lazyness

I have the third load of laundry in the washing machine,  my 3 bathrooms are if not gleaming like something out of a Mr. Clean commercial at least passably tidy and smelling faintly of whatever chemical they put in “Green Works” cleaning products.  I have an empty dishwasher and fresh linen on the beds.  There is a blob of hamburger thawing in my sink which will eventually resemble something we will call dinner.  The dog is laying in a patch of sunlight on the carpet, pleasantly tired after the 5km frolic we went on this morning.  Or rather, I walked a brisk 5 km,  and she ran to the edge of my sight and back again to my side over and over and over and over.  That being said if I suggested going out again she would happily bound along with the energy of a puppy.

As for me.. It is mid afternoon and I’m ready to take a break.  I sit in the warmth of the few stray rays of sunlight that have found their way into my home, looking out over the quiet neighbourhood from our perch on the hill at the end of the street.

Daisies

©RiverWalker Arts

“Stars are the daisies that begem The blue fields of the sky, Beheld by all, and everywhere, Bright prototypes on high.”
~ David Macbeth

When I have moments like this there is always guilt.  Guilt that I should be doing something else, something productive... I should be washing the windows.. or the dog, cleaning my closet, de-cluttering the spare room,  putting in a long run to prepare me for the race on April 10^th.  Maybe I should be baking, or scrubbing out the inside of my car ( which currently has slight “ ‘eau de wet dog” odour).  There are papers that I never get time at work to read which I should take out and read.  Or maybe that nagging feeling can handle me putting all these mundane tasks aside, and maybe the guilt I have is that I have neglected craft projects that need finishing, like that partially finished dress I was making for a masquerade party happened 2 years ago.  But as I think of dragging out all that work, and I look outside I have the feeling  that this sun will only last an hour at most before the rain sets in for another week and I Should really get out and do some early spring gardening... like pulling the weeds that are choking the flower beds and strangling the crocuses.  

But for some reason all that guilt, all that should, could, ought to do .... isn’t getting done and instead I’m languishing here relaxing, my novel tucked in next to my hip on the sofa.   

As winter creeps into March....

The deluge froze into a mountain of snow that accumulated, half melted re-froze, solidified into an ice sheet and then the snow fell again

My challenge – with artwork in tow.  Was to fly roughly 1000 km south in a  de Havilland Canada Dash 8 300 series turbo prop that was probably manufactured only slightly after I was born.  The way it works up here in the wet northern coast is that in the absence of any flat land on the island on which I live, it was necessary for those folks building the airport to place the runway on a neighbouring island ..  accessible only by ferry or water taxi.   And so on this auspicious morning I boarded the bus, that creaks and bounces and just generally feels like something used by a prison to haul inmates  -  it leaves from the hotel down town,  almost 3 hours before the flight is scheduled to depart,  and it takes luggage and passengers across on the ferry to the airport.

The bus was packed as the flight the night before had been cancelled due to terrible winds and white out snow conditions… and so squished like sardines in a can we drove to the ferry… onto the ferry… and the ferry never left. After some time we were informed that the lone truck that existed at the airport to which the blade for clearing snow was attached was broken in some manner and that it was not possible to clear the run way – therefore the planes would not be landing that day and a mechanic had been sent for.

Now – why they could not have rounded up one of the snowplows in town to ride the ferry with us and clear that run way I’ll never know… but the long and the short of it was that there was no way I was getting out of town that morning.

My option… to catch a grey hound bus to the nearest neighbouring town some 140 km along the single snow covered road that snakes out of town along the mighty River of Mists.  And so it was that I found myself watching 3 men trying to dig out the bus from a snowbank as it ploughed into town.   But 4 hours later I was behind the security check point at the airport and readying myself for a trip marvelling at snow capped peaks jutting angularly out of densely forested green hillsides that form this spectacular coastline complete with deep fjords and a myriad of odd shaped islands, patchy with clear-cuts and scared by logging roads. 



The Stark Blues of Winter

Original Watercolour

The wind stirs and the skeletal branches creak in protest like old rusted hinges.  The movement dislodges the newly settled snow and sends it swirling to the pallid earth.  The air seems clearer, the sky hangs low, and the world is full of possibilities.  The snow just keeps falling.  It coats the forest in powdery white, and makes the world stand still.   There is a surreal quality to the light, you could almost believe in magic on a day like today.

© RiverWalker Arts



playing dodge the snow squall....

