Carving.1. The old one.

This Fall I have begun to carve again. This was my first childhood creative work and I have picked it up again from time to time. It comes more easily to me and is the most intimate experience I have with the side of my personality that communicates through imagery. As a child the only art I saw being produced in my little coastal BC community of Mill Bay was that produced by the Indians down the road by the ferry dock. In the big wooden buildings by the beach were dugout canoes and in the cemetery, totem poles, and that was what I carved too with my pocket knife.

It never occurred to me that I was transgressing on another culture`s tradition. I had a powerful dream of the Thunderbird several times and I never thought to doubt that this could not be for me, this little white boy recently arrived from England with his family. Ignorance was bliss. I still know this in my heart even though I have studied Anthropology and know now that only First Nations peoples have the right to make First Nations art. And I agree. So, this carving thing that I have a direct line to the spirit of the land with? What do I carve? Because, you see, it is the Thunderbird who made me a carver.

I have been saving interesting pieces of wood for years now and have recently bought a circlet saw chain cutter that is mounted on an angle grinder, - a dangerous, high speed tool that permits me to cut into wavy grained or very hard pieces of wood that defeat conventional gouges and knives. I pick up a long tapered piece that was once a buttress on a cedar tree and begin at random, - no plan. I know that the agreement I have is that I hand over my labour and something other calls the shots. The thick end starts to form into eyes... a nose... lips... and the long trailing piece must be the beard. The machine bucks and gouges as I learn to control it. Oops, that was too deep so I guess that changes the design a little, the eyes will be deeper set.... There can be no thought of My deciding here at the beginning, and this process is so rapid that the image swims up very quickly into view.

By the time I learn to shave delicate slices from the wood it is high time that I begin the fine work that will pull all the elements into a co-ordinated whole. The belt sander grinds the final shape to the face and the circlet cutter puts the curls in the long white beard. The blank eyes stare unfocussed until my sharp knife cuts the grooves across them.

Hand sanding always takes a long time, but every imperfection in the wood will show when the oils and then wax finish is applied. The oil darkens the heart wood and that sets off the white surface wood off nicely. Finished!

After the Deluge. The wild wet beast.

Ok, so our west coast of Canada is also called the Wet Coast, because of our winter rainfall, but these past two days were very wet. At night we woke regularly to the drumming of the rain on our metal roof and the gurgling and dripping of the run off. Days were misty affairs with the clouds wafting through the trees and dropping their loads of sheeting rain. A good time to work in my studio, even though walking back and forth to the house left my jacket permanently damp.

The second night, Heather said she could hear a new sound blending into the raindrops and I suggested it might be the stream plunging over the falls. “Yes and no,” she said. “There is the deeper sound of the falls, that`s true, but this is a higher pitched noise that I have not heard before.” I`m too deaf to here this sound, so I dismiss it and roll into sleep.

Next morning, waking late after another apprehension interrupted sleep, I step to the window and peer out into the rain which is slackening at last, and see a wide streak of white foam lining the path of our usually well trained seasonal stream. It writhes down the valley bottom, leaps over the waterfall with a roar and bounds off down through the trees that line its course. Right after breakfast I am out with my camera into the last few drops of rain and follow the course of the stream from where it comes out of a culvert under the road to where it disappears into our neighbour`s land on its way to join the main valley stream below. Even I can hear the noise Heather noticed last night now that I am beside the stream itself. It is the sound of rushing water as it twists and turns, sporting a rooster tail in the steep spots and bunching up grumpily when it must crowd through a narrow passage under the forest trail.

Big Pond, beside my studio, is sheeting across the lawn as well, unable to fit all its discharge into the stream bed. The stone bridge has both its channels filled and is hosing water out its lower side. The long low falls have a perfect curl of water and the lower pond`s main stone barrier not only shoots out a smooth curve of water in its falls but is spilling water all along its length as well. I pause here to get all this in the camera before follow the stream in its headlong dash down the valley. All those little patches of rock dams in the streambed I had created years ago are now performing as I had visualized, creating a long series of rapids and high speed twists and turns.

At last I reach my bottom fence where the stream has bunched up maple leaves against the wire, creating another torrent of water that leaps through and streaks white on down the hill. I`ve taken over a hundred photos in one hour! This is what winter brings us; snow, gales, and every once in a while the excitement of a wild wet beast writhing through our landscape.

First snowfall. In communion.

It had been a gentle Fall; rain, wind and plenty of sunny days. No frost. All the more shocking when the temperature plummets overnight and the snow begins to fly. Morning`s first light illuminates the bedroom with a cool white light, so different from the slowly waxing flicker that struggles to push the darkness aside that we are used to at this time of year. Time to jump out of bed and get the woodstove going and warm the kitchen up. It is bright and cold this morning and everything; the balcony, garden, trees and rocky knolls are transformed.

Before I light the fire, make the tea, I take the first photograph of the day out of the window. An early dawn panorama of big white trees. Firs carry their layers of white on fans, a complex arrangement of interlocking planes, while the bare maple trunks, branches and terminal twigs are careful white line drawings. An even grey cloud layer blankets us in silence. Before the snow can begin to degrade from this perfection I will be out and about recording this moment.

