Month: September 2018

Here’s another installment of figurative work I mentioned in the previous post — and also the next chapter in the Family Travelogue, Summer, 2018. When our daughter returned to Toronto for the fall semester, Cloudy and I hit the highway to catch up with our son Lewis. He has recently taken up residence in the lovely and historic Osborne Village neighborhood of Winnipeg. He lives in a slightly crumbling but still elegant Victorian-era walk-up near the bank of the Assiniboine River. I found the city’s downtown architecture to be well-preserved with so many striking lines, mixed with modern developments too! I watched Lewis slink around them like a cat who knows his new domain.

The painting is from a photograph I took of Lewis, not in Osborne but near the marshes in the Assiniboine Forest. We used to hike together often as a family, so following him through the aspen trails took me back. We spent most of the time under the shade of the leaves, but Lewis is under the full blast of the September sun as you glimpse him here.

This summer my daughter Esther was home from Toronto for fifty-six sweet days, on leave from her nursing program. Her arrival coincided with a renewed interest I’ve had in doing figurative work. I watched her bustle around my apartment and I really wanted to capture her. She’s always been a fast-moving target. She and a friend sat for one experimental figure study. Then we went to the smoky mountains.

Esther, her dad Cloudy, and I drove west to Jasper through the smoke of BC forest fires. The national park was full of tourists from all over the world, scratching their jet-lagged heads and wondering where the famous Rockies went. The peaks were all in pastel blues that got paler with the distance. We had one clear day when we climbed the Opal Hills trail to one of those high mountain valleys full of cheeky marmots. Cloudy was ecstatic to have our company at altitude. We all thought of Lewis — fourth member of the family — in his new city out on the prairies.

I studied trees, rivers, rocks, and the world became blocks of colour. In the image, Esther is in our secret campsite by the creek that lulls us to sleep and chills our hard-boiled eggs. The colour planes I think of as blocks of energy, and Esther is making a gesture that says, “Ok, you got me.”