Hollyburn sleeping tree, sleeping cabin

Like bears, mountain hemlock trees sleep through the winter.  With 2 to 3 meters of snow already, little hemlocks are buried, and the big ones stand dozing stoically with their branches held in close by the snow.  But it's the adolescent ones that are the most entertaining.  The first snow of the year bends their flexible top over.  The next snow bends them a little further down.  Heavier and heavier snows later bend the whole thin trunk, so they look like they are napping with their head hung way down.  Sometimes they'll curl completely around, like the one outside our cabin.  When the snow melts and falls off, they pop part way back up, then fully unfurl themselves in the spring.

Some cabins also look like they are sleeping, under an enormous down comforter of snow.

Bluebird day

Clear sunny skies with fresh powder snow on the mountains - we don't get a lot of these bluebird days in Vancouver.  And we don't get any at all if we stay at work when they happen.  So I took the opportunity to carve some telemark turns on Hollyburn - flawless ones, I might add, which also means "timid".  And, of course, to work on my icecolour painting.  Connoisseurs of the genre will recognize the tell-tale features: blotchy washes, pale colours because the brushes have frozen, blobs of dark colour where ice-paint flakes ended up, and feathery lines of frost crystals.  And subject matter that usually involves snow, mountains or snowy mountains.

Life, exaggerated

Me, exaggerate?  Never in a hundred million billion years would I exaggerate a life drawing.

Portrait and party

Alain Boullard came up with a brilliant idea for a drawing session: an hour and a half of portrait drawing, followed by another hour and a half drawing a blue-grass band in full twang.  The brilliance is the yin-yanginess of it.  Portrait drawing is intense, artists packed close together staring intently at another person's face while struggling to get something respectably human-looking on the paper.  I tend to end up holding my shoulders somewhere above my ears and forgetting to breathe until I notice my drawing hand turning blue.  And then, faster than you can say yippee-ei-o, a change to the complete other end of the looseness spectrum, with The Soots, a duo playing fantastic foot-stomping blue grass.  I have a bit of a different drawing style when I'm dancing, and breathing...

Icecolour drawings at Hollyburn

Watercolour drawings have to be done quickly in the mountains at this time of year.  Frozen fingers I can deal with, but when your paint freezes, then your brush, then your painting water - well, you're done.  You learn to be fast.  I had about 15 minutes at First Lake at Hollyburn, then less than 10 minutes on the weir at the outflow of West Lake.  First Lake had cheerful cross-country skiers and seemed a fairly benign place even though I was shaded from the low afternoon sun.  West Lake sits in a cold air pocket, and its outflow drops into a dark canyon that makes you think of Coleridge's Kubla Khan: "that deep romantic chasm which slanted down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!  A savage place!..."  So savage that I had to thaw my water cup in my slightly warmer hands to melt my brush free.

Keefer Street crawl

I went over to the Eastside Culture Crawl, but it was really too nice to crawl, so I mostly sketched: one drawing from the railway overpass on Keefer St. done patiently with waterproof pen and watercolour; the other a little further west, done more loosely with water-soluble ink.  On the street, about half the people who walked by were admiring the colours or the architecture of the houses - it was a nice change from North Vancouver, where the houses cover the spectrum from grey to beige, and people tend to talk square feet and market value.  I was painting on my bicycle-studio when a homeless man with an extravagant-in-all-dimensions beard shuffled by with his cart, and muttered as he passed "You're as crazy as I am."  Superficial appearances would suggest otherwise, but he was probably right in many ways.  I took it as a compliment.

Anonymous Art - Security

I put one picture in the North Vancouver Arts Council's Anonymous Art Show, which, happily, sold.  (Happily, too, for the Arts Council, since it's a fund-raiser for them, and I donated my half of the sale to their good cause.)  I used acrylic inks on a wood panel, based on sketches at the grain terminal in North Vancouver.  I would have done the whole thing in situ, but when I rode down there, I found the area is now surrounded by fences, and within 10 seconds, a security guard drove up in a large truck and told me, "All this land - this land is our land."  I didn't think he was quoting Woody Guthrie, and I don't think the local Squamish nation would agree, but in any case, he clarified his position: "Go away."  I must match a profile they teach in security-guard school, at least when I'm carrying my sketchbook.  When I drew there a couple years ago, in freer days, I noticed a homeless camp - consisting of a box and a blanket in the brambles by the tracks.  I hope that person, now evicted, has found a more secure home...