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... ongoing projects
 many additions of photos and correspondence to the on-line parts of Vanishing British Columbia and the correspondence part of Vancouver Remembered. |
 additions and changes to "Explaining Australia," an on-line book project |
...added December 31, 2011
 |
One
of my oils about to be published in Vanishing
Vancouver: The Last 25 Years. Unlike its predecessors, this book will have a fairly wide range of images, beyond my usual watercolours that have illustrated my books going back to the 1980s. There are a few oils and quite a number of brush and ink (chiaroscuro) drawings, many of them coloured à la comic book with Photoshop, and even a few cartoons. This picture shows the two Admiral Seymour schools in the eastern part of Strathcona in Vancouver, with a 'made up' bird's-eye viewpoint and landscape of wooden houses. I did it to illustrate the "school as landmark" – the way that traditional city schools were the neighbourhood beacons, like the church steeples/minarets of religious societies or the baron's castle in feudal ones. This specific school was very much in the news in the last year when one of its teachers went public with her dismay over the utter poverty of many of her elementary school students, triggering an avalanche of donations from the public. |
... added December 18, 2011
| ... a few days to the winter solstice here in Vancouver, and I find myself looking repeatedly at this picture, taken a few days from the summer solstice, perhaps, about 1953. Every once in a while somebody sends in an image, as Bill Suckling did of these cabins at Pierre's Point on Shuswap Lake, that seems to capture an era. It embodies a feeling of utter calm, quiet and safety, worth contrasting with his reflections on the changes at lakeside in recent years. This image is part of the page on the cabins at Shuswap Lake, part of the Vanishing BC part of this site. |
... added October 29, 2011
 |
I
apologize to anyone who's been a regular visitor to this site and has
looked in vain for something new during the past several months. The
new Vanishing
Vancouver: 20 Years Later has
taken all my time since the
summer. I'd believed I had it almost done last May when its
publication
was postponed from Fall 2011 to Spring 2012, but final writing and
illustrating took ... well, it took as long as it took. The
lead
time for a book like this is pretty substantial: it will go to press in
January and be shipped to stores in March or early April, according to
plan. I've put a preview page here. |
... and
... an interesting bit of correspondence about a roadside relic
...added June 28, 2011
 |
Just
returned from a couple of weeks away, part work and all pleasure. The
first
week, as noted below in the March 12th entry, was in Percé,
Quebec, where I taught a
course on "the grammar of space" useful for artists and travellers. It
was my fourth time teaching at the Université Laval's summer
school for the arts. The journey's web page, added to my travel
section, is here. Coming soon, when I get a chance to finish them, are some bits and pieces from the second week, when Christine and I visited Chicago. |
...added June 3, 2011
 |
I've
put a favorite old double-sided watercolour into the 34th annual
auction of the Penticton Art Gallery –
July 7, 2011, from 6-10 pm. The majority of the proceeds benefit the
gallery. The back of the watercolour, which is also framed with glass, is of a roadside in the Summerland orchard area in Prairie Valley. Both of the images are on the web page for Summerland, part of the Vanishing British Columbia on-line section. These pictures were reproduced in my book Vanishing BC, on page 65. It's the time of the year for a road trip – take the book along! |
...added April 29, 2011
 |
After
considerable delays due to all kinds of boring reasons, I've put up
some artwork and writing from our trip to Costa
Rica last January. It joins the long list of trips archived on my travel page. |
... added March 12, 2011
 |
June
13 –17, 2011 I will be giving a week-long course in Percé, Québec for the Université Laval's summer school entitled "The Grammar of Space"... La Grammaire de L'Espace The course will explore positive, negative and atmospheric space, reviewing all the compositional tricks used for representing landscape and architecture, and will end with a day of breaking all the "grammatical rules" we've worked with during the preceding days. Percé is a fishing village on the Gaspé peninsula in eastern Québec – one of the most fabulously picturesque places on the planet. The atelier is the former studio of a New York painter named Frederick James, who modified an old house for summer use c. 1875. The school has a website and my course is here. The course will be conducted in French but I will be there, obviously, to translate if necessary. This will be my fourth time there: the records of the previous trips begin in my travel section on the Percé pages. |
... added February 18, 2011
 |
Unveiled
tonight at the beginning of Hycroft's centenary, my commissioned oil
painting for the University Women's Club which has owned the building
for the past half-century. A good party and happy conclusion to a process that began last September with me getting onto the roof of a highrise a few blocks away with a 30 x 36 inch canvas .... Normally when you're painting or photographing architecture you look for a low, corner angle that gives the composition strong diagonals and more drama; this straight-on view is much calmer, more conservative, befitting a mansion so well established in its landscape. The space has to recede in subtle shifts of tone and scale without any tricks of perspective. Other, older commissions are archived on another page. |
