Alberta ̶ where I lived first and where I still say I'm from

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.

Edmonton
watercolour and crayon
©2016 Charlene Brown

I lived in Edmonton from 1959 to 1962, my first three years at the University of Alberta.  However, the city pictured here was not there at the time. The only structures in this painting that I remember from my university days are the Provincial Legislature on the far left and the Fairmont MacDonald Hotel, which is just about exactly in the middle – and it is quite different from the MacDonald I remember. Back then, the hotel had a huge ‘Brutalist’ addition, and the whole structure was referred to as a ‘tiny perfect chateau and the box it came in.’ Anyway, the box has been removed, and dozens of much nicer boxes have been added to form today’s Edmonton skyline.

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.     

The first place I lived back in Canada

Vancouver

watercolour and crayon

©2024 Charlene Brown

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.

 

Opus Plein Air Challenge

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.

Heading over to Fan Tan Alley
ink, crayon and watercolour
©2025 Charlene Brown

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.)

Where I lived after the Big Move

Phillip Island

watercolour, crayon and marker

©2025 Charlene Brown

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).  

Sunset parade of the fairy penguins
watercolour and crayon
©2025 Charlene Brown

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. 

Small town living after my year in the big city

Pine Point Beach, Deep River ON
watercolour and crayon
©2025 Charlene Brown

A job offer at the Chalk River Nuclear Laboratories brought about my next move  ̶  to Deep River  ̶  in the fall of 1964.  For the first few months I didn’t even know there was a beach at Pine Point, even though we all skied at a small hill near there. 

This painting is based on pictures I took at the beach during the following summer. (The mountain in the background is Mt. Martin which is on the Quebec side of the river and is barely high enough to be classified as a mountain, so I’ve given it a little added elevation and a more rugged skyline.)

After that summer, during which we spent most of our free time here on a surprisingly warm stretch of the Ottawa River, I made a really Big Move to the next place I lived – which I’ll write about next week.

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.