We picked Victoria for retirement in 2000, of
all the places in Alberta and British Columbia that we had been considering.
Actually I think I was the only one
considering Alberta, and I sometimes wonder if my husband decided on Victoria
when he first came here to attend Royal Roads Military College in 1958.
When my husband started working for Emirates
Airline, the company had two Airbus 300 aircraft and one of his first jobs was to
fly a third one down from the factory in Europe. The skyline of the city itself
was dominated by its mosques, all facing directly west to Mecca.
Emirates now has hundreds of Airbus and
Boeing planes, and the coastline shown in this painting is packed with shopping
malls and skyscrapers including Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building. I’m
pretty sure that everyone has heard of Dubai by now!
After a shaky start (the Gulf War just
about emptied the place a few months after we got there) an astonishing amount
of Dubai’s expansion took place during our ten years there.
After being transferred from
Colorado back to Canada, we lived in Ottawa again, this time for eight years,
then two years in Vancouver before Ottawa again, this time for only three
years. Then we left our government jobs and my husband went to work for Wardair
in Toronto. We lived several miles south
of the airport near Lake Ontario, in Missisauga.
We probably would
have stayed there until my husband retired, but the airline was bought by CP
Air, and the former Wardair pilots sensed that their future prospects were less
than excellent. Many began looking
elsewhere, and twelve of them including my husband, were scooped up by a brand
new, rapidly expanding airline many of us had never heard of. In 1990 we moved abruptly to a city we also
hadn’t heard of and had only recently located on a map of the Middle East. I’ll
tell you about it next week.
In the summer of 1968,
the Canadian government launched a cross-country recruitment drive for computer
programmers. Fortunately for me, one of
the departments requiring more programmers was Fisheries and Forestry.
Within two months, we’d moved to Ottawa, found an apartment and a babysitter, and I’d settled into my new job (the first one ever for which I was completely qualified). Within a year, I’d had a promotion and a retroactive raise and actually bought some furniture! And I’d met an RCAF pilot of whom I was quite fond.
But this happy situation looked to be falling apart a few months later when he was transferred to Colorado Springs… Fortunately, undeterred by the fact my daughter and I were kind of a ‘package deal’ he returned to Ottawa briefly at Christmas time in 1970, married me and our next move was to join him in Colorado.
There’s a painting of Colorado in my May 11 blog post, and in the next post I talked about how this painting launched this series about places I used to live.
“We 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.”
Banff
watercolour and crayon
©2023 Charlene Brown
I was born in Banff, lived there until I
finished high school, and returned to work there each summer until I finished
university.
This is the only one of my Alberta
paintings in which the place looks almost exactly the same as when I lived
there.
Calgary
watercolour, crayon and marker
©2012 Charlene Brown
My final year at
University of Alberta was completed at the Calgary campus, UAC, which became
the University of Calgary a few years later.
This painting of Calgary was based on photos I took from a 2012 WestJet flight to Calgary and most of the buildings in it– bank towers, Calgary Tower, Suncor (the fact the building is red is only part of the reason it was initially referred to as Red Square), the Bow Building, Olympic Park ski jump, and the Alberta Children’s Hospital ̶ were not there when I was at university.
After leaving Australia rather suddenly, my
daughter and I stayed for about a year and a half in Vancouver, the first place
we landed. My next job was again at a
university, as a computer programer in the Faculty of Forestry at UBC.
This led logically (for the first time) to my next move, which I’ll write about in a couple of weeks. Next week, I’ll talk about the first three places I lived ̶ all in Alberta ̶ before I started the ‘on the road again’ part of my life in 1963.
On location at the Gate of Harmonious Interest
pencil, ink, and watercolour sketch
©2025 Charlene Brown
A couple of weeks ago I participated in the
Plein Air Challenge organized by Opus Art Supplies. I only had time to complete
the first two steps of the sketching procedure demonstrated by our instructor,
Peter Loebel. It was a hot day and there were a couple of cruise ships in town and
the shady side of Fisgard street was so crowded it wasn’t possible to find a
place to sit down ̶ and that’s my excuse for the shaky drawing.
The next steps, erasing the pencil lines and adding crayon and watercolour when I got home, didn’t tidy it up much so I decided to try a larger
painting beginning with more carefully drawn pencil and ink. I eventually decided I lack the steadiness or
patience to do anything carefully, but here’s the result.
The title of this painting refers to the
pedestrians crossing Fisgard Street, heading toward Fan Tan Alley, the
narrowest commercial street in North America. (It’s .9 meters wide.)
I arrived in Australia in November, just in
time for my second consecutive summer, and soon found a job at the University
of Melbourne. (This was a long time ago, when a university degree, especially a
science degree, would get you your choice of job offers in almost no time at
all.)
Right after my first hot Christmas, we had
a very welcome break – a breezy day at the seashore on nearby Phillip Island.
The flowers carpeting the cliffs may be Carpobrotus glaucescens, commonly known as iceplant or (unfortunately) pigface. I don’t know for sure because I didn’t take a lot of close-up photos in those days (years before digital cameras enabled us to take multiple pictures of everything in sight).
Tiny penguins, only about 30 cm in height,
come ashore after a day at sea fishing, and head for their burrows near the top
of a long smooth beach.
I was going to include this famous parade in
the first painting but then remembered that these two most paintable memories
from that day were miles (and hours) apart.
Hence the two paintings.
We returned to Canada the following year. I'll write about where we lived next in a couple of weeks.
