Sunday, January 10, 2021

A time-altered memory

Banff High School
Co
mputer-altered watercolour and crayon
©2020 Charlene Brown

The internet must contain two or three photos of every important building (and several unimportant ones) ever built in Banff. All of them except the original Banff High School, it turns out. 

This painting had to be done from memory and is as accurate as I could make it. I should probably mention that one part of the painting where I wasn’t even trying to be accurate is the flag—as you may know, the red maple leaf flag became our official flag in 1965, five years after that high school was torn down.

And if you think that’s a stretch… I only remember one occasion in all the years I was growing up in Banff that there was a flag of any sort on that pole in February 1952 the Union Jack was flown at half-staff when the King died.

I may use a version of this painting as a background for one of the (fictional) scenes in the graphic novel I’ve started adapting from a screenplay I wrote several years ago. It may be the location of the first pinch point—more about the various ‘points’ in a screenplay (or graphic novel) in a couple of weeks.