I still think of this as the ‘new’ city hall

Toronto City Hall 1965

crayon and watercolour

©2025 Charlene Brown

The first place I lived after I returned from a year in Europe, was Toronto, where I was employed as a Probation Officer (don’t ask!) from 1964 to 1965.

During my time there, the ‘revolutionary’ new City Hall was opened and the design for the new Canadian flag was finally agreed upon.

The city hall’s Finnish architect, Viljo Revell, asked Henry Moore to create a sculpture in keeping with the flowing lines of his design, and Moore produced ‘The Archer.’  It’s my favourite Henry Moore, so I’ve included it in this painting despite the fact it wasn’t installed until 1966, months after I had moved on to my next adventure.

 I’ll post a painting of that location next.

My first Christmas away from home

Innsbruck

watercolour and oil pastel

©2018 Charlene Brown

Until the summer of 1963, I'd never really been anywhere but Alberta except for brief forays into Saskatchewan, BC and the American states of Montana, Idaho and Washington.  So, when I suddenly landed in Europe after working that summer in the Yukon Territory, the first thing I did was hitch-hike through a ridiculous number of countries to make up for lost time.  Then I started looking for a job near Innsbruck, so I would have a place to stay during the 1964 Winter Olympics.  

I got a job washing floors in a Krankenhaus on a mountain-side south of the city. One week after I started I was told that ‘my’ President had been shot. As I hadn’t yet acquired the 50-word German vocabulary one needs to wash floors in Austria, they practically had to act out Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas to get the message across. Even though Kennedy wasn’t my President, like many Canadians I thought he was terrific.  

It was a very lonely time until a joyous Tyrolean Christmas – despite the trauma of being my first Christmas away from home – worked its miracle a few weeks later. 

I used to live here

Wrangell-St. Elias Range from the Alaska Highway

crayon, watercolour and marker

©2025 Charlene Brown

Last week, I painted Pikes Peak near Colorado Springs to illustrate a blog post about a proposed energy transmission experiment, the Sun Train, running from a solar array at Pueblo, Colorado to Denver, about 170 kilometres to the north.  Colorado Springs is between the two.

This connection being rather tenuous, I didn’t include Pikes Peak when I added the Sun Train to a book of blog posts I’m compiling, ‘Visualizing the Anthropocene.’

We’ve lived in Colorado Springs for a couple of years (in fact our younger daughter was born there) and the painting gave me an idea for a series of blog posts illustrating places I used to live. 

Full disclosure – I only spent one summer working at a lodge on the Alaska Highway, and our particular stretch of highway was nowhere near as picturesque as the part shown here (which was about 60 miles away).  We were surrounded by muskeg and you couldn’t even see the mountains.  The only accurate part of the painting is the late summer fireweed, with the blooms at the very top of their 8-foot stems and puffy white seed capsules on the withered flowers lower down. That’s what the fireweed lining our stretch of the highway looked like when I left in September heading to Anchorage to fly over the pole to Europe and the next place I was to live (almost as briefly).  I’ll write about that next week.

Experimental solution to electricity transmission problem

 

Pike's Peak and the Garden of the Gods

crayon and watercolour

©2025 Charlene Brown

In an Anthropocene article, Shipping Solar Power at the Speed of a Freight Train, Peter Fairley writes, “By charging up battery cars where renewable energy is cheap and delivering the power to where it’s needed, [a San Francisco start-up called The Sun Train hopes to show] railroads could break the clean energy transmission logjam.” They see freight cars packed with solar batteries transporting electricity obtained at a solar array near Pueblo, Colorado as the perfect way to by-pass the increasingly congested transmission grid in the Denver area.

The concept seems somewhat awkward, but if you consider other advantages like potential capacity increases and decreasing vulnerability of diversified transmission systems, they may have a practical solution.

Anyway, in looking for a way to illustrate this article so I could use it in a blog post, I came up with Pikes Peak, which is situated near Colorado Springs 70 km. north of Pueblo, about one third of the distance to Denver.