Even as I wander through our forest and later on a walk down into the valley I know I am taking Christmas card kinds of images. Partly this is on purpose, I need to select something soon for our season`s greetings mail out and that need is driving my vision today, but really it is all perfection and the novelty draws me to record the obvious. How pretty the snow is with a few bright leaves sticking out. How warm is the fluffed-up red breast of a robin in a landscape of white and cool blue. I am like a tourist snapping away at the tried and true and unable to see any other reality that might co-exist with quaintly costumed locals and dramatic canyons at sunset.
                          
                          

A few days later the novelty has worn off and a cold rain is pelting the snowy ground. A new pattern of white and green covers the ground under the somber tones of the now snowless forest trees. These melt patterns are more interesting to me, there is the possibility now of experiencing a voice in this landscape that speaks of something beyond pretty, beyond eye candy. I dress for the rain, slide into my winter gumboots and tuck my camera inside my jacket to keep it dry. Feeling the cold and soaking rain personally is an important part of the process if I hope to get close to what is happening here, and I need to do that, to cross over into the other, if I am going to understand what is going on and record an authentic image. No more a tourist in a winter wonderland, I am back home again.

To keep my camera dry, I find myself testing first with my eyes, mentally framing and then referring it to my inner editor. I am not staring at the world through a viewfinder with the camera screwed to my face. I am part of the world and not separate from it and this makes an immense difference. When I whip the camera out and quickly make a photo I have already checked it out and know that it is right. Up on the ridge of a moss and snow patterned rock outcrop in the forest the land pulls me in and guides my hand.

This morning there are still patches of white, flashing their morse code of dots and dashes in the shady places and the pond has rain puddled on its icy surface. The trees sigh and sway in the south-easter and the grey clouds slide by close overhead. Yesterday morning was the last hurrah of this first snowfall with its bright sun and the mist rising off the cold ground. I was there too, recording that moment of everlasting transformation.

Foggy . Truth and beauty on the waterfront.

“Beauty is truth, truth, beauty,” -that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need know.                                                         
                 John Keats, 'Ode on a Grecian Urn.'

Down by the harbour the morning fog is still thick. As I drove to Ganges over the height of land I could see the grey blanket filling the harbour below and now I am walking down to the dock to check my sailboat. Photography in fog is almost too easy, everything is coated in glamour!

Some school girls ask if I will take their picture, so I do, and then look beyond them at the rocky bank, arbutus tree and the ocean sliding smoothly out into the white mist. Out there I can see a channel marker post and its reflection and, faintly, another. These are just the first two of several that mark the dredged channel which curves through the muddy shallows and out to the open harbour and the world beyond.

I give the girls their camera back, take a couple more with their permission on my own camera and then start thinking about the scene behind them. What will this picture be about if I do take a fog photo? Spooky/generic is just not enough today, but to imagine beyond that takes an effort.

I have been reaching for a different way of thinking about composition for some time now. The hallowed rules of composition that come slightly tattered and musty from the long tradition of European painting work less and less for me these days as I seek a more nuanced and dynamic way of recording the world. I raise the camera, place the rocks and tree in the right hand half of the frame and have nothing but foggy blankness and two whispy channel markers in the left hand section. I look carefully, make slight but seemingly important adjustments in the angles and proportions and click, I have the image in the camera. I know this is just right, that it is an excellent image by my developing aesthetic but also know that to others trained in a simplified photographic formula this may well seem rather weak or enclose too much white blankness or seem to be about nothing interesting at all. Just another fog photo.

What I think I have found is an image about a thought rather than a thing. - an idea, an epiphany of sorts. The eye slides off the softened forms of the tree and rocks and follows the channel markers out into the misty world beyond the harbour. This is an image that engages the viewer and leads him out of the frame into ‘wild surmise’, into the world beyond. Into another way of thought.

In a way, I have reached a long way back to those cave paintings of Paleolithic times and to the art of ‘primitive’ societies in our modern world that were made, not to be pretty, but to create a bridge with the eternal and the secrets of life. Beauty in those images was about truth. Truth and beauty, two words portraying the same thing, were to be apprehended by careful observation of deep relationships and the building of understanding, and not by a formulaic repetition of the status quo.

Finding a new path. 3. All paths lead home

At the head of the bay I stop to photograph the massive arbutus trees that arc over the salal covered bank and rocky shore. The sun`s rays are still with me, angling through the last of Autumn`s leaves and setting them alight. This is like some great cathedral with its high timbered roof, its leafy stained glass windows and the sea lapping at the shore which is the mystery itself ebbing and flowing with the moon.

I walk toward the farm buildings and my road home along the rough path at the foot of the high cliff I stood upon a couple of hours ago. The walk today has seemed like an eternity, a life time at least, moving so slowly through the new landscape of the upper forest, the low-tide waves of sandstone shores and the memory of the spirit from the coastline I have just left.

