Notan and Herring Weirs

"Fixing the Weir"

9x12, oil - SOLD

My workshop students were lucky enough today to see an old herring weir being resurrected over by the Head Harbour Lighthouse. As the herring industry diminished over the years, traditional herring weirs were abandoned. There are still some on Campobello Island, but very few. One of my favorites is the one by the lighthouse. It has stood unused for the last two years, and the winter storms have not been kind to it. I was delighted to see that the owners had a pile driver out and were pounding in new stakes. It won't be long before they string up the net and start catching fish.

For those of you unfamiliar with weirs, here's a good article on them: http://www.grandmanannb.com/weir.htm. Here's a picture I took some time ago of the lighthouse weir in all its unbroken, unbattered glory, but without the net. It's quite a difference between what it looked like then and what it looks like today!

We had fog, and that made for a very light sky and very light water, putting the weir and its attendant boat and pile driver into silhouette. If you squint, the scene is basically two values, a light and a dark. I like the abstract pattern the old weir made against the water. It reminded me of Arthur Wesley Dow's book, Composition: Understanding Line, Notan and Color. He makes a big deal of notan, which is a Japanese design concept dealing with light and dark patterns. If you haven't read the book, I recommend it.