... the views from the plane, leaving Vancouver, are spectacular.
Islands appear, and then the plane turns and you can see the entire city -
Eight hours (and not much sleep) later, dawn -
The plane descends, turns - hello England -
Back to "real life".
Taking the ferry to Vancouver Island is comparable to crossing the English channel, but without the need for a passport.
And the scenery is ... much more scenic.
Various islands get in the way.
Not to mention atmospheric effects.
"Western Red Cedar" impressed me - and made me think of how similar the linocut lines in the background are to quilting lines. See the whole image here, amid the gallery's excellent documentation. 
The Emily Carr exhibition at the gallery runs till 2013. As I'm sorting the Schleicher family photos, it was interesting to find that Emily had an artist friend named Edythe Hembroff-Schleicher. Edythe was Emily's only sketching partner, wrote two books about her (M.E. A Portrait of Emily Carr (Toronto: Clark Irwin, 1969) and Emily Carr The Untold Story (Hancock Publishers, 1978)). Along with Mark Tobey and Lawren Harris, Edythe promoted Emily's work and rediscovery in the late 1920s and 1930s. 
I couldn't resist rearranging the leaves that had fallen onto the seating in Victoria art gallery's Japanese garden.
Inside the gallery, one display is of miniature objects from China and Japan - snuff bottles and their shadows - 
and some slightly sinister netsuke -
These folders (from the 1960s and 1950s) certainly brought back memories. Our camera then was a simple black box, a Kodak Baby Brownie like this one -
Among the envelopes were negatives, including some large ones from the mid-50s of photos I'd not seen before - the family smartly dressed, as you did back then, for a Sunday drive perhaps -
Many levels here - not only the surface of the water, of the rock, and of the leaves, but the intersection of that surface, and some things completely submerged, yet almost visible. Plus the action of sinking leaves and the colliding ripples, as well as the flowing water. The dimension of change - the flowing water again, the erosion it carries out (wearing down of banks, of rocks), and the rotting of leaves - as well as the fact that changing season has sent the leaves into the water in the first place.
Hoping to finish (and absorb) "The Gift of Thanks", started on my last visit. Its subtitle: The roots, persistence, and paradoxical meanings of a social ritual.
And I get to see the golden sunsets through the trees -
With the recent good weather, the mornings have been glorious.
Mist lifting away from the mountains, that sort of thing -
By a wonderful coincidence, Port Coquitlam, the town just across the river from Pitt Meadows, had two new exhibitions, one by the BC/Yukon area of SDA (Surface Design Organisation). I went along to the preview and met up with CQ member Catherine Nicholls, one of the organisers of this show.
It has evolved from a parlour game called "Consequences", and was played by the Surrealists - capturing spontaneous, irrational words and images. The exercise "revels in the idea of chance and results in fantastic bodily forms" - it's "still pertinent to today's obsessions with the body - as sexual object, as metaphor, and as the site of mortality and political contestation."
The 39 works on show used all manner of textile and paper-based surface design techniques. Among the 3D works was one that came all the way from Whitehorse, Yukon (about 2700 km) -
I loved the subtle colours of this hooked visage -
To make each figure, people worked in teams and agreed on (or drew straws for) who would do which section. Some teams made three sections each, then got together and decided which would go where - and which of the results would be entered in the show.
One team decided on an aquatic theme, and divided up the piece of background fabric -
The team who made the piece on the left worked in a way that's traditional to the paper version of the game, folding over their section and covering it before handing it on for the next section to be added -
In a workshop room, visitors were invited to participate, using images from pages torn out of magazines -
Of course I had to have a go; my creature ended up with a big nose and long bare legs, and a handbag as a blouse -
These had been prepared earlier -
The works in the exhibition by Salmon Arm artist Wendy Browne were difficult to photograph without reflections - they were "transformed from snips, rips and slices of paper" -
When we played Exquisite Corpses at a family gathering recently, we used four sections - head, neck to waist, waist to knees, and lower legs and feet -
A fun game - even for the "but I can't draw!" people.
