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From Land and Sea, Vancouver Island inspires

Pinned to a cork board on the wall of Linda Yurgensen’s studio is a photo of her and her father painting together during a recent trip she took back to her home province, Nova Scotia. It’s a reminder of her very first inclination to translate reality into a representative vision through art.

Retired now, Allen Horne was a pipe fitter and plumber during working hours; father to six children, and an avid hunter and painter when time permitted. He first inspired his daughter to pick up pencil and brush.

“I grew up watching my father paint, he painted part time – never really showing his work anywhere,” she recalled. She remembers sketching, and occasionally asking if she could use some of his paint in her own works.

But after she entered her teens, the love of painting went dormant in Yurgensen for many years. “I did it up to a certain age, until I was maybe 13 or 14, and then I kind-of forgot about it,” she said.

She married, worked, raised a family and moved – in 1992 – to the Cobble Hill home, where she and her husband Eric still live. “For years and years it didn’t really occur to me to pick up a paintbrush,” she said. Not, in fact, until 10 or 12 years ago, a hiatus of about three decades, did she set brush to canvas again.

Once again, her dad helped her get going. “My father kind of encouraged me,” she recounted. “He sent me a book for Christmas one year, Painting with Pastels, and that’s how I first started, pastels.”

Since then, she’s been making up for lost time in the narrow studio, which looks suspiciously like a converted front porch, where she works. The urge to paint has become “an overwhelming desire to do something creative,” she said. What inspires her now are the forests, landscapes and seascapes of her Vancouver Island home… and always colour, vibrant hues of reflected sunlight.

“I just did it for the enjoyment of it, basically. And I noticed as I was doing it my work was getting better,” she said. 

She took one course in watercolours, tried pastels, went on to acrylics, but gravitated to oils as her preferred medium. “Oil is my love,” she said. “I really love oil, probably won’t ever leave oil.” Although she’s self-taught and paints by her own light, Yurgensen does admire The Group of Seven, and some of her work is reminiscent of Canada’s most famous artistic movement.

And like the Group of Seven, her work is deeply evocative of place, of Vancouver Island. We do get plenty of cloudy, rain-sodden days here, but Yurgensen sees and portrays them as anything but drab. “When I look at a foggy day, even, I’m not seeing grey, I’ll see purple and blue.” 

She wants viewers to experience her new homeland’s contours, shapes and hues through her art. “I’m hoping they see the West Coast as I do, not as a drab place, but the beautiful, green, lush, colourful rainforest, which is Vancouver Island,” she said. “Before I came I had no idea that this was here, now I’m never going to leave.”

To achieve the feel she wants, Yurgensen starts with a primed canvas, colours that with a primary colour, ‘something bright’ in acrylic. Then she paints her scene on, again in acrylic. “When that’s all dry,” she said, “I go in with my oils, but I don’t layer, I just lay the colours side-by-side, so you get an optical illusion when you look at it. It’s not blended.”

The artist’s life isn’t easy. Getting your work into galleries is hard, and when the work is rejected, it’s hard not to question why. “You wonder, it it the art, or is it just not the right time?” You have to push through and keep going. “I would say, just keep doing what you love, and eventually, others are going to love it too,” Yurgensen said.

Linda Yurgensen will be featured artist January 6 through February at Rainforest Arts, 9781 Willow Street in Chemainus, open from 11 am to 4 pm daily. She will be hosting an art demo Saturday, Jan. 18 from 2 to 4pm at the gallery.

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Please Take a Seat

There’s really no such thing as an empty chair.

That’s the conclusion you come to, looking at the evocative pictures Daphne and Art Carlyle have taken over the last 15 to 20 years of chairs outside cafés, in shopping malls, nailed to forest trees, in marble porticos, in just about every conceivable setting or configuration.

Funny thing is, there’s not a single person in any of the pictures hanging at Rainforest Arts, where they are featured in September and October. Rather, the chairs inviteyouto take a seat. But they’re photos, so you can’t step inside the scenes and sit yourself down, the only way to get there is through the portals of imagination.

Viewers are invited to turn themselves around and look out of the photos, instead of in. “I hope that they would look at the chairs, and imagine themselves being in that chair, in that location,” Daphne said. You can even bring a companion along and place them on the other side of the table. “Somebody special, or perhaps just a friend.”

“Any chair has an appeal to it, and there’s a temptation or an invitation to sit,” Art said. “So, a quaint table and chairs at a coffee shop is an invitation to sit and chat or take a moment, take a special moment.”

Part of that special moment is the chairs themselves, how our bodies conform to their shapes, how their curves and colours appeal to the eye. There’s an elegance and functionality to chairs that make them works of art in their own right, and capturing that essence is one of the objectives of Please, Take a Seat.

