Last week I was blessed with a brief retreat to Brentwood on the Beach. It’s a lovely inn on Lake Huron. I spent most of my hours there walking the quiet beach. This time of year the beach is a surreal landscape of sand mixed with ice heaped up into mini frozen mountains. I took some photos and I’m thinking, so, if I paint a polar bear beside one of these ice formations, who’s to say it’s not a large iceberg? The blue shadows are there. The angles and shapes are there. It brought to mind large paintings I have seen that look like a cliff wall. Then later I would read that the artist held a pebble in their hands for inspiration. So here’s the creative challenge to painters experiencing our Canadian winter. Get out the camera and find out, is there an iceberg by the sidewalk?