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Category: Lake Ontario

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Plan 2014: the law of unintended consequences

People who built on the Lake Ontario flood plain were foolish, but they were also the victims of government planning.

Flood damage at Six-Mile Creek, Niagara County, NY.

“We should just bomb the dam,” one disgruntled local told me. We haven’t been at war with Canada in 202 years. Still, this spring Lake Ontario came close to doing what foreign forces haven’t done since 1813: breaching the fortifications at Fort Niagara.

Lake Ontario is bordered by marshy ponds. That’s one indication that its natural levels are highly variable. Long escarpments indicate the limits of a much bigger body of water.  When the last ice age ended, this whole area was below sea level. It is still rebounding at a rate of about 12 inches per century. This makes the lakebed gradually tilt southward, creating worse shoreline erosion on the American side than the Canadian.
Flood damage at Six-Mile Creek, Niagara County, NY.
But people are short-sighted. None of this has stopped building on the gravel spits that lie between the ponds and the lake itself.
Plan 2014is a new water-regulation plan approved by the Canadian and American government. It went into effect in January, 2017. That, unfortunately, aligned with an unusually soggy spring in the St. Lawrence watershed.
Flood damage at Six-Mile Creek, Niagara County, NY.
The Moses-Saunders hydropower dam is the plug that blocks the Great Lakes. It’s controlled by the International Joint Commission. In theory, Plan 2014 allowed the water level to go two inches higher than the previous maximum. In practice, what was left was an historic high water level that couldn’t be released. To do so would exacerbate flooding in Quebec.
Terry L. has a modest camp in a trailer park at Six Mile Creek in the town of Youngstown, NY. It may not seem like much, but if you’re a working-class person from Niagara Falls, it’s paradise on a hot summer day. Her family has been summering here for more than sixty years.

Flood damage at Six-Mile Creek, Niagara County, NY.

She took me to see it on Sunday. Four of the trailers were gone, moved before they washed away. Several of the others are in water up to their skirting. Decks hang askew over the water, patios are gone. Terry’s dock was thrown up on the ground near her picnic table, which in turn has been buried in a pile of cobblestones more than a foot deep. The beach, so inviting in the summertime, is underwater.
I very rarely see water I don’t want to wade in, but Lake Ontario, in her current cranky, white-capped mood, warned me off.
Flood damage at Six-Mile Creek, Niagara County, NY.
Compared to million-dollar houses elsewhere, this trailer park sustained minor damage, but this is not the French Riviera. It will be a struggle for these senior citizens to fix what’s broken.
Niagara County is running a big gas-powered pump to try to lower the pond levels. Since the barrier between lake and pond has been breached, this is a finger in a collapsing dam. Still, municipalities are doing it up and down the lakeshore.
I thought you told me this would be good for the fish.
Letting Lake Ontario ebb and flow naturally is a great idea. Naturalists say it will stabilize fish and migratory bird populations. The plan, however, ignores the real-world cost to maintain homes, streets, and water treatment facilities built after the dam was finished in 1958.
I have limited sympathy for those who build pricey homes on flood plains. However, here they’re also the victims of a rule change.
It continues to rain in the St. Lawrence watershed..
The International Joint Commission says that the high water levels have stabilized and should start to recede as the spring rains stop. Meanwhile, as I left Buffalo for points east, it was pouring yet again.
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When good painting locations go bad

Carol’s set up of Durand Lake. Nice mackerel sky, heralding rain (correctly, as it turns out).

 I’ve painted at Durand-Eastman Park for years. I’ve painted on the beach, along Zoo Road, and most often on the embankment facing Durand and Eastman Lakes. These are steep-sided glacial fingerlings reaching back from the shore of Lake Ontario, separated from their mother lake by a narrow strip of land. 
This location is handicapped-accessible. It has picnic tables. It has parking. It had a Porta-Potty, and it’s always several degrees cooler than inland.
Speaking of skies, this was what we had at sunset. Not all that paintable, but interesting for having that fine spun cotton below the altocumulus layer. That Lake Ontario skyline is inexorable, however, and it is matched by an equally flat shoreline. If the clouds don’t cooperate, you have a whole lot of nothing.
With a little manipulation, one could create the illusion* of the stillness of the Adirondacks. Durand Lake seems to disappear through a twisting inlet that gives the impression of limitless possibility. A tree trunk curves fetchingly over the inlet and the sun would often etch that line in lovely contrast to the still, golden water below.
  