“I think it’s important to acknowledge the designers and the craftsmen, who make the chairs,” Art said. “Our role is to use our creative skills and technical skills to interpret that. I don’t think anyone who looks at the show is going to quite be able to view chairs the same again.”

So, consider yourself invited to Please, Take a Seat, during their exhibit at Rainforest Arts. The gallery is at 9781 Willow Street in Chemainus. It’s open from 11 am to 4 pm daily. On Sept. 14 Daphne and Art will be at the gallery all day for their opening (refreshments will be available). More information at RainforestArts.ca. You can also email info@rainforestarts.ca, or phone 250-0246-4861.

CraigSpenceWriter.ca

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The inspired whimsy of Morgan Bristol

Clocks with feathered hands, birds that ‘could be’ crows with four legs and stiletto beaks… Morgan Bristol, who will be featured artist at Rainforest Arts for the months of July and August, gets lost for hours at a time in a world of insightful whimsy, where he discovers art that delights and informs.

“I like to have a bit of character, comedy, in there so that people may have a little laugh, or see something in there that they can identify with,” he said at his studio, next to La Petite Auction House at 9686 Chemainus road, which he and wife Dawn Geddie operate.

To the uninitiated Bristol’s modest work space seems a combination repair shop, of some sort, and painter’s studio. That reflects his dual artistic persona: as a metal artist on the one hand; painter on the other, the painter in him only having emerged in the last year-and-a-half.

“I was trained as a metal artist, a jeweller” he explained, “and everything was sort of tactile and 3D, so this is kind of a new venture for me and I’m thoroughly enjoying it,” he said of his 2D debut.

There’s a sense of joy in most of his works, be they three-dimensional, or two. Clocks aren’t meant to measure time, really, so much as to make light of it; crows – if indeed the birds depicted in his recent works are of the Corvine family – aren’t meant to fly, so much as make us ask how flight is even possible.

Purposeful whimsy might be a good phrase to capture the spirit of Bristol’s work.

He’s especially excited to have his paintings featured. For someone who picked up the brush and spatula such a short time ago, he has created pieces that are innovative and captivating. You can’t help trying to imagine the world these creatures might inhabit – a world that’s an expression of Bristol’s own imagination.

“I seem to channel something when I’m painting,” he said. “It’s something that happens, and I can lose two or three hours in a second, and almost come-to and it’s done. It’s all intuitive in that sense.”

Intuitive, but worked with an almost sculptural passion. For Bristol the process is as important as what emerges out of it. “As far as the paintings go, I was never a lover of flat images. I always wanted to do something to those flat paintings, so that said, in this batch, I work in texture.”

His paintings are built up in many layers, Bristol explained, using just about any material that comes to hand. He listed paint, caulking material, gyprock mud, even tar as ingredients he uses to change the ‘contours’ of his paintings ‘until I get something that I like.”

Morgan Bristol’s art will be featured at Rainforest Arts, 9781 Willow Street, Chemainus, in July and August. The gallery is open from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. daily. More information at RainforestArts.ca or info@rainforestarts.ca.

Asked if the birds depicted on his canvases were crows, Bristol replied, “Could be,” and laughed. “It’s a hybrid, definitely a hybrid, open to interpretation.” Come see for yourself and take some flights of serious fancy interpreting his works. His July 1 opening will feature live music and, of course, Bristol himself.

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Featured Rainforest artist captures equine essence

Eleven years ago, Antonia Olak was walking in the trails near her home in Qualicum, when she encountered a couple of equestrians, one riding Gypsy, the horse that would inspire a series of paintings capturing the spirit of its kind: freedom, speed and surging power.

It was a eureka moment. “That whole experience will never leave me, I was just so excited,” she said, recalling the instant. “I was doing horse profiles before then, but this is the one where everything clicked, and I realized what I was doing.”

Olak wanted to capture the essence of the animals in abstract representations. More than that, she wanted to separate the equine qualities from any background noise, and place her likenesses on absolutely still canvases.

“I feel that extra space gives it a bit of weight, it’s a very quiet image, not quite vulnerable, but just calm,” she said. There’s a felt-tension between the abstract representations of the horses, and the limitless background – the works capture her subjects’ essence, without limiting their vital energy.

In Machusla, a ‘roly-poly’ somewhat clumsy animal she had actually ridden herself, Olak saw qualities many would not have detected. “As a painter, you understand, once you get going, that a painting has a life of its own, and it takes off and you just go with the flow, right?” she remembered.

