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I imagined the Iceland Gull ice fishing wearing winter garb to keep warm. He uses a lawn chair that’s light and easy to move, ideal for ice fishing when one doesn’t have a shed. You might have noticed an Iceland Gull near the waters of Ontario and the West Coast of Canada as they have been seen south of the Arctic cliffs where they nest and mate. They are easily mistaken for the Glaucous Gull or the Herring Gull since they often share the same colouration. They are smaller; adults reach the size of a medium Glaucous gull.

Jackson Pollock fascinates me. Diane and I viewed one of his paintings in the Museum of Modern Art. It filled a wall with riveting energy. Ed Harris dramatized his drip painting technique in the movie Pollock. I confess I never understood Pollock’s technique, but I admired him for pioneering it. I was struck in the movie with one critic’s statement that Pollock would produce his best work in the then near future but that it would be ignored because the public had moved on to other concerns by then. I wondered how something could be that good but that transient.

I once went to a theatre to see a movie based on Pollock, and the technician didn’t align the film properly, so we saw a boom mic during a major scene. The presence of the mic reminded me that this was only an enactment of Pollock’s life at its zenith, and he had no idea what was coming. He captured a moment in time and for that he was famous. He was, however, like a boom mic in a show that reminded at least one viewer that it was just a story of when Pollock was famous.

Jackson Pollock