Energy Storage Haiku

TransCanada Overpass

A series of overpasses has been built to get wildlife safely across the TransCanada Highway in Banff National Park.

Unlike some of the paintings that I have ‘randomly’ selected as haiga backgrounds for the computer-generated haiku, these structures have very little to do with energy storage, other than to look very cold in mid-winter just after sunset.

By  way of explaining the haiku… An air source heat pump is a system which transfers heat from outside to inside a building, based on the principal that air at any temperature above absolute zero contains some energy, and involving a  compressor and a condenser to absorb and then  release heat. On-going research aims to find an efficient combination of air source heat pumps and salt-solution energy storage to smooth out the variable efficiency of the heat pump, a problem shared by all weather dependent, non-combustion energy sources.

History of Design I

A few years ago I put together a cross-cultural 'History of Design' timeline covering art and architecture from prehistoric times to the beginning of the twenty-first century. To do this, I used either facts I'd learned while visiting archaeological sites or things I'd looked up when I was writing blog posts about them. I plan to link this ‘History of Design’ table to the above time capsules.

This page from the History of Design shows where the first of the cross-cultural ‘time capsules’ I compiled last year fits into the big picture. Last July I wrote about ‘What the Third millennium BCE looked like around the world.’  (Actually the paintings are more likely to show what the third millennium BCE sites highlighted in the table look like now.)

Commemoration of a generation

Our family’s memorial bench

Watercolour

©2019 Charlene Brown

Looking out over one of the ponds at the top of Banff Ave is a bench commemorating the arrival of my grandparents in Banff in 1904. 

When my daughter and I were in Banff last September, it was the first time we’d seen it covered in snow – the benches are taken away and stored each winter.  The ponds are drained too, so we were very lucky to find everything looking so picturesque.

Here’s a close-up of the plaque on the back of the bench.

Christmas in Mexico

Plaza Mijares in San José del Cabo

Watercolour and marker

©2019 Charlene Brown

One of my favourite things about our Christmas trip to Mexico was the Art Walk in San José del Cabo. The event runs every Thursday evening from November to June in this resort city on the southern tip of the Baja California peninsula. 

The area surrounding the Plaza Mijares is closed to traffic from 5 to 7 pm, and the many galleries and cafes expand into the streets. The galleries offer a wonderful variety of works from traditional silver jewelry with fire opals, to Talavra pottery, colourful weaving, paintings  and Huichol art  ranging from religious traditional themes to the most recent innovations in folk art. 

And of course, brilliant  Christmas decorations are everywhere. Who knew that Mexican Nativity scenes often feature a small herd of deer? 

This is the 10th Anniversary of 1150 Words by Charlene Brown

Nile at Aswan

watercolour
©2008 Charlene Brown

I started this blog exactly 10 years ago on 2 January 2009, posting this painting of the Nile River at Aswan, as viewed from the roof of our hotel during a UVic travel study program in Egypt.

The rest of this post is a review of progress on various blog-to-book projects during 2018 and my plans for these projects in 2019:

Clean energy haiku/haiga project:  I have compiled 50 illustrated poems using ‘found’ haiku and computer-stylized versions of landscape paintings from all the provinces and territories of Canada into a first draft of a book, ‘Inventing the Future with Clean Energy Haiku.' I hope to have this ready for on-line publication and availability on Amazon later this year. 

I had hoped to complete a first draft of an auto-fictional journal, ‘What Could Possibly Go Wrong?’ about the career planning and launching years in the lives of girls in six generations of my family.  I do have what could be called a draft of the first four chapters (beginning in 1898, 1925, 1958 and 1987) but so far, the final chapters (beginning in 2017 and 2042) are still pretty much collections of random thoughts – and speculation. Maybe I'll get enough written that I'll be able to call the whole thing a first draft this year.

I compiled 24 archaeology-related paintings into six cross-cultural ‘time capsules’ representing the following time periods:

Third millennium BCE 

Third century BCE 

Eighth century CE 

Early second millennium CE 
Fourteenth century CE 
Late second millennium CE 

A few years ago I put together a cross-cultural 'History of Design' timeline covering art and architecture from prehistoric times to the beginning of the twenty-first century. To do this, I used either facts I'd learned while visiting archaeological sites or things I'd looked up when I was writing blog posts about them. I plan to link this ‘History of Design’ table to the above time capsules.