A great trip with the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria

Retiro Park, Madrid                       Park Güell by Gaudi, Barcelona                                  Cantabria

Triptych of a trip not taken

watercolour, ink and marker

©2025 Charlene Brown

These are some of the locations I might have painted last September if I’d made it past the Seattle airport (where I fell and broke my arm) on the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria tour: Spain: Icons of Spanish Art - Goya, Velasquez, Picasso, Dali.

The Parque del Buen Retiro (Retreat) is a classic garden with “an Andulusian air” with delights ranging from this Cupid statue in the fountain in the Garden of Roses to the oldest tree in Madrid, a Mexican conifer planted in 1633.  

Park Güell is an enormous garden with stunning and distinct architectural elements designed by the same architect as the famous (not yet finished) Sagrada Familia  ̶  the renowned Antoni Gaudí.

Cantabria is on the northern coast of Spain, slightly off the beaten path from major tourist areas, but with mountains, beaches, stunning views and rich history, it is a “goldmine of authentic Spanish beauty.”  And great food, apparently.

 

Favourite Google Streetview 'location' paintings from 2009

LasBrujas at Liorna, Mexico City, Mexico 

Duke Street, Halifax NS Canada 

Fisherwick Presbyterian Church, Belfast, Northern Ireland, UK

 

Where the 16 September 1810 call to arms triggered the Mexican War of Independence

The Cry of Dolores
crayon, watercolour ink
©2025 Charlene Brown

The Baroque Parroquia Nuestra Señora de los Dolores, sometimes known as the Grito Church is directly across from the Plaza del Grande Hidalgo and Independence Garden in Dolores Hidalgo, Mexico. 

Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla was a Mexican Roman Catholic priest, best remembered for his speech, the “Grito de Dolores” (“Cry of Dolores”), which called for the end of Spanish colonial rule in Mexico. Today, Hidalgo is celebrated as “the father of Mexican independence.”
 

Will I ever be able to pronounce Guanajuato?

Guanajuato

crayon, watercolour, CP
©2025 Charlene Brown

Guanajuato was founded by the Spanish in the early 16th century and became the world's leading silver-extraction centre in the 18th century. The historic Baroque and neoclassical atmosphere is preserved by routing traffic through subterranean streets along former mineshafts.

We were told by our guide that students can attend the famous Guanajuato University free of charge by maintaining high grades and doing volunteer work aimed at preserving and beautifying the colorful residential areas and parks of this World Heritage designated city.

San Miguel de Allende ̶ possibly the most delightful place in all of Mexico

Alicorns* in the arts & crafts market
watercolour and crayon sketch
©2025 Charlene Brown                                                                

In addition to cool inner courtyard gardens, many of the restaurants in San Miguel have umbrella-shaded rooftop dining areas from which you can see the flower-framed doorways and balconies, market stalls, and jacaranda forests leading up to the cathedral-like parroquia (parish church) de San Miguel Arcángel. 

*The winged unicorn or alicorn is my favourite species of alebrije, the brightly colored, fantastical creatures of Mexican folk art.  In case you didn’t spot them right away… There are three alicorns under the lace-trimmed white umbrella in the centre foreground of this watercolour sketch. 

My 1000th blog post on 1150 Words!

Cañada de la Virgen

watercolour and crayon sketch

©2025 Charlene Brown

My daughter and I were in San Miguel de Allende last week enjoying a wonderful Road Scholar trip.  One day we visited a nearby archaeological site, Cañada de la Virgen. One of the northernmost step pyramid sites in Mexico, it is situated on the MesoAmerican border north of which people were more nomadic and did not build such enormous structures.

The original name of this Otomi celestial and moonrise-aligned ritual and ceremonial location, dating from around 300 CE, is unknown. The Spaniards renamed the (by then abandoned) site Cañada (canyon) de la Virgen when they arrived in about 1540 CE. The virgin to whom the name refers is the Virgin of Guadalupe  ̶  Mary, the mother of Jesus  ̶  who appeared to a man in Mexico in 1531.  

