Back to Lima

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Cathedral Plaza at Night

Watercolour and crayon

©2013 Charlene Brown

Earlier in October, I painted a picture for the Virtual Paintout, where pictures must be of Google Streetviews of the designated location.  I had planned on painting the Lima Cathedral, but found that the Google car hadn’t actually made it into the plaza, or anywhere near it for that matter.  I eventually found a perfectly acceptable street, Eléspuru, in the Rimac area, but recently decided to give Lima another try, and paint the elusive cathedral from photographs.

No longer limited by Google Streetview’s understandable lack of night scenes, I painted it at its spectacular best, the way it looks just after dinner – at about 11 pm!

The treasure of Siwidi

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Undersea and regular grizzlies

Watercolour and crayon

©2013 Charlene Brown

The Museum at Campbell River, one of the highlights of our recent trip up-Island, offers a fine venue for experiencing the rich heritage of the people of the coast. Vibrant and contemporary exhibits reflect First Nations cultures and lifestyles, dating back 8000 years, including the Kwakwaka’wakw, Nuu-chah-nulth and Coast Salish culture groups.

A not-to-be missed feature is ‘The Treasures of Siwidi,’ in which the powerful voice of a local Chief narrates the adventures of the ancestor Siwidi. Journeying to the Undersea World, Siwidi encounters a host of supernatural creatures, dramatically illustrated as a series of spectacular masks are revealed one by one, including many sea creatures such as octopus, whale, and my personal favourite, undersea grizzly. The 24 masks are the work of contemporary First Nations artists. 
It wasn’t possible to obtain a replica or even a picture of the mythical undersea grizzly with his striking sea urchin helmet, so I decided to paint a couple of them, fishing for salmon along with some regular grizzlies. 

Visualizing the passage of time with layers

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Ptolemais, Libya

Watercolour and Photoshop™

Originally one of the five cities of the 7^th Century BCE Libyan Pentapolis, Ptolemais was conquered by Alexander the Great in the 4^th Century BCE (and passed to his General, Ptolemy - hence the name), and conquered by Rome in the 1^st Century CE. Ptolemais was the site, in 301 CE, of an early attempt at wage and price controls – Diocletian’s Edictum De Pretiis – overlaid, in this computer painting, on the background of a watercolour of the present day ruins of the site. 

The best up-island trip yet!

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Hanging Gardens of Quadra

Watercolour and Photoshop™

©2013 Charlene Brown

Vancouver Island was first explored by British and Spanish expeditions in the late 18th century, and was originally called Quadra’s and Vancouver’s Island after Spanish navigator Juan de la Bodega y Quadra and British navy officer George Vancouver. The Spanish must have lost interest in land so far north because in the 19^th century when Quadra was dropped from the name they settled for it being given to a tiny island between Vancouver Island and the mainland. Vancouver Island covers 12,407 sq mi and Quadra Island is less than 1% of that at 120 sq mi!

I’ve just returned from another Gallery Associates trip to visit artists in the northern part of Vancouver Island, and on Quadra Island, which we reached by ferry from Campbell River. This picture is the view from one artist’s garden back towards Campbell River. As always, we found people’s gardens to be as splendidly inspiring as their studios and galleries, with driftwood, ceramics, and metal sculpture combined with flowers and arrayed around rock pools or hanging from trees.

Virtual Paintout in Lima, Peru

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Eléspuru, Rimac

Watercolour, crayon and marker

©2013 Charlene Brown

The Virtual Paintout is in Lima, Peru this month, and my first thought was to have a look at the Lima Cathedral and the townhouses of the original Conquistadors in the vicinity of the cathedral. I suspected the Baroque ornamentation of the Spanish colonial architecture would prove rather difficult to draw so I wasn't sure that was what I wanted to do, and when I got to that part of town on the map, I discovered the Google car hadn't got anywhere near the Plaza Mayor, so there were no Google Streetviews of any of the area I had in mind anyway… and no big decisions about whether or not to try the cathedral!

I just wandered around town and picked a Streetview with mountains in the background.  Here is a link to it  

Visualizing the passage of time with faded image of the past

Ziggurat at Ur

Watercolour and Photoshop™

The Sumerian ziggurat at Ur, built about four thousand years ago, originally had three levels.  

 The first level, most of which is still standing, has three huge stairways leading to a magnificent gate more than twelve metres above the ground.   In the illustration, the surviving part of this ziggurat is coloured. 

 The upper levels, which were later destroyed, are ghosted in white.

Another way of visualizing time

Diptych in the fourth dimension

Watercolour, gouache,crayon and Photoshop™

©2013 Charlene Brown

The right panel of this diptych is based on a photograph I took on a University of Victoria Travel Study program in Egypt in 2008. It shows a relief sculpture (reassembled from shards) on a wall in Hatshepsut’s temple at Deir el-Bahri, across the river from Luxor. (The mural illustrates an expedition to the Land of Punt, an exotic country on the Red Sea coast in what is now Northern Sudan.)

The left panel shows the pyramids of the Black Pharaohs, also located in what is now Northern Sudan – I’ve never seen them, but I find their design fascinating. They are smaller, pointier and far more numerous than the more famous pyramids near Cairo. The fact they were built in about the 5^th century BCE nine hundred years after the gardens of Punt were sculpted at Deir el-Bahri in the 14^th century BCE, and are near the Nile, rather than the Red Sea, stopped me briefly…  until I thought of presenting the time/space divide as a diptych…

Another Drive-by Painting

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Spanish church

Watercolour and crayon

©2013 Charlene Brown

When I first glimpsed this church from the Alicante airport bus, it was almost dark and we were darting around one of the many hairpin turns on the way to Javea. All I could tell for sure was that it was curvy and ornate, and I thought perhaps it was designed by Gaudi, like the Sagrada Familia I painted a couple of weeks ago…

A few days later, on my return to Alicante in broad daylight, I discovered to my surprise that it was an Orthodox church, quite a large one (those blue things at the side of the road below the church are cars, not the recycling crates at least one person took them to be!)  And it’s much newer than Gaudi’s buildings – I’m pretty sure that’s a bank of solar panels at the back.