Finding a new path. 2 - the shore

From the forest`s shade I keep walking straight ahead down the sun`s path, step across drift logs at the high tide mark and then down across sandstone slopes to the shining sea. Although it is a calm and sunny day the water rolls and crashes almost continually because all the ferry traffic between southern Vancouver Island and the mainland of BC must go around this point trailing their wakes behind them. It is low tide and where I am standing will be well over my head in a few hours, but in the meantime what a great and unusual perspective for my camera and me! I walk up and down big sandstone waves, stepping carefully over slippery seaweedy and wet patches. The heavy rains of last week have started little seeps that drip from the thin grassy soils above and run in braided runnels to the sea. They shine like silver wires.

There are so many interesting images; the old weathered grey logs and stumps that were stranded here over fifty years ago in a mighty storm, the vivid green of seaweeds welded tightly to the crevices in the bank, the trunk of a mighty Garry oak that fell one calm night while I was park ranger here and the wrinkled faces of the waves in the rocks. This is like a miniature Grand Canyon and my eye and camera are helicopters zooming along looking for interesting shots.

I reach the southern point, am forced by the deep sharp edged side canyons to step back up onto ‘dry land’ for a while and then back down to the water`s edge I go. The steep slopes here are clothed in low scrubby oaks that cling to the rock faces, and eventually I run out of sea shore and must climb with their help back up to the familiar trail above. This is familiar all right and very beautiful with its arbutus, firs and oaks. Somewhere, deep in the forest and up those sandstone slopes above me, must be the trail I was following down to the camping area. If I had become lost up there and slowed down I would have followed the sun`s arc and ended up sliding down to here.

This is holy ground for me. I remember guiding a group of Japanese High school children along this way on a nature walk. I had already had to hold them back from rushing at deer with their cameras held out in front of them and now they were talking loudly among themselves oblivious to the world around them. It felt more than a little strange for me, a Canadian, to stop them at a cliff edge and ask for silence. “Listen to the waves, the wind in the trees, the ravens and the seagulls calling. This is the voice of this land. If you can hear it with respect, it will respect you. You and it are not unrelated.” Surely there must be some Zen or Shinto in this, some point that overlaps their own cultural ways so they can understand that this foreign shore is no less sacred and due some honour than their own holy mountains and groves.

Finding a new path .(1).

I have spent a lot of time this summer and fall dutifully doing what does not come easily to me, - maintaining: rebuilding and cleaning up around our property. It seems that the thirty-five year mark is the point that all things fall apart. Now that all is bright and shiny again and ready for the winter rains it is time to take myself for some exercise, some re-creation, along the shores and trails of our island. Fall is a lovely time of year as nature itself strips down for winter action. Change is in the air!

One day I stroll along the familiar trail at Indian Point, stopping to re-photograph trees and shorelines I have photographed before. A different mind set, different angle of sun and misty air produces all new and interesting images. The next day I drive further to Ruckle Park and walk down across the valley, past the farm buildings and stop before I take the normal right turn down to the bay. Above me looms a rocky cliff half hidden in the trees. In all the years I worked here as a Park Ranger I never climbed up there. The whole central rocky core of my usual coastline circuit is terra incognita to me. Time for a change!

I am walking on my own because Heather is away for a few days looking after grandchildren. No one knows my trip plans, and indeed I didn`t know I was leaving the beaten path until just now. I have no cell phone if I should need help. Do I dare or not? My life experience gives the answer: yes, but with caution! At first I take a faint trail that fades to a wisp of a deer track as it winds up the slope behind the cliffs. Big firs, grassy meadows. As I climb I am thinking that I will simply find the top of the massif and then follow the path back to the road again, Simple, safe.

This is exciting, discovering new landscape, and eventually I emerge onto a large grassy hilltop, the highest edge of which forms the steep cliffs that I have seen all these years from the valley below. I gaze my fill and then cannot resist looking to see if the sketchy trail picks up again on the far side of the meadow. I look carefully over my shoulder to set my return path in my memory, and wander off down the slope toward the morning sun that indicates south-south-east and gives a slowly shifting reference point for direction finding. Way down there I find some yellow survey tape fluttering from some branches and beyond, deeper in the tangle of vegetation, is another. A marked trail or a false lead?

There is a faint and intermittent trail beneath the tape markers that trends toward the sun and so off I go ducking under Garry oaks and fallen trees. What I worry a little about is breaking a leg or twisting an ankle and needing to drag myself out of here. It is not going to happen but it doesn`t hurt to proceed with caution. After half an hour of following the marker tapes through masses of vegetation and mossy rock outcrops I have dropped altitude and can occasionally glimpse the sea ahead. Soon I am stepping out from the dark forest into the grassy and familiar camping fields beside the sea.

My little adventure has worked out fine, but how long is it since I have stepped off the beaten track? Once, while we were living the sailing life, there was no track and life was all discovery. Time, high time, to sniff some of that heady aroma of freedom again.

