It’s been quite a long time since I’ve had anything to post so I’m happy to put this one up, another in the series of watercolours devoted to planting trees in British Columbia.  This one comes from a week we spent planting close to the shores of the big lake.  Here I tried to capture the mood of a rainy-then-sunny May in the north. If you would like to read more, you’ll find this image and many more like it on the separate page called The Artist Goes Tree Planting. Cheers, J.

This is another in the ongoing series featuring the south shore of Victoria, BC, Canada and it is the third to depict the lovely Chatham and Discovery Islands.

Chatham and Discovery were the names of two ships commanded by Captain George Vancouver in the 1790′s.  In his circumnavigation/exploration of the world, he charted much of New Zealand, some of the Australian coast as well as much of the South Pacific.  As a sailor he also knew Hawaii quite well, having been there with Captain James Cook in his younger years where he was to witness the elder captain’s murder.  Vancouver’s expedition took him from New Zealand to Hawaii, then to the Pacific Northwest and Vancouver Island where the Spanish, Americans and Russians were all feverishly snooping about, mapping and seeking out the fabled Northwest Passage.  The Big Island came to bear his name and Captain Vancouver himself named many of the features to be found in this part of the world.  I had thought that Vancouver had named these two islands for his boats, but it turned out not to be true.  These islands were named in honour of Vancouver’s two-ship fleet by the citizens of Victoria about 1840, some fifty years or so after Vancouver’s visit.  Not that this painting is about all that history, though – that’s just a long-winded way of telling how these islands got their name.

This beach is on Chatham Island’s south side, looking across to Discovery Island.  I found a whole line of bleached-out driftwood and thought it would make a nice contrast to the life and motion of the place.  Chatham and Discovery have many of these little beaches, interspersed between the more typical rocky shoreline and they seem made for relaxation and exploration.  While I was doing my own trifling investigations, I thought about Captain Vancouver, wondering whether he had bothered to send anyone ashore here to look around.  I kinda doubt it.  I thought about the native people who lived and fished and traveled around these islands and I tried to picture how and where they lived.  I picture them looking offshore at the Chatham and Discovery as they sailed past and thinking to themselves, “Oh yeah, I’ve heard of these guys…”

The Artist Goes Treeplanting is an ongoing memoir of sorts based on my time planting trees in the Canadian North.  It’s written around watercolour illustrations that I make from time to time.  If you’re looking for a little whimsical reading, and some fun images,  check it out!

New paintings coming soon!

Cheers, Jeff

Chatham and Discovery Islands

A little sketch here for the next acrylic painting, a nice little scene from Chatham Island.  More than anything, it’s a study in colour and composition.  Chatham Island, tiny as it is, has quite a few of these little beaches and given that relatively few people make the trip, the beaches usually can afford the visitor a measure of sunny solitude and privacy.

I’ve been thinking about glass floats lately, ever since my wife brought home a number of them from her grandmother’s house last month.

Back in the days before plastics, fishermen kept their nets afloat using spheres of glass.  The floats were molded and sealed, then wrapped in netting that was then attached to large fishing nets.  Thus, they kept the nets afloat and from about 1800 – 1930 they were a mainstay of the fishing industry worldwide.  Naturally,  millions of them were lost over time and thousands still ride the waves today.    They come in different volumes, from the size of a plum to ones as big as basketballs.  Ours are green and full of bubbles, a sign, apparently that they are made from cheap glass.  Some of ours  are plum sized, some are as big as  honeydews.  We have one brown one too with japanese markings.  The rest, green and unmarked, I take to be more local though I can’t say for certain.