... added February 12, 2011
 |
The
Potato House
in Williams Lake has been saved! And to all the people who've sent in material for the Vanishing BC section, on Bradford Angier, Bridesville, Alexandra Lodge, Cawston, Beaver Cove and many other places, I've posted all your comments and questions. Sorry it took so long... the other projects, especially writing the new Vanishing Vancouver, have had me fully occupied. |
...added November 1, 2010
 |
A
new Vanishing Vancouver, 20 years after my original one, will be
published in the spring of 2012 by Whitecap Books. It will be in a
format
very similar to my recent books Vancouver Remembered and Vanishing
British Columbia (see my books
page): a hardcover of 200+ pages, almost completely new (that is,
unpublished) material, a combination of artwork, old postcards and
photos, and a text ranging over the history of Vancouver's
buildings – particularly its houses – and how
they're holding up with all the changes to the millennial dream city. Buried House on Main Street near 7th ... watercolour ... the view from my daughter's apartment window. At first blush it appeared to be a house with a square 'boomtown front' added to it to make it fit into the commercial street, but after further investigation it appears it was built as a shop for J.W. Clarke in 1892 and is, according to Heritage Vancouver researchers, "the oldest commercial building outside of downtown." The long-time location of A. Frith & Co. men's furnishings, it evolved into a restaurant in the 1950s and has worn names including Continental Cafe, Riviera Pizza, Himalaya Restaurant and, currently, Nirvana. |
...added August 7, 2010
 |
Due
to the predations of plumbers and other tradesmen during our recent
home reno, I am actively soliciting commissions. This recently
completed one is an oil on canvas for a Vancouver family. I
have also painted smaller, less expensive watercolours. Over the years I must have painted a hundred or more commissions for people, some of summer places, others of gardens, many of beloved homes about to be left behind. There is more information on my commissions page. |
...added July 31, 2010
 |
In
March I wrote "after a month or so of messy renovations" we would be
moving to our house and I would be returning to my normal life. A month! Ha! Four
months later we're still working on it, but down to part-time. There's
light at the end of the tunnel and it isn't a train. Rahul Gaur of Gurgaon, India, has an interesting blog in which he reflects on contemporary life there and compares it with the past, including using excerpts from classic novels. Much of it is in English, some in Hindi. Among other images are a few of my sketches from our India trip of 2009, such as this one of kites circling in the hot sky above Delhi's Red Fort. |
...added April 14, 2010
 An
interview with me about travel painting, specifically focusing on the
mega-campervan trip of last September-November in Australia, on the
interesting Travel Painting Blog.
|
...added April 6, 2010
 Although my book Vanishing British Columbia was published five years ago, North Bend, the almost abandoned railway town in the Fraser Canyon, continues to attract a lot of correspondence from people with roots there in the last century. Arlana Nickel has sent in more photographs of people that might be of interest to family researchers. I've grouped all the North Bend people photographs onto a new page, and sorted the rest of the North Bend material (about various buildings) into four separate web pages that are best accessed from the index page for the Fraser Canyon area. Also, Robert Murray has sent in a very good memoir and a collection of photos of growing up in the long-gone coal-mining hamlet of Blakeburn near Coalmont. |
...added March 19, 2010
 |
It's
been a long time since I put anything new onto this website. Almost
five weeks ago we arrived back in Vancouver and have been occupied with
house-hunting, car-buying and Olympics-watching. One of the places we almost bought was the little blue house on Vernon Drive with the grocery store in its sideyard. Ironically, it was one of the watercolours I painted in 2006 for Vancouver Remembered, which will be coming back into print this fall. Instead, we settled on a place about as old (1908) in the Grandview area, a block or so from The Cultch. After a month or so of messy renovations we will be moving there in June, if all goes according to plan. ... and with luck there will then be a return to painting and writing. |
... added February 15, 2010
 After three years and three months, two book proposals, many oils and watercolours, several fabulous journeys and one almost-complete novel, we have left Australia and our many friends and relatives and moved back to Vancouver. The last postings from down under are two oil paintings of Australia. |
...added January 22, 2010
| A brief article on me and my sketchbook in RAK Today (thanks to Manju, who found my website) prompted by our visit there last February. You can try to find the article by clicking on this link and going to pages 64 and 65; or, I've put facsimiles of the pages at the bottom of my Emirates travel page. |
...added January 8, 2010
...
