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Seoul
Watercolour and crayon
©2013 Charlene Brown
I am on the art tours committee, a volunteer fundraising group at the Art Gallery of
Greater Victoria, planning and organizing day-trips
up-island or to Vancouver, trips of four or five days duration further afield to, say,
Alberta or Ontario, and really big tours every year or two to such places as the
Hermitage in St. Petersburg or Cambodia, Laos, and Viet Nam in S.E. Asia.
This year’s really big one, scheduled for November, was to
go to South Korea and Japan, lead by
the Gallery’s Curator of Asian Arts, Barry Till. Then North Korea found its way into the
headlines every day for about three weeks, and some of the people who had said
they were interested in participating started stalling or even backing out. So about a week ago we pulled the plug on the
South Korean portion of the tour.
At
approximately the same minute, North
Korea disappeared from the news… Purely coincidence, of course, but I like to
think we’ve contributed our bit to reducing tension in the world.
I’m disappointed we’ve had to make this decision (I
think I’m the only one) as I was planning to join the tour, and I’d done some Google
Image research on the painting possibilities in South Korea – mostly the
temples, museums and gardens we were going to visit, but including a few cityscapes
as well. This painting of Seoul is a compilation of a few of them.
