Status of Original Painting – Sold at Charity Auction

All prices are in Canadian dollars

Size: 17 x 20  inches

Auction Price: $990

Medium: Watercolour on 300 lb Arches

Description:

The is Cabot Tower on Signal Hill in St. John’s. It is the site where Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi received the first wireless transatlantic transmission on December 12, 1901 – the letter S sent from Cornwall, England. The tower guards The Narrows, the entrance to the harbor of St. John’s. Cabot Tower was originally built in 1897 to celebrate the 400th anniversary of John Cabot’s discovery of Newfoundland. It is a mandatory site for tourists to visit, and the climb up the steep, winding roadway on Signal Hill is an excellent way to exercise. But on two sides are steep cliffs down to the ocean and the harbor, and every year people need to be rescued after straying from the marked paths and nearly falling to their deaths.

I originally did a painting of Cabot Tower in 2002, which can be seen at this link. That version was about half the size and I painted it in eight hours, from start to finish in one day. But this one took a lot longer…probably well over 40 hours with all the tiny, irregularly shaped and colored bricks.

Jill Cole suggested that I paint Cabot Tower again, and I decided to make it an interesting, stormy sky. I had a similar approach when I painted Stonehenge in 2007. Lisa Dawe suggested “Stormy Signal” as the title, which I liked a lot but shortened just a bit.