Missing from 1991

Three Sisters

Watercolour and Photoshop™

©2013 Charlene Brown

This computer montage started out as two paintings (shown below) that I painted in 1991 at a workshop at Kananaskis just east of Banff National Park, led by California artist, Barbara Nechis.  

Until now it existed only on my computer – but soon it will appear in my compilation of annual letters.

Read the last sentence of this post

Cover of my new book

Adobe InDesign™ document

©2019 Charlene Brown

The haiku book I’ve been working on, and blogging about since 2015, has just been published.  

Inventing the Future is available on Amazon. This link will remain available in the right hand column of my blog above my other Amazon links.

According to Seth Godin, “The most common way to deal with the future is to try to predict it. To be in the right place at the right time with the right skills or investments.  A far more successful and reliable approach is to invent the future. Not all of it, just a little part. But enough to make a difference.”

I don’t believe that the future is nearly as dire as the UN Climate Panel has predicted. The main reason for my optimism is that I believe we are finally becoming aware that we must change our behavior. We know that we must transition away from our heavy dependence on fossil fuels for transportation and energy production, and we must accomplish a significant portion of this transition soon.

The objective of this book of haiku is to invent (or at least point the way to) a better future. We are already locked in to decades of self-perpetuating climate change – but it won’t become irreversibly catastrophic if we act now.

Missing from 1990

Neuchatel

Watercolour and Photoshop™

©1990 Charlene Brown

This was painted following a visit to our daughter at her school in Switzerland.  I’ve since decided the original was kind of pale, so I’ve bumped up the colours in Photoshop and, while I was at it, changed the proportions – compared to photos of the coffee shop on the Neuchatel lakefront, for example, the painting had everything stretched vertically.

The school in Switzerland was mentioned in my 1990 Christmas letter, but I didn’t think of including this painting until I started my current project to consolidate all the annual letters beginning that year.

The other missing 1998 paintings

Most of the Christmas letters I wrote had lots of photos, but hardly any had paintings. When I get all the ‘missing’ images lined up, I will add them to the letters that mention the adventures they illustrate, and then compile all the letters since I started writing them in 1990.
Here are a couple of the paintings I mentioned in my last blog post.  They will be added, along with the painting of Kathmandu, to the Christmas letter I wrote in 1998.  The bilingual Pepsi truck was drawn by our grandson, and the painting of Rawson Lake in Kananaskis Country is one of mine.

Missing from 1998

Kathmandu

Watercolour and Photoshop™

Charlene Brown

A couple of paintings by our grandson, who was six when they visited us in Dubai in February 1998, and a painting I did in Alberta that summer will eventually make their way into that year’s Christmas letter. 

However, I couldn’t find any of the paintings I did on a trip to Nepal in March 1998.  So I painted this watercolour sketch. As you may have guessed, it has been photoshopped within an inch of its life, mainly using a process called posterization. This involves converting the original continuous gradation of colour to eight distinct tones, with abrupt changes from one to another. This served to give some solidity to the original overly-loose painting, but lost the effect of the multi-coloured prayer flags, as well as local and Tibetan textiles and costumes – and of course the very colourful tourists, many of whom were decked out in florescent finery suitable for the ascent of Everest. I also underlaid parts of it with some Devanagari script.