Inuit Art Central

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Cape Dorset, Nunavut, Canada

Watercolour and crayon

©2009 Charlene Brown

Cape Dorset has more artists per capita than any other Canadian municipality. It’s likely you’ve never seen a painting of it though, as these folks aren’t landscape painters. This particular scene hasn’t been ‘done to death’ as seems to happen in other artists’ enclaves like, say, Banff or the Gulf Islands. The Inuit of Cape Dorset are stone carvers and printmakers – creators of iconic Canadian images of the far north, and they’re been doing it for fifty years. Probably the most famous Inuit printmaker of all, Kenojuak Ashevak, who designed The Enchanted Owl was from Cape Dorset.

I’ve been up north a few times, though not recently, and I’d like to go back sometime – there are lots of wonderful sights that need to be painted up there. But for now, I think I’ll just continue painting the Rockies and Vancouver Island, again and again...

Getting Ready for the Olympics

Early Snow at Whistler

Watercolour and crayon

©2009 Charlene Brown

They’ve had the first snowfall at Whistler at the higher elevations, boding well for the Olympic Alpine events in February – but just in case it’s one of those years (occasional warm rain) the snow-making machines and 80-person crew have also fired up and the lower slopes have a light dusting as well. I’ve tried to show current conditions in this painting, but it’s actually based on a picture taken on a midwinter evening when the area was completely snow-covered. The alpenglow on the peaks, which I’ve only ever seen in February, is also a figment of my imagination.

Virtual Paintout in Belfast

Fisherwick Presbyterian Church

Watercolour, crayon & ink

©2009 Charlene Brown

Several artists whose blogs I follow have contributed to The Virtual Paintout, a blog run by Bill Guffey, who has had the rather good idea of using ‘Google Street View’ as a resource for traveling the world to find interesting locations and subjects to paint. I liked the entries by Liz Pearson Cathy Gatland and Pat Reese so much, I decided to give it a try, and started looking around Belfast, Northern Ireland, the location of Bill’s October challenge.

There are so many very paintable locations available, I decided the only way to make a decision was to narrow my search to churches – and eventually selected this one. There are at least ten street views of it, and when I strung them together, I couldn’t figure out the perspective – until I went to the original Google map Satellite view and discovered the street curves about 15 degrees part way along the building. Couldn’t resist including the 'Don’t Walk' signal and the sign proclaiming this an ‘ALCOHOL FREE ZONE.’

Painting in the Rockies II

Moraine Lake

Watercolour, crayon & ink

©2009 Charlene Brown

This is the SW end of Moraine Lake in the Valley of the Ten Peaks in Banff National Park, one of the areas in which we were hiking a couple of weeks ago. This view shows one of the streams of melt water flowing into that end of the lake. This inflow contains ‘rock flour’ which gives the lake its colour. Also shown is the glacier to the left of Mt Fay (the highest peak in the picture) not normally seen in the much more famous view of the lake from the rockpile at its NE end. This better known view (with Mt Fay on the extreme left) used to be on our twenty-dollar bills.

Painting in the Rockies

Rim of the Opabin Above Lake O’Hara

Watercolour and crayon

©2009 Charlene Brown

This is the view from the north shore of Lake O’Hara in Yoho National Park, looking up to the outer rim of the Opabin Plateau. My daughters and I had just returned from hiking on the plateau, where the larch were beginning to turn golden – a couple of weeks late, as every season has been in western Canada this year. This is one of the few places in the high country that grizzly restrictions are not in place – in some of the other areas we hiked you’re required to stick together in larger groups – and it’s suggested you yell, “Yo, bear!” from time to time, as the bears have been conditioned to expect loud bangs and rubber bullets, when they hear that.

Click on this link to see some of my sketches on an interactive map.View Opabin Plateau in a larger map

Video Painting the Continental Divide

Golden Larch

Watercolour, crayon and computer

@2009 Charlene Brown

I’ll be away from my computer for a couple of weeks – hiking somewhere in this part of the Rockies. With a little luck, I’ll be painting the larch trees along the timberline at the peak of their fall colours, as shown here – either in the Valley of the Ten Peaks (second lake on the left) or on the other side of Victoria Glacier, on the right. I have computer-painted this stretch of the Continental Divide in all seasons and put the series together in a one-minute video. If you’d like to see it, click on A Year on the Divide.

Graphic Novel Artwork

Chapter 4

InDesign document containing digital photomontage, collaged watercolour

©2009 Charlene Brown

Have you ever thought that some of your painting experiences would make a good comic book? Sometimes painting adventures can be pretty funny (though probably not as action-packed as the average comic book) and writing about making art opens up lots of great illustration possibilities.

I’ve been working on a comic book aka graphic novel – a fictionalized combination of some of my travel painting and workshop painting stories, and this is a two-page spread from it. I should mention that actually starting on any of the ‘great illustration possibilities’ was harder than I thought it would be – until I realized there’s no rule saying you have to start at the beginning – hence, Chapter 4. (edited 24 Nov 2009)

Creative Archaeology

(click on image to enlarge)

Hanging Gardens of Babylon

Watercolour, crayon and computer

©2009 Charlene Brown

When I wrote about the harbour gardens here in Victoria on July 30, I said I was going to get back to one of my original projects, painting a series of ancient gardens. I thought I might include some of the Victoria planters in a painting of the Herodium in Jerusalem – well, that hasn’t happened, but here are five of them in the Hanging Gardens of Babylon -- one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. It is unlikely that this painting resembles the real thing, particularly the Tower of Babel which probably never got even this high, but you never know – this might be exactly what they were like! It is loosely based on an engraving by 16th century Dutch artist Maarten van Heemskerck