How sweet the sound. Sailing Safari kati in Ganges Harbour

Easing down the narrow lane between boats tied two deep on the floats of the local dock takes some concentration this morning, but this is the forth time recently that Safari Kati has been out and all the old boating skills are seeping back into me. It is seven years since we sailed home in our big schooner Shiriri, five since she sold, and this new boat has been in a long refit to bring her back from an equally long period of neglect. She is not completely finished yet, but it is time to go sailing and get our confidence back!

Once out from behind the breakwater and into Ganges Harbour I raise the sails of our little 25` folkboat and hoist the outboard engine out of the water. Heather is aboard for the first time and is struggling a little with the tiller. Somehow it does not work quite the same as the wheel steering she was once so familiar with. The light northerly breeze wafts us slowly out of the harbour and I am glad for such a gentle re-introduction to boating for my wife. After arriving alive after a long difficult voyage home from Australia she has shown no interest in returning to the sea until now and I want this to be a happy experience for her. Going sailing alone is ok, but together is a whole lot nicer!

The wind dies behind an island, picks up a little in the outer reaches of the harbour and then drops again in the wind-shadow of Scott Point. Our outboard engine pushes us against the ebb current in Navy Channel, past Long Harbour and into a long bay on Prevost Island where we anchor and row ashore in the inflatable tender. We explore an old orchard, gather some apples and walk the trails until it is time to head home.

At anchor in Lyle Bay. Prevost Island

Once back in Ganges Harbour the afternoon sea breeze is kicking up whitecaps and Safari Kati heels a little more, fills her sails roundly and for the first time we hear her begin to speak. “Swoosh, aaaah”, she says as she rocks gently and presses the waves apart. Heather and I smile to hear this sweet voice of our new friend who has sat mute and abandoned for so many years.

All Hallowed Eve. The important festival at the beginning of winter

This autumn festival is the one time of year when we put aside our civilized veneer and step into an ancient European mind set. The night of witches and goblins and visits of the dead. Remarkable in our modern world, and yet obviously necessary or people would not go to such trouble. What was not so long ago simply a children`s dress-up evening is now full of adults in full Halloween garb. Scary, when you think about it, but perhaps as we all become more domesticated in our normal lives we need more extreme expressions of wildness and this old Celtic festival provides for that.

At the end of a dark rainy trail through the woods, lit fitfully by jack-o-lanterns and populated by ghouls and goblins that scream and grab at us as we pass, (with our little grandchildren in tow, this must be worth a few nightmares at least), is a bright bonfire with crowds of costumed lost souls drinking hot chocolate to fortify their ephemeral bodies against the Autumn chill. Leaves blow past with the raindrops, the flames flicker and sparks fly in the smoke.

In this little Vancouver Island community of Errington a lot of folks have worked hard to organize this yearly event and, judging from the many cars and people, many more have arrived to participate in it. This may be a clue to the popularity of this modern Halloween and of the original festivals held at the beginning of winter in Europe long ago. Before the darkness, cold, and snow arrives, before the ice demons stick their frozen fingers into us, our communities come together, gather around a big fire and prance around in the guise of those demons that inhabit hot places. One really good night of heat and light and banshee wails should last us until the midwinter festival when the nights will have already begun to shorten and the sun`s warmth is promised to return.

The gloaming.

 The nights are coming earlier and earlier each day now, the sun sets just around supper time and this will get earlier still as we climb closer to Christmas. Heather is away again looking after grandchildren and I realize that I am not tied to co-ordinate my activities with the usual supper hour. I grab my camera and head for Indian Point and a rendevous with sunset.

As I hike along the familiar coastline the shadows are already long with bright bursts of light angling through the tree tops to flash upon the water. The deep forest floor is dark too, speckled with tiny shafts of intensely bright light. The camera has a much more limited range than the human eye when it comes to contrast and this extreme light and dark is actually difficult to handle. I snap away anyway and keep walking quickly toward the still sunny shore facing the harbour. I have photographed so often along this trail that it is the light, at this moment so warm and generous, that interests me rather than the originality of the scene. It is light which reveals form and it is its subtle variations that open the mind.

  

 

The great arbutus’ burn brightly in the last rays of the setting sun as they lean over the reflective ocean surface and contrast with the blue shadows on the mountainous far shore of Fulford Harbour above which the sun is beginning to bounce from ridge to ridge. Time to turn around and follow the trail back through the woods before it is too dark to see. The sun touches the mountain`s rim at last and I click away as the light changes dramatically. The bright glare fades to a tiny pinprick before it vanishes and I catch its reflection, a string of jewels, on each smooth wave from the passing ferry.

I now begin  to photograph the gloaming. This is the moment I have been waiting for. The bright paint of warm light has disappeared from Indian Point and a much more nuanced afterglow now delineates the landscape. A man and his dog pass me on the darkening trail above the sea and I am quick enough to pan the camera along with their motion and catch an image on the fly. It will be streaked and blurry except for the dog, which is caught in a whirl of action beside his master.

 I stop along the way to record the beautiful light that changes and deepens minute by minute. Way out among the other Gulf Islands the sun is still shining but here in the shadow of the mountain we are sinking deeper into darkness.