The story I heard, then, was that although these floats come in all sizes and colours, the purple ones are the rarest and most sought after among people who collect them.  The purple floats, I was told, were made for and used by the fishing fleet of the Emperor of Japan throughout the 19th century.  No one else could use floats of that colour and I guess if you did you could get in big trouble.  I began to think about this – thousands and thousands of these glass balls bobbing along on the tide set free from starting points in Japan, China, Scandinavia and the west coast of North America.  From these points of origin they’ve spread through the seas and now show up on beaches worldwide.  I like this notion quite a bit – the idea that something as random as this can exist, that the floats can be free to follow the permutations of current, wind and tide without any interference or management from us.  I decided to do a sort of documentation of this journey, putting one of the Emperor’s floats in our Salish Sea.

This also allowed me to incorporate some elements that I’ve wanted to focus on for awhile.   I combined three elements: the purple float on the waves of Juan De Fuca Strait, the Olympic Mountains across the water and the shroud of cloud that rolls through the strait and climbs the mountainside, obscuring the distant view as it goes.  I wanted stability, but chaos too; the water off Victoria’s south coast can get pretty choppy and thought I would use the tension of frothing waves to contrast against the horizontal stability of the overall scene.  I thought plunking the viewer down over the waves in the middle of the strait might help them to feel as adrift as the float is.

I’ll probably return to this idea – not sure that I’m done with glass floats.  Stay tuned!

Cheers, J

Someone’s Sailboat in Oak Bay Waters: Looking Southeast to Chatham and Discovery Islands Acrylic on canvas, 18″x29″, 2010

The Lagoon on Chatham Island, acrylic on canvas 20″x40″, 2010

Chatham’s North Islet with Geese and Flotsam, 2010, acrylic on canvas, 18″x30″

At the end of last summer, we took our second trip to Chatham Island, just off the southeast end of Victoria, courtesy of Cap’n Jib and his Thunder Jet.  I was anxious to go as I have wanted to get back there for some time in order to make some observations that I might bring back to the art table.  Both islands lie less than 2km from the U.S. border which runs down the Strait of Juan de Fuca.  There Chatham and its sister isle stand like lush sentinels with Victoria to the northwest, the San Juan Islands to the east and the Olympic Mountains of  Washington State to the south.

I must admit, I can’t get enough of this place. The island is actually a set of four small islands plus a bunch of dodgey rocks that can make navigation difficult.  It lies next to its twin, Discovery Island , which is a BC Provincial Park.  (Chatham itself belongs to the local native nation).  These isles were named by Captain  James Cook George Vancouver in the 1700s after his boats, HMS Discovery and HMS Chatham.  However, as the native people of the Salish Sea had been visiting and living here for millenia, one supposes that they have other, more original names too.

These islands have a paradisical quality – lush and overgrown, they are filled with many species of trees, thick undergrowth in places and wildflowers galore.  On a warm, sunny summer day, Chatham Island seems to call out to the shore saying: “C’mon… peace and tranquility await you this afternoon.”  However, there is a flipside to being an island in this part of the world – winter storms.  Both Chatham and Discover are properly battered all winter long and the evidence is plain.  Many of the trees have lost their tops to wind and storm and the vegetation seems to cling to the island as though it often needs to hold on for dear life.  For  the rest of the year though, these isles are a haven for wildflowers, indiginous plant species and all kinds of birds. ( On my last trip there I spied an enormous flock of geese which vacated the meadow above upon my arrival.)  There are beaches here too, though most of the shoreline is rocky and rugged.

The top image, Someone’s Sailboat in Oak Bay Waters shows the view from Oak Bay with Chatham and Discovery in the background.  Most days when I look out at the sea, especially eastward from Oak Bay, I see bands and striping on the water’s surface, I suppose caused by wind or cuttents .  It’s one of my favorite  things to observe and to paint, though I have yet to get it 100% perfect.  In July and August when the water is calm and the breezes play lightly with the surface instead of whipping the waters up into whitecaps and swells, the banded surface sparkles with all kinds of lightplay, creating a radiant glare.  I wait all year to see this radiant, doldrum sea and this is what I’m driving at in this image.  The sailboat made a nice, placid subject for the foreground.

