Neighbourhood Icebergs

Quilts in the breeze at Gunners Cove

Watercolour and marker

©2019 Charlene Brown

Large icebergs which have ‘calved’ off glaciers in Greenland drift south along the coast of Newfoundland and Labrador every spring. Some get hung up on shoals or trapped in coves and stay in town for weeks providing a steady supply of almost perfectly pure ice for anyone brave enough to go out in a boat and chop some off (those things roll, you know).  I’m sure there are many uses for this unique resource, but the only one we were told about was the brewing of iceberg beer.

 I took a lot of photos of these icebergs in various neighbourhoods, including an especially decorative one in Saint Lunaire-Griquet (shown on the right) two kilometres south of Gunners Cove.   I even considered including this particular iceberg in the painting of Gunners Cove, which provided a more paintable foreground, but decided to stick with the ones that were actually there.