Our expanded 1992 Christmas Letter

Click on image to enlarge

Screen shot of a 3-page Christmas letter

Adobe InDesign™ document

©2020 Charlene Brown

Here's another Christmas letter, with two paintings added: Active Pass between Galiano and Mayne Islands, and the Fort at Bahla in Oman.

Gardens as Art: Aesthetic Journeys around the World IV

Imperial East Garden in Tokyo

Watercolour and crayon

@2015 Charlene Brown

The fourth of this year’s Sunday Art Lecture Series, Shibusa Aesthetics: Spontaneity in Japanese Gardens” was to have taken place March 29, but has been postponed to October 4.

According to Dr. David Young, who will present this lecture, "The goal of a traditional Japanese garden is to re-create nature in an artistic way that improves upon nature. But can something be natural and artificial at the same time? This interesting challenge was met in Japan with the concept of shibusa, which can be translated as ‘restrained spontaneity’ and has been used to create gardens that are not really spontaneous and natural but appear to be so."

I sketched this part of the Imperial Gardens during a tour of Japan with the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria in November 2015.

Gardens as Art: Aesthetic Journeys around the World III

Sculpture Garden

Watercolour and oil pastel

Charlene Brown

The third of this year’s Sunday Art Lecture Series, Niki de Saint Phalle’s “Giardino dei Tarocchi” in Italy was to have taken place today, but has been postponed to October 25.

This park-like property in Tuscany is filled with enormous otherworldly female figures – assemblages made of bizarre collections of objects, evoking a sense of the absurd.  A stroll through the garden is apparently “a magical experience” – that I have never had. The painting above is based on several photos found on the internet

I’d like to see it for real (some day when we’re able to go back to Italy) so I looked up its location. It’s shown on the map on the right should you too be wondering.                          

Gardens as Art: Aesthetic Journeys around the World II

Matarea Garden

Watercolour and oil pastel

©2020 Charlene Brown

At the second Sunday  Art Lecture, on March 8, Dr. Marcus Milwright described many aspects – artistic, medicinal and religious – of this fabulous but elusive botanical wonder in Egypt.

According to legend the garden sheltered the Holy Family after they fled to escape the persecution of Herod, and early Christians considered the area sacred. Thus, in medieval times, even though it belonged to the Islamic Sultan, only Christians could harvest the valuable balsam oil.

The garden’s actual appearance is open to speculation as most of the early illustrations of it were done by European artists and mapmakers who had never actually been there. Most agree that there was a large sycamore, traditionally the ‘Virgin’s Tree,’ and an obelisk nearby (although I think the one I included is far too tall, making the garden look more like it’s in Washington DC than Cairo) and there was some sort of water mechanism, and the precious balsom shrubs (to which I’ve added orange trees) were surrounded by a wall with a guarded gate.  The detail on the right is from an illustrated map, from the 1575 edition of Sebastian Munster`s Cosmographia.

Gardens as Art: Aesthetic Journeys around the World I

Monet’s Garden

Watercolour and crayon

©2013 Charlene Brown

This year’s Sunday Lecture Series at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria opened March 1 with a beautifully illustrated presentation on Monet’s Garden at Giverny by Dr. Melissa Berry of the University of Victoria.

When Claude Monet moved to Giverny in 1883, his objective was creation. Unlike previous artistic ventures, he no longer seemed satisfied finding inspiration for his canvases in a world in which he had no control. Thus, Monet’s largest, most immersive masterwork was born, or rather cultivated. He approached his land with an artist’s eye, and continued to develop his garden, adding to and drawing inspiration from it.  It served as his subject matter until his death in 1926.

I sketched the water garden at Giverny seven years ago, after I had been there with my granddaughter on a Road Scholar Intergenerational program.

Gardens as Art – the COVID-19 Interruption

This year’s Sunday Lecture Series, an annual fundraiser organized by the Associates of the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, got off to a great start with lectures on Monet’s Garden at Giverny on March 1, followed by the Matarea Garden in Cairo on March 8.  

Then came COVID-19.  So far only one case has been found on Vancouver Island, but the third and fourth lectures of the series have been postponed indefinitely – as has every large public gathering.

At least the lectures will be easier to reschedule than, for example, ‘A Conversation with Michelle Obama’ which was to have been in Victoria, her only Canadian stop, on March 31.

I will go ahead with my planned blog posts of paintings relating to each of the gardens to be featured in the series, starting on Wednesday.

Predictive Analytics

Just One Slide

Watercolour, oil pastel and marker

©2020 Charlene Brown

The inspiration for this painting was the Three Minute Thesis Competition – one of the most popular events at the University of Victoria’s annual Ideafest. This competition challenges Master's and PhD students to describe their research “in a clear, engaging and jargon-free presentation using just one slide - in 180 seconds.” 

The graduate students’ single slides are properly annotated and labeled, but this painting of ‘Just One Slide’ is more of a ‘visualization’ and it’s going to have to speak for itself. I will just say it is a predictive analysis of three policy alternatives in transitioning off fossil fuels, and it uses data visualization rather than rigorous algorithms. Data visualization distills large data sets into visual graphics to make it easier to understand complex relationships and predict trends

Our expanded 1991 Christmas letter

Screen shot of a 3-page Christmas letter

Adobe InDesign™ document

©2020 Charlene Brown

Here’s another Christmas letter – with a painting from the Canadian Rockies added, and a bit more detail about why 1991 was the worst of times, and the best of times.

Another painting missing from 1992

Exiting Active Pass

Watercolour and oil pastel

©2020 Charlene Brown

Our Christmas letter in 1992 mentioned a stay on Galiano Island with our daughter and son-in-law and their son – our first grandchild – who was not quite a year old at the time. There were no photos or paintings of Galiano in the letter, so I’m going to add this view from Bluffs Park on Galiano of a ferry exiting Active Pass and heading toward Victoria.  

BC Ferries give the western tip of Mayne Island a wide berth because sea lions and orcas frequently gather at this point. I’ve included a few in the painting, though we did not actually see any orcas or sea lions when we hiked along the bluffs back in 1992.

Our expanded 1990 Christmas letter

Click on image to enlarge

Screen shot of a 3-page Christmas letter

Adobe InDesign™ document

©2020 Charlene Brown

One of my plans for the coming year, outlined in my blog post of January 5, was to add paintings, in this case a painting of Neuchatel Switzerland, to the photos already in the Christmas letters I wrote beginning in 1990. 

Like most of my Christmas letters, this was actually post-Christmas, written in early January 1991 in Dubai, a few days before the outbreak of Gulf War I – though it is unlikely you will be able to (or want to) read these details in this thumbnail version of the letter.