The trouble with weather forecasting is that it's right too often for us to ignore it and wrong too often for us to rely on it.  ~Patrick Young

I listened to the rain pounding on the single pane window on the side of my little room all night.  The pattering of raindrops loud against the howl of the wind and the more distant roaring of the surf as it beat against the shore.   I burrowed deep into my nest of blankets.  I’d even pulled the spare blankets from the closet and thrown them on the bed to try to ward off the chill.

Incoming Storm

I woke as the light crept into my room and wondered if the wind had died down with the rain.  I slipped from the covers, and padded across my little room  to look out towards the sea.   Beyond the young fir trees  - the waves looked as angry as ever and their quiet drone had lulled me into complacency. 

I figured I had until 3 that afternoon for the weather to sort itself out as that was the time my float plane was scheduled to leave and get me home.  I dressed, packed, loaded my bag into the car and wandered over to the main house to see about coffee.  

My host, and the care taker of the lodge in which I was staying was just in the process of pulling something delicious smelling from the oven.  Breakfast!! Yum. When someone else cooks, it is always delicious... when it’s a professional cook catering to me... even better! 

With breakfast eaten and time to kill before my flight... where else but to the beach..

My work partner and I  bumped along the gravel road that leads to the beach,  the road is narrow bordered by cedar trees towering out of the peaty bog  and  adorned with thick clumps of moss hanging pendulously overhead.  And then the road ends abruptly  with an endless expanse of sand and wind and water. 

Tourists often undertake this drive down the 23km stretch of seemingly endless sand… however when placing a bet on having a tow truck arrive from Masset versus the tide coming in and swamping the tourist’s stuck vehicle, the smart money bets with the tide…  this beach claims a number of vehicles each year.  At the end of north beach… Rose Spit… the longest spit in Canada.  An immense sandbar stretches northward towards Alaska. 

Ocean Spray

The wind howled and hurtled bits of frozen snow pellets at me.. and I tightened my hood on my jacket and headed out to the water’s edge.  The waves pounded into the sea and the little rocky outcrop that marks the only  interruption in an otherwise lengthy stretch of sand that spans roughly over 100km between Masset and Tlell.

I was convinced the plane would never fly, but a break in the winds found me sitting in a little 5 seater beaver that made it’s treacherous way home dodging snow squalls over the turbulent waters below.  While I hung tight to the seat and tried not to think of how fast hypothermia would kill me assuming I even made it out of that 50 year old tincan of an airplane.... we somehow managed to make the crossing.

View from under the wing... trying to out-fly the incoming storm.

 

Lovers of air travel find it exhilarating to hang poised between the illusion of immortality and the fact of death.  ~Alexander Chase

inspiration stretched over canvas...

Sometimes inspiration flows like a never ending waterfall, with ideas pouring over the rocks of my mind with crystalline clarity and I never see the white of the canvas in front of me only the flowing of colour and light.  Other times inspiration seems to have dried up and I add colour to blank paper looking for design and attempting to find that hidden waterfall.  

What I don’t do with enough frequency is to reach out and join others in the creative processes.  Instead of sitting alone in the dim glow of lamps and strings of champagne coloured Christmas lights draped along my bookshelf, I need to get out.  I need to watch the passion of others the freedom of creation for creations sake.  I need to look at the world again.   To peer out beyond the grey sheets of rain that tumble darkly from the sky, creating a world of damp darkness.  If I can push back that watery curtain and find again that which is hidden from view I could again find that place of colour and light and bring it forth to capture in paint.

Last Saturday I embarked on a Creative Jam session with inspired folks who came to sing, and write and draw together.  In a well lit but ghastly yellow room I put acrylic paint on canvas while watching the creative motions of others.   If colour had been dormant... it was so no longer.   Acrylic is a medium with which I am grossly unfamiliar, however on that particular day colour again bloomed under my hand.

And so I present to you 3 new works on Canvas. 

Macrocystis

Swaying in oceans currents this algae can grow two hundred feet long, at a rate of two feet per day. It is harvested as a food supplement but also used as an additive to salad dressings, ice creams, sauces and toothpastes...

Which goes to show... you never know where you might find your next meal.

© RiverWalker Arts

Kitson Island

Isolated on a small island facing the grey quicksilver pacific ocean, sits flanked by mainland mountains, that rise majestically out of the ever present mists.  Those mists rise up and hem the island in eerie drifting cloaks of pale moisture.    It rains here.  The type of rain that pours down on the world and fills up the earth, the ocean drinking what the land cannot hold.  

