Our expanded 2001 Christmas letter

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Screenshot of a 3-page Christmas letter

Adobe InDesign™ document

©2020 Charlene Brown

Here’s another Christmas letter, with the addition of a watercolour painting of Skagway Alaska.

Our expanded 2000 Christmas letter

Screenshot of a 6-page Christmas letter

Adobe InDesign™ document

©2020 Charlene Brown

Here’s another Christmas letter, this time expanded to six pages because it includes our Grand Tour of Europe, exactly twenty years ago in May and June of 2000, when my husband retired from Emirates Airline.  

Paintings of Triglav National Park in Slovenia, Pompei in Italy, the top of the Little St. Bernard Pass near the Italian-French border, Les Baux and Puycelsi in France, and the Guggenheim Bilbao in Spain have been added to the original letter.

Our expanded 1999 Christmas letter

Screenshot of a 3-page Christmas letter

Adobe InDesign™ document

©2020 Charlene Brown

Here’s another Christmas letter, with the addition of an abstract collage of an earthquake that took place in Athens on September 7, 1999.

Our expanded 1998 Christmas letter

Screenshot of a 3-page Christmas letter

Adobe InDesign™ document

©2020 Charlene Brown

Here’s another Christmas letter, with the addition of a drawing of a Pepsi truck in Dubai by Philip Hogg (age 6 at the time) and a watercolour painting of Rawson Lake in Alberta.

Our expanded 1997 Christmas letter

Screenshot of a 3-page Christmas letter

Adobe InDesign™ document

©2020 Charlene Brown

Here’s another Christmas letter, with the addition of two watercolour paintings, Stellenbosch Vineyards in South Africa, and the village of Stary Smokovec in Slovakia. 

Remembering 1996

Screenshot of a 3-page Christmas letter

Adobe InDesign™ document

©2020 Charlene Brown

Here’s another Christmas letter, with the addition of two watercolour paintings, Ballooning over the Masai Mara in Kenya and the Amber Fort near Jaipur in India, and a collaged watercolour of Portofino.

Self-isolating still in force here in Victoria, especially for us over-70s, so I've got lots of time to expand all these old Christmas letters.  What I'm saying is that you're going to be seeing more of them, possibly right up to 2019.

Remembering 1995

Screenshot of a 3-page Christmas letter

Adobe InDesign™ document

©2020 Charlene Brown

Here’s another Christmas letter, with the addition of a watercolour monotype of the Great Wall of China near Beijing and a painting of the Temple at Ninh Bihn in Vietnam.

As you can see, I’m still using old paintings to put together blog posts until I can return to my painting group.  This week, I’m continuing to use the time available to work on the sixth story in my six-generation collection – the one that begins in 2042 – enlarging on a scene where the girls are reflecting on the ‘cataclysmic changes’ that took place way back in 2020. (I’m pretty sure there are in fact some cataclysmic changes happening right now.)

Remembering 1994

Screenshot of a 3-page Christmas letter

Adobe InDesign™ document

©2020 Charlene Brown

Here’s another Christmas letter, with the addition of two overlay paintings of Pakistan, and a sketch of the Bidaya Mosque on the east coast of the UAE.  I wrote about this sketch in a blog post a few days ago. 

Back in the present (Happy Easter to you all in self-isolation)... One of my projects for 2020, as explained in my New Years blogpost  is to complete an autofictional novel about a few years in the lives of young women in six generations of my family.  In mid-March I sent a second draft of this collection of six short stories beginning in 1898, 1925, 1958, 1987, 2017 and 2042 to the publisher for editing. I’d had the presence of mind to insert a couple of references to COVID-19  – but it still jumped directly from December 2019 to September 2020 in the fifth story.  I am using this time when I can’t paint to fill in this big blank in the fifth story.  In real time.