The Old Masters. The transcendent moment.

It is Clara`s birthday, I have been taking photos of the celebration which overlaps with the Canadian Thanksgiving weekend. You know the kind required at this time; the new outfit, the opening of presents, the blowing out of the birthday cake candles, the host of family well wishers who share the responsibility for her development. I am happy to comply.

Later, as I do a sweep through the images that I have collected, I find one that seems to speak to a larger question about the arts. Clara is about to blow out her candles but one is smoking badly and Tim, her dad, reaches over and snuffs it out. It will be relit and the ceremony will continue, but the moment of surprise that I have captured, the expression, the body language, while not up to old masters standards, sets me to thinking about all those paintings that grace the walls of museums and are our legacy from the creative people of the past.

What my image has in common with the great ones, the Caravaggios and Rembrandts, is the dramatic moment; the point of change when something unexpected steps into her life. Those great artists have captured that point of revelation in a much more profound way and have expressed it in paint or stone. An amazing leap of understanding for human beings to make. Yesterday there was an overlap of sorts when I listened on the radio to the creation of another saint by the Roman Catholic Church. The man in question, Brother Andre, had spent his life as a simple usher in a large church in eastern Canada and over a lifetime had developed a reputation for miraculously healing the sick and also for giving people the grace to accept what could not be cured. He incorporated the transcendent which, like lightening, passed through him into those that suffered. And the artists who wrought those images that touch us today long after their own lifetimes, what was it that worked in their lives? How was it that, despite often personally difficult and less that stellar personal lives, they were able to achieve such imagery, the tipping point in people`s lives?

As I write this, the first rays of the sun are picking out the tops of the trees in gold, the air is glowing, laden with autumnal mist. Nature itself is revealing a transcendent moment in the transition from night to day. Dawn is a normal morning phenomenon, but this moment is highlighted today and I feel dawn as a special revelation, I grasp its splendor! A Zen moment, you might say. Those artists, those saints, they got that to a much greater degree and the trajectory of their lives changed and took them into a new way of seeing and expressing . They themselves became the light and we are left with the brightness of their passage.

‘What the world needs now....’

In a discussion the other day with someone very concerned about humanity`s headlong plunge into disaster, -ecologically speaking -, the man opposite me was musing about how to use the psychological mind-bending techniques of the advertising industry ( and of our governments) to correct our course before it is too late. On the face of it, a logical approach to an important problem. Along the lines of fighting fire with fire and all those ‘self evident’ truths, means and solutions.

I found myself struggling to define the error contained in this concept. Confronted with the problem and the urgent need, it was hard not to agree. That is how we have always dealt with things after all. I reached for the analogy of pre-war Germany and the emergence of the Nazi propaganda machine. We think now, rightly, of its leaders as evil beings subverting the thoughts of their people and building a vast, destructive juggernaut on the foundation of a set of nasty ideals. All true, but within the thought structure of the people involved I know most must have been acting for altruistic motives; they believed their own propaganda, were in love with ideals like the purity of the people, the manifest destiny to have more ‘living space’, to take their place as a world power. Perhaps they also dreamed of some kind of world government that could force the folk onto their (ideal) track. Being good pragmatists, once the ideal was formulated, the means to achieve it was flexible. The goal was the thing, not how you got there. The more you fervently believed, the more horrible the means you could use, - war, murder, genocide, the subversion through propaganda and governance of your own people.

Having always thought of myself as a pragmatist ( the usual default North American philosophy) it came as a surprise for me to be saying that the means is important, in fact more important than an end goal. Attractive as finding a psychological tool and altering the way people think about their world may be, it is the tool which is suspect, just as it was in Germany or in many nations today. Good results do not come out of bad action, never did. It is ourselves who are the ‘enemy’, if we think that using the tools of the competition is the way to go. The world may well ‘go to hell in a hand basket’, but let us at least begin to act from day to day as if good can only come from good, - that love is the only way, and that the way is important, not a goal.

Afterward.

Something has been bothering me about my own argument. If, having tried appeasement with Hitler, the liberal democracies had continued a pacifist stance and not rearmed and fought and eventually won, then where would we be today? Where does ‘love is the only way’ meet another really destructive way? When do we say ‘no passera’, and pick up the same weapons as the foe and beat him at it?

There is no doubt that wars, either tribal conflicts or world wars wreck havoc on societies not only during the actual conflict phase but for many, many years after; within succeeding generations of families whose members participated and were brutalized, or within societal attitudes that were carried forward into the future. Although we may not recognize it, much of our problematical attitudes towards the earth, seeing it as a commodity to be ripped up by our muscular technology, has the last century of warfare behind it. But I still think that, given all the difficulties, following a way of harmony is the final cure for conflict, though it may take more generations than we really have time for to accomplish it.

Forget about achieving the goal and live it in our own lives right now.

Walking with granddaddy.

Let the music begin!

