Status of Original Painting – Private Collection

All prices are in Canadian dollars

Size: 13.25 x 20  inches

Medium: Watercolour on 300 lb Arches

Description:

These two brightly colored houses caught my eye during a recent summer trip to Trinity, which is located on the Bonavista Peninsula in Newfoundland. It was an overcast evening, resulting in a gray whiteness of sky and water that served to emphasize the two houses and convey a moodiness. I decided to preserve all that, rather than changing sky and water to brighter blues and fluffy clouds as I sometimes do.

Trinity was so named by the Portuguese explorer Gaspar Corte-Real when he arrived there on Trinity Sunday in either 1500 or 1501. It provided a protected and defensible harbor on Trinity Bay, and became an attractive stop for seasonal fishermen from England by the mid-1500s. Its peak population was around 800 in the late 1800s, and supported fishing, lumbering, coopering, and ship building. During recent decades its population has declined, and it had only 169 residents in the 2016 census.

Trinity has preserved much of its heritage in the look and feel of the town, which makes it a very popular destination for tourists. Many of its iconic looking buildings have featured in the very advertisements that drew visitors to Newfoundland and Labrador. Trinity’s popular Rising Tide Theatre features plays, dinner theatre, and concerts each summer and fall. The 2001 movie The Shipping News (based on Annie Proulx’s Pulitzer-prize winning novel) was filmed on location nearby, as was the 2002 TV miniseries Random Passage (based on a novel by Bernice Morgan). The Random Passage Site preserves the sets that were built for that series, including houses, a church and school, fishing stages and flakes. It is a realistic depiction of what living conditions were like in a fishing outport during the early 1800s, as is much of Trinity itself even today.