Winter Accretion

This is a gorgeous, medium sized oil painting on board with a wood frame. It's in great condition save for one tiny blemish in the frame, viewable center right in the photos.

The painting contains the signature 'Marion E. Rumble, 1953', dating this back 70 years. Of course, I googled and found a census dating back to 1901 that states a Marion E Rumble, aged 3, lived in Oro, Ontario, which sits between Lake Simcoe and Lake Huron and you'll come close to it if you're making the trip up to Ontario's cottage country.

This would put Marion at age 56 when this painting was created. Further investigating shows that Marion died in 1961 in Rockland County, New York.  I stopped typing this stuff up here as I don't need to come off as though I am doxxing this woman posthumously. But when you find a piece like this, and it's not a print, you wonder who the artist is and where they're from.

Did Marion paint this scene from a photograph? It's possible. A dream? Maybe.

But if Marion spent her life between south-Central Ontario and the part of New York state that borders Connecticut, this feels very much like a lived experience, as I was instantly familiar with nearly everything in frame.

This could be the town I grew up in, or it could be the outskirts of Renfrew, Ontario. It certainly could be near Oro, Horseshoe Valley Resort sits right there and clearly we see some slopes in the background. 

There's a visceral familiarity this image brings. A just cut trail through a day or two worth of downfall. A bright winter morning. A frozen lake.