete. As you can see from the shot of it on the easel, a good three quarters remains in the underpainting stage. Like the painting discussed HERE, I intend to capture the view  across the lake from behind a flower filled planter at the Chateau Lake Louise Hotel . I am taking this one slowly, in steps, and unless I whip something else out quickly while some stage of this is drying, it should be the first painting completed in my new studio.  Probably be a few weeks yet.

The detail shown may or may not be done. I think it looks fine and reasonably suggestive of the real deal, but that is no guarantee that it won’t need a tweak or two once the whole painting reaches the state of completion I like to call "time to stop farting around."

This one is oil on canvas, done primarily with brushes although the palette knife saw use on Mount Victoria itself. The interesting challenge is the white of the glacier up against the white of the clouds. Absolutely pure unadulterated white is usually reserved for only the teensiest highlights in paintings, while grays, blues and, well, any color in myriad very light shades are used to give white some dimension. In this painting a large part of the cloud got to be untainted bright white. What a joy. If you look down at the bottom of the detail, you’ll see just a hint of the lake water. So far, it looks like the color is right. I won’t really know until the planter flowers are painted underneath whether it still reads correctly though. Go figure.

Our vacation in Canada’s Rockies took place at the end of July and every stroke I’ve painted since then depicts something or other from that trip. This one won’t be the last, but it should be the last for the time being. Hope it turns out well.