Watercolour and crayon
©2016 Charlene Brown
The big ferries (2000 passengers and crew,
400 cars) that run regularly between Vancouver Island and the mainland barely
slow down as they go by each other in Active Pass between Galiano and Mayne Island.
Thus, while most of us who live on Vancouver Island have sailed by Mayne dozens
of times, a surprising number of us have never actually been there.
One of the fundraising
projects of a group I belong to, the Associates of the Art Gallery of Greater
Victoria, is to organize tours of artists’ studios on Vancouver Island and the
Gulf Islands. For (quite) a few dollars more than we have to pay for lunches, a
chartered bus and ferries, we take the participants round to the often
idyllically-located studios which may be deep in the forest, on a cliff
overlooking the ocean, or in vineyards and orchards. A couple of weeks ago, we toured Mayne, many of us for the first time, met some wonderfully creative people, all very involved in
the activities of the close-knit artistic community there.
