Two brief trips to the Québec City /Lower St.
Lawrence region, with minimal time to play . . . .
Thanks to my friend Claude Dubé for guiding and hosting me.
The Édifice Price (Price Building) is old Québec's art deco masterpiece from the 1930s and dominates the skyline of Vieux-Québec. The view is from a park along the ramparts above the St. Lawrence River, not far from the Plains of Abraham. Church and seminary at Ste. Famille on the Île d'Orléans, in the middle of the St. Lawrence River just downstream from Québec City. Lines of raspberry bushes clothe the fields on this part of the magical, agricultural island.
House at Ste. Pétronille, at the western end of the Île d'Orléans. It was the English (post-Conquest) town on what is otherwise a very Québecois, very ancienne-régime part of the province.
2002 Pôchades
A pôchade is a quick watercolour sketch; a croquis a quick drawing: Christine (mon epouse) and I had been staying on Île d'Orléans for several days and had only a few days to tour the countryside. We went east along the south bank of the St. Lawrence River as far as Rivière-du-Loup, then crossed the river on the ferry and returned to Québec City on the north side. I was painting--sketching, I suppose--very rapidly with an Isabey squirrel-mop travel brush (#6202) and a Winsor-Newton travel paintbox--the small one with the lid that clips onto the opened-out box and becomes a water reservoir. I never finished them, but perhaps they are a useful indication of how far I take a sketch in the outdoors before finishing it later from memory (but, alas, I didn't even make notes of most of the locations and the memory is très vague).
Church and presbytère, Spring day. It was mid-May but had been cold--a very hard winter--and the trees were just beginning to leaf out.
Classic Québec "bank barn" along the roadside somewhere. Grain and hay are moved across the ramp onto the upper storey; the animals are fed during the winter in a byre on the lower one.
Beginnings of a sketch of the hotel room under the Mansard roof in a town near Kamouraska, I recall. A part of Rivière-du-Loup A snoozer on the ferry crossing the St. Lawrence River. Old freighter in the estuary at Baie St. Paul.
