Welcome to Swansea, Ontario

Happy Canada Day weekend! These paintings are a celebration of what we have in Canada. As the Duke of Edinburgh affirmed on Canada Day 2025, we are celebrating! Welcome to the new website. You will find work from various series here. Mainly, there are birds. There are also other animals and people sitting or moving through the scene. Scenery varies from winter to summer. Typically, I paint outdoors. Like a photographer, I need to be at the place in the picture. Once I was painting the cherry blossoms in High Park and a photographer asked me, "Where are all the garbage cans?" and then she realized, "Oh, you didn't put them in because you are painting."

Today I will write about the painting above. It is featured in my movie, Swansea, of a series of mute swan paintings and pastels. In the movie, I follow a nesting pair to see if there are cygnets. Normally, there should be seven cygnets. In the movie, there are! What I don't say in the film is that the nesting swans I painted had zero cygnets, but I happened to find a family of seven the next week.

The reality is that mute swan eggs are oiled by the authorities so that there is usually no outcome. Mute swans are considered invasive across north America. With strict population control, it is rare for even one cygnet to hatch. What a surprise it was to find a family of nine at the lake for once in my career. It was exciting to paint them from the beach.

Mute swans were a gift to Canada from the late Queen. That gives them added prestige to me, even though the ones I paint are not part of the Royal Flock whose survivors have been placed in a Quebec zoo. I like that the Royal Flock in Ottawa had both Australian black swans and English mute swans. Perhaps the harsh winters of Ontario were a challenge for the black swans. Maybe that is why we have not seen many wild ones in Toronto.

I have read that mute swans are also controlled in England so only one or two eggs are able to hatch. The authorities check early and often! If they hear signs of life, they leave the egg alone. I suppose it is good they are vigilant. Since people do not eat swans anymore, the population can go up unless regulated.

Painting gives me a chance to observe wildlife and learn about it. I love the camouflage in the painting above. The swans really blend into the waves on the lake. I learned that the normal color for cygnets is brown, but some are white, called Polish. I guess I am Polish by marriage, so I cannot complain about the little white cygnets.

When I first drew a swan on a nest in High Park, there were more nests to see. Grenadier Pond used to have three nests, but is down to only one now, that I can see. There is a particularly aggressive male swan living there. I saw him chase away two trumpeter swans who dared land on the pond. No doubt he has also chased other mute swans.

Swansea