I has rained heavily all night long, - the steady beat of the drum on our metal roof, but this morning the grey clouds are all wrung out, the seasonal stream and waterfall are speaking again after their long summer`s silence and little two year old Clara is in need of some outside activity. Her Granddaddy too, so out we go into the soggy world. She is dressed for the occasion; a shiny, red, hooded coat, rain pants and rubber boots. Off we go down the trail that parallels the stream, passes through the woods and curves back beside the stream again towards the house. For her short legs this must seem a grand adventure in an enormous land of moss covered mountains and towering trees.

As we wander slowly along, my mind wants to muse among thoughts about my latest art project, but Clara`s total absorption in the present moment pulls me back. I am taking her for some much needed exercise in nature and she, by her very nature, is pulling me back into this vital and drippy world. On the last stretch back up the grassy trail though, she is lagging behind. I stop and smile back to her and get a grin in return. She is not lagging because she is tired, or feeling left behind, or somewhat lost. What is it?

I realize that it is very quiet, with no distant aircraft or all the other background noise that we normally accept as silence in the country. Just the gentle murmur of the steam and... ah, the sound of her plastic raingear swishing as she walks. She herself is now off in her own personal world, listening to her own walking musical accompaniment!

“Tears, idle tears*

It had been a typical Fall morning, the fog slowly thinning to mist, the trees and buildings steaming as the sun burned through to bring a blue sky and a fresh breeze. The car window I was working beside was coated with tiny drops of moisture and it was a simple, mindless thing to stick out my finger and begin to draw a round face. As I drew in the little comma-like eyes the drops formed drips that ran down the window. Quickly I drew, not a happy face but a down-turned mouth to match the tears. Then I ran for my camera and recorded this transient image.

So transient, like the thought that drifted up from my unconscious and united with the developing face on the glass. My usual mind begins to doodle a happy face, and my deeper self, working with the image, expresses tears.

*Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,
Tears from the depth of some divine despair
Rise in the heart, and gather in the eyes,
In looking on the happy Autumn fields,
And thinking of the days that are no more.
from‘Tears, idle Tears’ by Tennyson.

The title for this piece came to me immediately, even though it is by a Victorian poet and not a well known poem of his either. It is such a dramatic way of expressing regrets for what might have been. How often what I create has a feeling from music or poetry that is its twin in another medium. All of us creators are drawing from the same well.

Yes, those ‘days that are no more’ are surely behind me, but I are not dead yet and much remains to venture. Nostalgia, the looking back on one`s life, reminds me of the old West Coast method of navigating on foggy days. On setting out from land to cross a strait, a long line would be trailed behind the canoe. The crew could not see the destination ahead but by constantly lining up the canoe with the trailing cord behind and keeping the angle constant between cord and the dominant wave pattern they could maintain a course. So, while we cannot know our future, we do know our past, and a careful understanding of that is the best way of finding the path ahead. We do need to cast off and keep moving because we get, not what we deserve, but what we risk, what we dare, but neither should we never look back. Tennyson finds the mood in ‘Ulysses’ that is the next stage to the backward glance to the past, a resolve to keep developing, ‘to strive, to find, and not to yield’.

Though much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to find, and not to yield.
from‘Ulysses’ by Tennyson.

WOOD WAR II. The beach landings were hotly contested.

Holocaust memorial. Ash, fire and wire.

I have been cleaning up around my workshop, now that it has a new metal roof and has been rebuilt inside and out. Thirty years of ‘may be useful’ bits of wood, full of nails and half rotten, have been going up in smoke over several days and now the last of it, a large pile of red hot coals, breathes orange flame in the gathering darkness. I reach for my camera and begin to create a series of images. I have no set purpose at this point, just collecting, with my thinking mind held in neutral.

I try different angles, swirl the camera around, take low and high angle shots and then on a whim roll a coil of old fencing wire against the flames and photograph through that. I move on to some interesting shots of old crockery, semi-immersed in the coals. Then I do a counter-intuitive thing and turn on the flash. All the bright orange light of the glowing coals is extinguished. Grey ash and charcoal, fissured by bright gouts of flame create a very different mood. When I photograph through the fencing wire this time, I have found a powerful image. Not a beautiful image, it reminds me of the Jan Martel book, ‘beatrice and virgil’ that I have just finished reading. His book is a very creative take on the Holocaust that I made the mistake of finishing just before falling asleep, or in that case, not falling asleep. I recognize my ash, fire and wire image to be existing in that same mind space, creating yet another form of Holocaust memorial.

I am still making photos of beautiful things these days, but when this kind of image arrives I am very pleased. It means that I am expanding my range of expression beyond the beautiful and into more difficult subject matter. My mind is touching things way down below somewhere, and translating them into more challenging imagery.

Spirit Dancing

Cast shadows of a maple branch and its myriad of leaves against a red barn door. A few from the still green tree hover above. The red/green colour contrast sets the green leaves and their shadowy relatives, projected and made visible by the last rays of the evening sun, to dancing. If I turn my mind just so, I can see that this is a companion piece to my image of wire, ash and flame.