 

Favourite Google Streetview ‘location’ paintings from 2010

County Clare, Ireland

Rio de Janeiro from Estrada do Sumaré

Revueltas, San Miguel de Allende, Mexico

  Diamond Head Rd, Honolulu HI, USA

Looking south from GC-210, Canary Islands 

 Lutsiveien, Stavanger, Norway

 Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco, CA USA 

Albertacce, Corsica 

 

Favourite Google Streetview ‘location’ paintings from 2011

 The Bank of Eureka & the Savings Bank of Humboldt, Eureka, California, USA

Via Verdi in Talana, Sardinia

St Louis Cathedral from Decatur Street, New Orleans, LA USA

 Koyukuk River crossing, Alaska, USA

North of Glenorchy, Otago, New Zealand  
 

Ave. de Verdun, Eze, Alpes-Maritimes, France

Table Mountain from Leeukloof Drive, Cape Town, South Africa

Thermovoltaic systems

Lafarge Exshaw - the largest cement plant in Canada

watercolour and coloured pencil

©2025 Charlene Brown

Thermovoltaics is a technology that converts heat into electricity. Waste heat is everywhere. Globally, of the energy used to power the industries that the world needs such as cement and steel, approximately 60% is simply lost as waste heat. 

Industrial activities account for about one third of total energy consumption and urgently need to cut CO2 emissions.

In 2022, the energy intensity of the cement sector reached 100 kWh per tonne, with fossil fuels as the primary source of thermal energy. Globally, iron and steel manufacturing consumes 8% of total energy demand, contributing to 2.6 billion tonnes (gigatonnes) of CO2 emissions annually. 

Addressing the emissions from these industries and finding ways to capture and productively use the vast amounts of industrial waste heat are critical steps in the fight against climate change.

Favourite Google Streetview ‘location’ paintings from 2012

 Lomnický štít, Tatranska Lomnica, Slovakia

Water Street, St. Andrews-by-the-Sea, New Brunswick, Canada

Højbro Plads, Copenhagen, Denmark

Mahamakut Buddhist University, Chiang Mai, Thailand 

 Riga, Latvia

Breckenridge, Colorado, USA

  

Favourite Google Streetview Virtual Paintout ‘locations’ from 2013

 Corner of Calle dello Spezier and Calle Fondamenta Megio, Venice, Italy

Þjóðvegur, Iceland 

Rua Jorge M. Reis Machado, Azores

Via Roma Destra Bridge, Lido di Jeloso, Italy

Mosque in Smolevo, Bulgaria

Gedimino prospektas, Vilnius, Lithuania

Prospect Hill, Douglas, Isle of Man

Second round of my AI painting adventure

Admitting Defeat - Photoshopped Hellebores

Charlene Brown 2025

At the end of my February 5 blog post, I promised to keep you posted on my ongoing attempts to improve my hellebore painting with AI Image generation software.

Using Adobe Firefly™ I started with the instruction:  purple hellebores about 10 inches high with light dusting of snow and evergreen forest background

Which yielded the above suggestions.  Without pointing out that if I’d wanted magenta hellebores I’d have said so, I continued the operation using only the first picture.  (or not, as it turned out)

I uploaded my original hellebore painting as a composition reference. Then I asked for some special effects  ̶  baroque, geometric, doodle and science fiction.  Here’s what I got instead.

They all seem to be edging toward the composition I requested… but have lost their forest backgrounds!  And their baroque, geometric, doodle and science fiction instructions.

Apparently I still have to ‘educate’ the Firefly AI using my language and my pictures.

Or I can admit defeat and just use Adobe Photoshop™ (see above).  I’ll try again, probably not with Firefly, and keep you posted.

Favourite Google Streetviews from 2014

 Trädgårdsföreningen, Gothenburg, Sweden

Jinsha Township, Taiwan, ROC

Russky Bridge,Vladivostok, Russia 

Along Ruta 7, Southern Parks area of Chile 

Georges Pierhead, Liverpool, UK

Lake Jasna, Slovenia

Pershing Park, Washington, DC USA