© RiverWalker Arts

Dancing Medusa

With no heart, bones, eyes or brain, Medusozoa are made up of 95% water, and yet they are still a remarkably efficient ocean predator.   Gently pulsing in ocean currents these predators are in balance with the large predator fish of the seas.  With overfishing the balance appears to be tipping in favour of these transparent and graceful but deadly predators.

© RiverWalker Arts

I refuse to believe that trading recipes is silly. Tuna fish casserole is at least as real as corporate stock.

I’m thinking of putting all the little recipe cards I have together... I’m thinking of compiling them into a book.   I’ve started some mock-ups of what a page in this short little book might look like.

I’d like to share.. and get any feedback you feel is useful.  

Most of my creations look remarkably unappetizing in photographs.  I really do consider myself a passable cook,  but the aesthetics of the meals I concoct are clearly less important that the taste.  I’ve yet to find the skill for turning what DH so lovingly calls “slop” into some image of beauty and artistry... so I figured that even though I like a recipe book with photos.. maybe my home made version could be free of photos that might dissuade potential cooks from making something that looks so much like a dogs’ breakfast

Anyway here are a couple samples I’ve thrown together....  (click images for larger sizes)

Recipe:  A series of step-by-step instructions for preparing ingredients you forgot to buy, in utensils you don't own, to make a dish the dog wouldn't eat.  ~Author Unknown

Plan B

The snow has been swirling out my window on and off all day.  There is a dusting on the ground, wet and icy with the freezing rain that alternated with the bouts of snow.  It’s been dark and dreary looking.  My black furball of a dog is curled up under my chair giving off the odour of wet dog.  She will dry eventually.   (maybe)

I have a calendar that I was given for Christmas, it hangs next to my desk and reminds me that “Life is all about how you handle plan “B”.  Which seems very apt lately.  Gracing the month of January is a cartoon image of a wild looking redhead, her hair billowing around her head in wild shades of orange on a lime green backdrop.   Boldly printed alongside this wild looking woman it says  “ I learned long ago that shifting into Plan B takes more patience, skill, and humility than it ever took to figure out Plan A in the first place. (Discarding your preconceived ideas and then reexamining all the contingencies is not a job for sissies!) But thing rarely turn out exactly as we planned, and at that point, we have to decide whether or not to shift gears, embrace the change, and test out who we really are. “

Plan B.  The truest test of character.

Clearly there is a reason that people quote each other saying “even the best laid plans.....” 

 it’s true.

But at the end of the day... life wouldn’t be interesting if things always went according to plan.

.

Anyone who tells you portaging is fun is either a liar, or crazy, or maybe both

In August my family set out on a 7 night backcountry canoe journey.  It was a dream of my father’s to paddle a chain of lakes in BC’s interior.  And so 6 of us loaded up the canoes, and launched into the lakes to test ourselves against the weather.  There was spectacular clear lakes surrounded with rugged peaks,  stunning sunsets and torrential rain.  The flat calm water stirred itself into a rage and we huddled wet and cold on a sandbar to wait out the storm.  We paddled.  And camped, and paddled and got rained on and huddled around an old woodstove in a rustic trappers cabin with our wet gear hung out to dry... we woke to blazing sun and we paddled down the caribou river avoiding sweepers and dead heads…. – we hauled out and portaged overland between lakes before paddling onward through the cloud soaked mountains and seemingly deserted waters.

I look back fondly at the days we spent away from the world of plastics, and electricity, on lakes free from any motors, where there are no beer cans or bottle tops, no roads or ATV trails, no sounds of aircraft flying above, no power lines or humming generators.   A place where the mists rise and linger cloaking the forest and every thought is the present.  I never once thought about work, we never talked about our life back home in land of conveniences and solid walls.  Our life on those lakes was all about the here and now. 

In a fit of nostalgia I sat at my desk and began to paint.  This is the product of that moment... and yet my need to paint memories of that trip has not been slaked, as there sits on my desk yet another canvas from which a canoe is springing forth from the mists. 

Isaac Lake

 Original Watercolour

“I remember a hundred lovely lakes, and recall the fragrant breath of pine and fir and cedar and poplar trees. The trail has strung upon it, as upon a thread of silk, opalescent dawns and saffron sunsets. It has given me blessed release from care and worry and the troubled thinking of our modern day. It has been a return to the primitive and the peaceful. Whenever the pressure of our complex city life thins my blood and benumbs my brain, I seek relief in the trail; and when I hear the coyote wailing to the yellow dawn, my cares fall from me - I am happy.”  ~Hamlin Garland, McClure's, February 1899

© RiverWalker Arts