About

Oakville is a town of a little over 200,000 on the north shore of Lake Ontario, halfway between Toronto and Hamilton. It grew where Sixteen Mile Creek meets the lake — a shipbuilding harbour first, then a grain port, then the quiet lakefront town it is now. The creek still cuts a wooded ravine straight through the middle of it, which is why the place never quite became a grid.

These nine plates are the slow way of looking at it: the 1889 lighthouse at the harbour mouth, the shale walls of Lions Valley, a farmhouse at Bronte Creek that has not changed its mind about the century. Each one was painted for this book; the colophon says how.