The second image, The Lagoon on Chatham Island,  shows the end of the lagoon at the center of the island, seen from the west side where there is a type of meadow that looks like it gets flooded with seawater from time to time.  There is a cairn on the meadow and I wonder if it is the grave of Jimmy Chicken, one of Victoria’s more noteworthy historical figures. ( I’m not sure though – could just be a pile of rocks.)  I found this one difficult – it was my first serious project after two years away from my acrylics and the scene was a little overwhelming.  Here I wanted to convey the beauty of this meadow while preserving the rugged, weatherbeaten look of the island.

The last image, Chatham’s North Islet with Geese and Flotsam is sort of a mish mash of ideas.  I changed my mind twice while painting this and then I added things that were not in the original plan.  In the end, it became more of a sketch than anything else, a way to work out some ideas for future work.  I am particularly interested in the vast amounts of flotsam that washes up on the shores of Vancouver Island and here we have a tangle of rope and lumber, two lost floats and a milk jug.  It’s kind of sad that there is no end to the trash that piles up on the beaches – containers, bottlecaps, lumber, smashed-up pieces of plywood, old floats, styrofoam and a million other things show up on our shores. It comes from Asia, Alaska and Vancouver, following the currents that eventually sweep past the bottom of our island.  it’s trash, but most flotsam is interesting to me – I like the idea that there are a billion objects out there, each with its own story, riding the waves and following the organic patterns of water and weather.  Each piece of flotsam is destined to touch solid ground again but the mystery lies in when and where that will be.  Somehow its presence makes a scene more interesting to me too, providing a break away from placid landscape images and the fluid, perfect lines of nature.  Trash speaks to the presence of humanity; it’s angular, jagged, geometric, poisonous and unnaturally coloured.  I like the juxtaposition, I suppose.

If the hearty Cap’n Jib will take us, I’ll definitely go back to Chatham.  For now, I’ll have to be content with photos and drawings from our last visit.

I’ve always loved Victoria for its coastline.  The way the weather moves around here compared to other places I’ve lived, seems to make the views from Dallas road and Clover Point different every time I go.  I like the moodiness, the fog and haze of winter, and the bright freshness of the beach in the sunny months.  many people find the winter here to be a real downer, but not I, not really.  I like the closeness of the sky and the blanketed feeling one can get on a day in December.  I’ve made a few canvases of this south shore area and for the most part, I’m pleased with them.  Most of these are acrylics on canvas and are more of a study of the mood of the beach than anything else.  Some of these are gone, one I’m keeping for myself.  But I still have a few left.  If you like what you see, or would like to commission something similar to the images below. I can definitely accommodate you.  I’m at jmrode@gmail.com.  I hope you enjoy these paintings as well as those in the posts below this one.

Cheers!, J.

Driftwood House, acrylic, 2005.

Finlayson Point, acrylic, 2007

Pilot, watercolour, 2007

McNeill Bay, acrylic, 2006

Dark Weather on the Juan de Fuca, acrylic, 2006.  Sold

Red Log, 2006, acrylic.  Sold

Thorny Thicket, Acrylic, 2007.

Farmer Plum’s Great Pumpkin Adventure is a book by John Hansen which I had the pleasure of illustrating.  I had never done watercolour cartoons before, so it was an interesting project and fun too.  All told there are 23 illustrations to go with John’s wonderful story about a Saltspring Island pumpkin farmer who has a few adventures and learns a few lessons as he takes his pumpkins to market.  The story is excellent and keeps kids engaged and the young ones enjoy the warm, soft illustrations too.  All the kids in our lives have a copy and it often ends up being the preferred choice at storytime.  For me, I guess, that’s the best part of the whole enterprise.

Anyway, here are a few sample pages.  If you’re interested in purchasing a copy, you can reach me at jmrode@gmail.com.  I can put you in touch with the author, or sell you a copy from my stock.  I’m not sure what John sells them for, but I think it’s about $12 Cdn.

Cheers, all! J.