“Well I realize what I did, was I got Machusla’s spirit, but it doesn’t look like Machusla at all,” Olak said. “She was always so willing to please, and so excited to be ridden, and she had this wonderful spirit.”

The negative space in Olak’s works is often linen instead of canvas, with the horses rendered in charcoal and acrylic. The works aren’t behind glass, so she has finished them with a polymer medium and varnish to fix and protect the actual image.

In some of the paintings Olak has included calligraphic elements. “A lot of my abstracts are like writing,” she said. “My mentor when I was young was Jack Wise.” An artist known for his eastern philosophy, mandalas and calligraphy.

Olak is the featured artist at Rainforest Arts in Chemainus for the months of May and June. She will have an Artist’s Demonstration at the gallery, 9781 Willow Street in Chemainus, May 11 from 1 to 3 pm. Go to RainforestArts.ca for more info.

CraigSpenceWriter.ca

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Dandelions ‘eulogized’ by Rainforest featured artist


American philosopher and naturist Ralph Waldo Emerson eulogized weeds as plants ‘whose virtues have not been discovered.

It’s in that spirit that Artist Diana Durrand portrays the common dandelion (Taraxacum Officinale), using bold paintings, delicate drawings and elegant sculptures, all intended to override our entrenched suburban bias against this much maligned species.

Her tribute, 100 Sleeping Dandelions, will be on display at Rainforest Arts, Chemainus, B.C. where Diana Durrand will be Featured Artist  for the months of March and April.

“From root to flower the dandelion is an edible, useful plant, its medicinal properties common knowledge among herbalists the world over,” Durrand says.

Yet, universally categorized as a noxious weed by homeowners and gardeners, the dandelion is mown down, poisoned and uprooted whenever it pops up on North American lawns, its hardy, prolific and incredibly adaptable nature the only things keeping the species from eradication.

“With this eclectic body of work my goal is to represent the many aspects of the dandelion I have experienced, from my earliest delights as a child, to the nihilistic adult attitude that has been cultivated by the home & garden industry,” Durrand says.

“I’m hoping viewers can tap into some of their own childhood memories of picking, smelling, tasting and exchanging dandelions.”

Is the dandelion an ‘invasive species’, introduced to North America and the rest of the world by the planet’s most pervasive invader, European Homo Sapiens; or is it a hardy, totally edible plant that has adapted to its new environments and flourished against all odds, to the benefit of human kind?

100 Sleeping Dandelions will shed some golden light on that question. You can preview the works at DianaDurrand.com

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Artist draws viewers Into the Stillness

Arts & Culture

Who knows where the wellsprings of creativity might be found? Growing up on a farm near the hamlet of Carlea, Saskatchewan, Patt Scrivener used to cycle to spot where a culvert flowed under the Canadian National Railway tracks, forming a pond that stayed throughout the summer. It was her ‘secret place,’ where she could go and ‘reflect’.

Into the Stillness, her feature exhibit at Rainforest Arts, which runs from Jan. 11 to Feb. 28, reminds her of that place, which is to say, even if it’s not the sole source of inspiration, it’s certainly a tributary she can trace, inviting people to join in her meditations.

“Water, for me anyways, takes me to a place of calmness and stillness, and a place of inner reflection, and I would hope with the paintings, that people will be able to look into them and be able to go to that place themselves,” Scrivener said. “Into the Stillnessis about going on that journey to that quiet, reflective place.”

Getting there on canvas isn’t the same as jumping on your bike and pedaling down the road. In fact, Scrivener says her scenes are more a geography of mind than representations of actual places. Her techniques bear that out.

She rarely works from photographs, and her process isn’t representational. The first step she takes, confronted with whitespace, is to ‘activate the canvas’. “I work very freely and loosely to begin with,” she said. “It just means taking the canvas from pure, blank white to having some action-marks on it.”

Brushes, pencils, spatulas, scrapers – Scriveners’ ‘mark-making’ tool kit is just as likely to include implements you’d buy at Canadian Tire as Opus Art Supplies. That’s not to say she’s just spreading paint randomly. Before the paint goes down, she sets her intentions, bringing to mind what she wants to emerge. “Those things are going to start showing up, because you’re thinking about it and you’re putting down paint in such a way that it might lead to where you’re going.”

‘Might’ is the operative word. You have to have a lot of faith in the process, and a willingness to let go. Asked if the process is sort of like jumping out of an airplane, without a parachute, hoping one will materialize, she said: “That would be a pretty good analogy.” The trick is to ‘not worry about the results,’ trust in the process, and have some fun pushing paint around, believing what you’re looking for will emerge.

She calls it ‘getting into the flow.’

