The Banff of Dorian Gray

Altered panorama

Watercolour and crayon

©2016 Charlene Brown

Like the Portrait of Dorian Gray, this painting has changed drastically from previous paintings (by which I mean my previous paintings ) of the same subject, while the subject itself has remained unchanged over the years.

Unlike Dorian Gray himself, however, the ‘real’ panorama of Banff is in fact the real thing. Since the 1980s when development in Banff National Park was capped to control the environmental footprint of the town, the appearance of this part of the Bow Valley has hardly changed. The whole place is still just about perfect.

Great design in Winnipeg

Canadian Museum of Human Rights / Provencher Bridge

Watercolour, CP and crayon

Charlene Brown

I love the design of this museum.  It opened in 2014 to much acclaim… and protests from groups – the Métis, for example – who believe that Canada’s actual human rights record isn’t nearly as grand as the building. Prime Minister Trudeau donated a sketch he had made of the museum to a charity auction last week, and it fetched over $25,000!  A friend in my Wednesday morning painting group said he’d pay at least that for this one… as soon as I become Prime Minister.

When I started drawing this Google Streetview, I thought the cables on the left were holding up the bridge the camera was on, but when I crossed the road and had a closer look, I discovered they were attached to a separate side-spar cable-stayed pedestrian bridge. This part of the bridge, the Esplanade Riel, was named after Louis Riel, a Métis who was hanged for treason in 1885.

Elegant Clean Energy Haiku XII: Quantum Leap Haiku Illustration – Plan C (cont.)

Lake Ashi

Watercolour, crayon and Photoshop™

©2016 Charlene Brown

thunder and lightning

titanium dioxide

replicate larger

This haiga illustration is a posterized version of the sketch I wrote about on December 23.

Elegant Clean Energy Haiku XI: Quantum Leap Haiku Illustration – Plan C (cont.)

Hakone Caldera

Watercolour, crayon and Photoshop™

©2016 Charlene Brown

disruptive new stuff

ecological footprint

off on a tangent

This haiga illustration is a posterized version of one of the sketches I wrote about on December 26. 

Elegant Clean Energy Haiku X: Quantum Leap Haiku Illustration – Plan C (cont.)

Switchback 26

Watercolour, crayon and Photoshop™

©2016 Charlene Brown

carbon tax is good

absurdist leaps of logic

serendipity

When I wrote about innovation that might be inspired by reading some computer-generated clean energy haiku, I meant not only revolutionary new discoveries and inventions, but refinements to existing technology and processes that will be necessary to tide us over the many years that it will take to achieve the carbon-neutral civilization we need.

The computer that will be generating the clean energy haiku may include economic concepts like carbon tax, as in this example, in its repertoire.  But it will never suggest ‘cap + trade’ (aka ‘smoke + mirrors’).

This haiga illustration is a posterized version of the sketch I wrote about on December 20. 

Elegant Clean Energy Haiku IX: Quantum Leap Haiku Illustration – Plan C

Shirakawa

Watercolour, crayon and Photoshop™

©2016 Charlene Brown

piezovoltaics

self-sustained arcology

absorb CO₂

I have great faith that technological solutions to our climate change problems will be found in plenty of time to prevent disaster – and high hopes that a tangential idea (such as might occur when reading some computer-generated clean energy haiku) will inspire such a technological innovation.

Plan C is another approach to producing a 17-shape haiku illustration or haiga – posterizing watercolour sketches from the Japan sketchbook I posted last year.  The posterizing process eliminates much of the detail and reduces the number of colours in a picture.

This haiga illustration is a posterized version of one of the sketches I wrote about on December 27.

I will post three more examples of haiku and haiga over the next few days.

Virtual Paintout in Majorca

Puerto de Valldemossa

Watercolour, crayon and gouache

©2016 Charlene Brown

The Virtual Paintout is in Majorca this month. I’ve never been to Majorca, but if I ever go there and find my way to this part of it, I’ll definitely spend some time in the café in the centre of the picture… Surprisingly enough, in the Google Streetview I used, there was hardly anybody sitting there (it must have been really early in the morning or something) so I ‘implied’ a few more with crayons,.

The jacarandas came from a street in Palma, about 16 kilometres south of here, another pretty Streetview I had considered painting.