So when Carol Thiel and I were kicking around ideas for painting spots, it seemed like a reasonable option for a particularly gorgeous summer evening: limpid, luminous, neither hot nor cool, with ever-changing clouds. It held the promise of a great sunset.
That thud-thud-thud is the sound of jet-skies.
But what the heck happened to my reliable view? The tree that had once dangled fetchingly over the inlet was obscured by new growth. The forms of the lake-shore were overrun with undergrowth, monotonously green in color. The duckweed that usually provides a golden-chartreuse foil was in extremely short supply.
Carol painted it, and did a credible job of finding interest in the scene. Virginia and Lyn turned their backs on it and painted Lake Ontario instead. Now, there’s a thankless painting! The person who can find a composition on the Rochester shore of Lake Ontario—outside the harbors themselves—that’s anything other than a series of horizontal bands punctuated by scrubby trees wins a prize: a freeze-pop in your choice of colors.
One thing we are never in short supply of here in Rochester is trees, so Catherine was wise to default to drawing them. (This park is home to Slavin Arboretum, which is an awfully interesting tree collection.)
And, if you can believe it, they took away the Porta-Potty.  And as sunset moved in, so did a dense, obscuring cloud cover. I really should complain to the city.

“We haven’t come across a Lock 32 this year,” said Catherine, by which she meant that we hadn’t found a painting location that mesmerized us. It must be easily accessible from the city, it must be handicapped-accessible, it must have a bathroom, and it must be interesting. I hate to reprise hits from the past, so I ask my Rochester friends: do you have any brilliant ideas?   
*Durand-Eastman is a particularly noisy park. The traffic on Lakeshore Drive is usually drowned out by the ever-present jet-skis rumbling along the lake. But paintings don’t have soundtracks, thankfully.

Join us in October, 2013 at Lakewatch Manor—which is selling out fast—or let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in 2014. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops!
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Rip-rap on the Lake Ontario Shore

I learned two important things today.

  1. When electronics (like your work camera) go missing, it’s wisest to start by looking in your teen’s bedroom;
  2. It costs $.25 per picture to upload photos from your cell phone.

This is my way of apologizing for not having “in progress” shots of this little sketch of rip-rap on the Lake Ontario shore. This was an extremely quick study, done in a few hours. The most memorable part was the surf rising and spraying my easel, my palette, and my feet.

These big rocks appear to be white marble and something else hard—gneiss? The prevailing stone here is Medina sandstone, which is soft and tints the soil pinkish. These big, hard white boulders look alien here. Although they are weathering beautifully, I hesitate to paint them in detail because they aren’t part of my essential Lake Ontario.

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From 99 Âş F to 65 Âş in two days

At Rochester, the shore of Lake Ontario is flat and covered with fine cobblestones. The shoreline is very even. It is hard to break up the strong horizontal and diagonal lines, except by putting in the dark overhanging trees.

What the lake lacks in architecture it makes up for with incredible light and color. On a windy day, the water shifts from violet to emerald as cloud shadows fly across its surface.

It was 65 º F when we got there with steadily strengthening winds. By noon, the wind was so strong, there were whitecaps on the lake and my hat had blown away. Of course, this fellow was happy…


I start with a crude sketch in Transparent Earth Orange (Gamblin’s transparent version of Burnt Sienna). My first pass is a very static composition, since I’ve divided the canvas into three equal spaces with two well-balanced lumps in the foreground.


I move the horizon line up gradually. I’d wanted clouds racing across the sky but realize you can’t have it all. I hope to break the bottom diagonal with little hummocks of plants along the shore.


The horizon moves even higher and only the clouds distant over Ontario remain. In truth, the only darks are in the foliage on the shore but I don’t want to weight the bottom of my painting so much. The shadow color on the water ranges from tints of ultramarine to quinacridone violet, depending on when you look. The green ranges from yellowish to emerald green.

My first pass is mainly to establish darks. Often the highest chroma in Lake Ontario is at the horizon line and the color of the water becomes less saturated the nearer you are to it. (This is the opposite of most long views, where the color becomes lower key the farther away you look.)


Next I establish an overall color scheme. I like this little sketch at this point, but I am concentrating so much on the water lighting that I don’t notice I’m “regularizing” the shapes in the foreground. The mind wants so much to balance things, but that same symmetry will dissatisfy me farther on. (The lump on the left is a young box elder and the wind at this point was bending it nearly double.)


I need to set the diagonals of the breakers, which appear to change angle as you scan the shore because they are rolling in from the west (over my left shoulder). Although the angle changes, the waves break at about the same distance from the shore no matter what direction you are looking.


I begin to consider the interstices between the breakers and develop the foliage in the front. Unfortunately, my painting pal has to leave, so we call it a day.


My biggest issue with this painting is to make the foreground shapes more interesting. I also want to refine the waves. But again, I want to do this on location, rather than in studio.