All those millions of souls who went up in the purifying flames of the concentration camps are still with us, to be glimpsed in a certain cast of light, their spirits dancing joyously with the living.

Can you imagine. On the occasion of John Lennon`s 70th birthday

Can you imagine squatting down beside a tidal pool, your eyes focusing through the film of reflected sky and becoming absorbed in the beauty and minutia of the seaweedy world of crabs, periwinkles and bull heads. The rocky shoreline, the beat of the surf, fades from your awareness just as has the reflection of the firmament overhead.

Do you hear a loud crash of a wave, feel suddenly the spray of the wave that reaches far up the shore and invades this perfect little world? Look up! There lies the great ocean, glinting in the sunlight and stretching out to the curve of the horizon.

True Love. 'As You Wish!'

‘As you wish’*
 from ‘The Princess Bride’

In the comments after ‘Red Rose’ was published on Dragongate I was asked if I thought that ‘True Love’ was a concept that resonated in the modern world. A big question, and I could only answer from my own perspective, that it is important within my own life, and that the ability to love profoundly is an important part of what makes us human. If many around me have a more jaded and ‘realistic’ view of the world and human relationships, then perhaps they are missing out on something useful.

When Jung was asked if he believed that God existed he replied in a functional way. “ If believing makes sense of your life, gives it meaning, then why wouldn`t you?” Similarly, if allowing a feeling to fill me to the brim, to colour my way of being in the world, and if that allows me to function well from day to day and is a big driver behind my creativity, then why would I put it aside and choose a more limited ‘realistic’ view of human relationships? ‘True Love’ is part of a constellation of attitudes that enrich my life.

Coming for a British family who emigrated to Canada when I was four, right after the Second World War, I would guess that feeling and expressing one`s emotions was not something that was fully developed, suitable for Europeans of the more excitable kinds perhaps, but cool, calm and collected was more our style. Emotion was there below the surface, but given little space to express itself and develop a full range in our everyday lives. My life seems to have been a game of catch up ever since.

Now that I am working with art full time it has become critical that I develop my feelings and give them space to rattle around in my conscious self. Art is expression, and one needs a well developed inner life if what one expresses is to be anything more than simple and banal. I read a lot of poetry these days, listen intently to classical music and observe the world around me with sharp eyes; a catch-up, self taught course in the refinements of artistic expression.

Perhaps age naturally turns one into a ‘soppy old fool’ towards the end. If so, then I will surf on that wave crest too and ride it as far as it can roll. ‘April love’ may well be for the very young, as Pat Boon sang, but ‘True love’ is deeper, stronger and rolls on forever and forever!


* In the ‘Princess Bride,’ whenever Wesley said, “As you wish.” he was really saying, “I love you!” and that, as all will agree who have seen this movie, was ‘TRUE LOVE!’

A Red Red Rose.

A Red, Red Rose

My love is like a red, red rose,

That`s newly sprung in June:
My love is like the melody
That`s sweetly played in tune.


So fair art thou my bonnie lass,
So deep in love am I;
And I will love thee still my dear,
Till a` the seas gang dry.


Till a` the seas gang dry, my dear,
And the rocks melt wi` the sun:
And I will love thee still, my dear,

While the sands o` life shall run.

 And fair thee weel, my only love!

And fair thee weel a while!
And I will come again my love,
Tho` it were ten thousand mile!


Robert Burns ( 1759 - 1796 )


I must have glanced at and then passed over this old poem in a college anthology yesterday, because at one in the morning I was awake with the emotion of it running round and around in my mind. I have never been any good at memorizing but I can remember the feeling of a poem very well. Now I am digging potatoes on a sunny Fall morning and multitasking by going over it again. Anything that insistent must be given some conscious thinking time.

Over this morning`s coffee I reread the poem carefully, - pulling it apart into its expressive elements. The two comparisons, a red rose and a melody. The declaration of love until the end of time; `til the rocks melt in the sun, `til all the seas run dry, while the sands of time shall run. The final promise of return, of constancy, though it were ten thousand miles. Very expressive stuff, but also very familiar and, like an old tune, often difficult to get past the by-now hackneyed expressions.

Hackneyed now perhaps, but the reason it is in the anthology is because at the time it was a revolutionary piece of writing and pointed to the future; the French Revolution, the Romantic poets that were to follow and how we understand the world and our place in it today. Here is an educated commoner ( unusual, except in Scotland, at the time) who writes to his love, not by dwelling on the quality and brilliance of his feelings but on eternity in a concrete, factual way. His love is not some court beauty, but the girl down the road. This is the beginning of the age of the common man.

So, why on this bright morning am I giving it a fresh pass through? The important part of this poem does not just dwell in words or ideas but in the reader`s own emotions as was Burns` intention. ‘And fair thee weel, my only love’ is written to a particular person and meant to dwell in her heart forever. It was never designed to have a shelf life of two hundred years, but even given the separation between his time and mine, even given the familiarity of ‘My love is like a red, red rose’, I am very moved.