colours of the Outback...added December 16, 2009
Artwork from the Great Australian Campervan trip,
also linked from my Travel page
...added September 17, 2009
Cascade Street from the top of the hill, oil on board, Winter 2009
| After 2 1/2 years we have left Katoomba and, with all our goods and chattels in storage, headed out on the road for a few months in a camper van. Among the things we will recall is this view we had on our regular route home, from the crest of the hill with the Jamison Valley and Blue Mountains national park in the distance. It never disappointed regardless of the time of year or the weather ... (read more) |
...added September 5, 2009
Black & white brush drawings from around Australia
...added August 23, 2009
 Country storm, from the sketchbook, 2008, one recent time where happenstance made the soaked paper dry the way I wanted it to... |
It's
a rarity to come across a good definition of watercolour painting that
describes
the particular difficulty in getting an effect and the fact you have
just one chance at it – there are no corrections possible in
a watercolour. We were watching a French film, L'Homme du Train, which is not about painting at all; rather, it is the drôle tale of a bank robber arriving in a small town who is befriended by an eccentric retired poetry teacher. In one scene, the robber meets up with an accomplice in an art museum and they have a rambling conversation, including: "How was detox?" "It was one big scam. Still, it got me back into watercolours... I'd forgotten it all – the interplay of water and chance." |
...
added July 23, 2009 ...
some new paintings of Australia
and British Columbia |
| ...added
July 21, 2009 There's going to be an art auction on Savary Island, BC, on August 8th, to benefit the land acquisition program of the Savary Island Land Trust. A very worthy cause that I've supported in the past: my donation this year is the small oil of Arbutus Island, one of those essentially west-coast places with a few arbutus trees and cedars. It is a tiny spur of rock, connected to Hermit Island by a rocky causeway at low tide.  |
...added May 22, 2009
As I've gone back to "studio painting," a few small oils of ...
 Australia, |
 British Columbia, |
 & India |
...added April 16, 2009
Finally, my Explaining Australia web book, which is inviting submissions and comments, and looking for a publisher...
... added April 15, 2009
My 10-foot long painting from 2007, "Sketch of Lawson to Remember It By," is on display at the Ben Roberts Gallery, 12 Blind Street, Lawson, NSW.
...added March 31, 2009
Travel art from recent journeys to India and Ras-al-Khaimah.
... added December 15, 2008
 |
Australian Watercolours ... small watercolours of ordinary people done as marginalia for my "Explaining Australia" book project, and some roadside bits from our travels here. |
...added November 8, 2008
 |
In
June, in Vancouver, I was staying at my brother's place in Fairview
Slopes and one morning walked over to the CityTV studio in Mount
Pleasant for an interview, passing by on the way these old houses at
6th and Alberta. They were empty and, it seemed, awaiting demolition.
The march of the condos, I thought. So I wandered back the following
morning with my
sketchbook and did this little daub, then continued on through the
neighbourhood looking for other relics that would soon be gone. The old
"Vanishing Vancouver" impulse never leaves me.... I was interested to see, in the on-line version of the Sun, that BC Hydro has purchased this site for a new substation but is trying to find a new home for the houses. An example of recycling and reuse, they say. This is good! |
...added October 31, 2008
 I've
posted my
artwork, with some narrative text, from our recent trip
through Spain and France. This continues the series of
journeys and
travel art that are indexed on my main travel
page.
|
 The other big change is the demise of my blog after almost two years. Anything I'm doing that seems new and interesting will go up on this page, so if you were previously looking at the blog, please bookmark this page, or the home page, instead. |
...added August 15, 2008
 |
I've
put up a pretty major piece of travel painting and writing, including
some impressionistic verse, about the Thompson
and Fraser rivers
in British Columbia. I've been painting in
that area for years and years and am trying to craft something that
would be publishable, either in a magazine or a book, and would go
beyond the kind of workmanlike descriptive writing that has been my
métier for so many years. Since moving away from BC, I find that on the visits back I'm trying to focus on and complete work that was always "ongoing" when I lived there. What about paintings, etc. about Australia? There's actually a lot of that going on, but not ready to post or publish yet .... |
... added May 27, 2008
... the final installment of my "Mid-Life Crisis Bus Story" on the Van Ordinaire page.
***