“Once I get the canvas covered in lots of information, I start homing into my intuition to see if I see something, or a feeling, and then I start developing the painting based on that.” The artist’s intentions materialize through a process that opens up to their possibilities.  “I believe that the paintings come through me, if I allow it and that’s a lot about allowing, and trusting, and believing, and allowing you to get into that flow state.”

Scrivener is the featured artist at Rainforest Arts – 9871 Willow Street, Chemainus in the Coastal Community Credit Union building – from Jan. 11 through to the end of February. Rainforest Arts is open seven days a week, 11a.m. to 4p.m. She will be holding an artist’s talk Jan 17 at 11 a.m., and demos Jan. 17 and Feb. 14 from 12:30 to 3 p.m. (in the Coastal Community Credit Union). More at RainforestArts.caor 250-246-4861.

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Fred Durrand, Veteran

A lot of people in Chemainus know Fred Durrand, my father-in-law. At 93, he’s slowed down some, but still shoulders his pack a few times each week and makes the kilometre-and-a-half trek into town to do his shopping. Fred’s always busy, always out-and-about.

So I thought it would be appreciated, especially as Remembrance Day approaches, to attach some backstory to the amiable, dignified, gentle man who is so kindly treated at the grocery story checkout, the pharmacy and everywhere else he goes in town.

Fred was born in Revelstoke, BC. When you see him sitting in our front yard, his daily pint of warm ale to hand, watching the sun sail over Mount Brenton, or sink behind it, you know he’s reminded of his youth hiking in the mountainous backcountry of the Selkirks, or ski jumping on the lower slope of Mount Revelstoke. Many of Fred’s best stories are from his early Revelstoke days.

But the event that shaped him as a young man was World War II. He enlisted at 18 years-old, fooling the recruiting officer by memorizing the eye chart before taking his physical. He wanted to be a pilot, but when he was rejected for that duty, signed on as a dispatch motorcycle rider. He remembers most the camaraderie of the war, the characters he rode with, made friends with, socialized with.

Without a doubt, though, the most important story of all was his flirtatious encounter with a young Dutch woman Josie Gaarenstroom, the woman who would eventually come to Canada, leaving her family in Amsterdam to marry the man she loved.

Eventually Fred and Josie would have two daughters – Johanna and Diana; he would embark on a career in municipal administration – he worked in Revelstoke’s city hall for many years, then moved to the Coast to become Administrator of Central Saanich; then retire to Victoria, and – two-and-a-half years ago – join us in the move the Chemainus.

Every year Fred attends Remembrance Day services on Nov. 11. His comrades have almost all passed away, but his memories of them, their determination, discipline, sacrifices and antics are vivid. Fred is a man who cherishes his own stories and thinks deeply about the history he’s lived. During his minute’s silence he honours those young soldiers. But his reminisces are always counterbalanced by a deep sense of sadness and anger at the viciousness, futility and senselessness of war.

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Haunted Vancouver Island


In this video Craig Spence, Mid-Island Focus Editor, interviews Shanon Sinn, author of The Haunting of Vancouver Island.

Gord Barney’s ghost didn’t have quite the dramatic flare of Macbeth’s Banquo, who took the seat of honour at his Lord-and-murder’s table, drawing the culprit’s terrified denial, “Thou canst not say that I did it; don’t shake thy gory locks at me!” Nor did he respond to the specter’s appearance with the bulldog suavity of Winston Churchill, who, emerging from a bath during a post-war visit to the White House, was surprised by the ghost of Abraham Lincoln, and is reputed to have said coolly: “Mr. President, you seem to have me at a disadvantage.”

But the Nanaimo retired logger still has a pretty good tale to tell. He had deked downstairs during a friend’s house party to ‘drain my bladder’, but when he looked into the nether bathroom mirror, a withered crone glared back, threatening to scare more than the piss out of him.  “Get out of my house!” the hag shrieked, convincing Barney to evacuated the loo as quick as he could. “I was shocked,” he said. “The music from the living room was blasting, but I heard those five words so clear I’ll never forget them.” He ran upstairs, where he complained to the party’s hostess. “Well that’s not very nice,” she grinned. “I’ll have to have a talk with Lucy when I see her again.” Continue reading “Haunted Vancouver Island”

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Logs to Lumber in Chemainus sawmill


Ever followed a log through the workings of a modern sawmill. This three minute tour of the Western Forest Products mill in Chemainus, will immerse you in the sights and sounds of a modern mill, and introduce you to the people who make it happen. For the full story, see the Summer 2017 edition of Cowichan Valley’s Arbutus Magazine, which has run a feature article on the Chemainus mill.