That is the wonderful thing about the arts, they do not simply appeal to the intellect, but like an arrow, pierce directly to the heart. This poem is the epitome of that process. I stand with my shovel amid the growing pile of potatoes, perhaps in the same pose as farmer Burns himself took while dreaming up this poem for his girl, and feel that sweet emotion as though it comes, fresh minted, from within my own heart.

The Wild (2). Skid row.

A red brick storefront glows in the morning sunlight. Its street number is 1910 and that could be its building date as well. A tattoo salon now, it must have had a long succession of occupants as this part of town, once the bustling waterfront that equipped the miners for the Klondike Goldrush, skidded by slow degrees to its present and pleasant state. That is what I notice right off, this is ‘ the other side of the tracks,’ but if one does not see it as such, does not pre- judge it to fit the stereotype, then it is simply a place basking in the same sunlight as the rest of Victoria. The camera is teaching me an important lesson, to see without personal filters on.

Just down the street is ‘Opus’ - the art supply store that I am headed for, and it seems appropriate

somehow that creativity and decay should rub shoulders here. The essence of creative thought lies in working with disparate elements, in not prejudging, in having no preset agenda. The kind of process that drives more rationally minded people crazy. But then that organizing cast of thought has written this part of town off long ago and prefers to dwell on the ‘social problems’ and the need for ‘renewal’. This is really just a part of town, like a part of the human body that has an important function but is screened from view and not talked about in polite society, - is often a curse word.

As I walk down the lower part of Johnson street I come across a store dummy on the sidewalk. Headless and sexless, dressed in a bright red shirt it calls out to be photographed. That is always the challenge in art, to find the one element in a vast collection of things that will speak for the whole, and here is one possibility. Red is the dominant colour in my photo, the shirt, the signs, the banners, and at first glance it speaks of happy things. But red is fire and blood also, and this upward shot has a hectic quality that reminds me of Las Vegas, all glitz above and snarls and fangs just below the surface. The thing is, this is not just skid row I am imaging here, but our society of which this is an organic part.

The Wild.(1). Two realities.

A parking lot in Victoria is backed by the concrete-block side of a building and on the wall is painted a mural of a forest river. Fishing in its swirling water are bears that pause momentarily to look out into the city-scape that backs their reality. All rather mind bending once you really look at what is going on - this sandwiching of two disparate realities.

Today I am involved in using my camera to make a link with reality, looking through the lens, not for beauty and harmony, but for the authentic voice of this place down by the waterfront. It is difficult to break the habit of natural landscape photography, but this wall and all these cars is the perfect starting point.

The question that it presents so clearly is just what I need, - which is the wild? The scene by the river, or the streets, buildings and vehicles? For this day I will see these seedy streets as wild territory and photograph them as such.

Who knows, perhaps someday in the future all the bear`s real natural habitat will be paved over, or then again, perhaps there will be bears fishing for spawning salmon by this shore, backed by a forest growing on mounds of crumbled brick and concrete. Now there`s a cheerful thought!

Gran`daddy

Little Clara is going through a phase, she is fixated on her two grandfathers. Now, flattering though this is, I know it will be something else next week, - it is a developmental thing after all. But is does remind me that all the people in a child`s life are part of her developing world view and that my contribution had better be a thoughtful one!

As my own children reached maturity I learned to let go and watch them fly on their own. Now as a grandparent I am learning to re-engage in a new role for my children and their children. It is all happening and I am learning by feel, allowing myself be directed by the daily changes. A delicate business, and these moments are more important than my art, my past accomplishments, or my latest design and building project. More important than myself. That repeating lesson down through the years, - that who I am is best defined by who I care for.

A journey into colour as expression.

 I recently made an image of some weedy plants growing against a red painted wooden fence down by the docks in Fulford Harbour. White trumpet blossoms, green vines and red fence. Not much really, except for me it was evidence of my recent interest in colour relationships.

Ever since my artwork last winter doing studies of the painters Cezanne and Gauguin I have been seeing the world through their eyes, their sense of colour and form, and recently I rediscovered a set of colour cards I had bought in art school, - tints and shades of all colours. Being partially colour blind, I had not found much use for them, preferring then to play to my strengths in graphic black and white. Time now to work with the increased colour sense I have been experiencing lately and the emotional impact that is possible when colour is used with intent.

I reread Johannas Itten`s book, ‘The Elements of Colour’, on his studies in colour theory and began to place blossoms against different coloured backgrounds. Orange/red flower backed by a cool blue/green, pink blossom upon a matching pink, green leaf on a yellow ocher. What I noticed was that each photo carried its own emotion in its colour relationships that had little to do with the subject itself.

Now, when I see white sails against blue sky I actually see that they too are blue, reverberating in the intense blueness of the air. Yellow flowers at dusk are shades already, have lost the warm cast of sunset, and are sliding into the blue of the night. And what I cannot report as true colour in a scientific way I am free to create in an intimate personal expression of what I see regardless of what more colour-sighted might think. I am lucky after all not to be constrained by ‘reality’, that agreed upon understanding of what the world is like, and to be free to play with colour relationships as a musician must play with sound.