studio

Today my father would have been 97. Looking back, here he is in about 1970 with Rob at the ranch that he bought east of Brooks Alberta. Looking forward, the book I have written about him and his ranch has found a publisher! I spent the last year and a half writing an intertwined memoir […]

Another look at contemplative photography: world as collage. Is this image anything more than light and shadow, shapes and colours? Is this singular image ever likely to be recaptured as it appears here? Every day the sun will be higher in the sky, the shadows cast on a different part of the wall, the vegetation

Daylight Savings Time! I’m not going to ask the all-knowing what we are saving daylight from. The whole thing is another of humanity’s absurd attempts to control the disinterested natural world. Light was the focus of this week’s contemplative photography study; how light changes that disinterested world and and our perception of it; how we

These Fridays, late winter, early spring, I am taking a Miksang Photography course with John McQuade called Child of Illusion. The title refers to the mind training slogan, ‘post-meditation be a child of illusion’, and reminds you to look at the world as a child would. The photograph is an example of Colour as Colour,

I pray my hands together pointing up into the godless silence like an arrow the arrow I just yanked from my own ribs I’m not impenetrable This poem arose from a poetry workshop. The exercise involved a mind map, and, well, arrows! February is the longest shortest month of the year and I seem to

…why, don’t submit your manuscript, of course! Divert yourself, as I am, by working on prototype illustrations. This one will be a cattle drive, rendered in found fabrics and bought beads. My memoir about my father and his ranch is essentially complete and will be sent out into the world this month. While I wordlessly

Stories about my father and his ranch, which I started a year ago, have been scribbled down, typed up, workshopped, ordered, illustrated and made whole. Now my beta readers weigh in with their suggestions, knocking me off my high horse and back to earth. The last time I was knocked off a high horse was

Yesterday’s pink dawn was absorbed by the peachy trees and then pink and peach were both subsumed by my fibbing phone camera and its robotic desire to please by saturating colour and smoothing out the smallest imperfections. Capturing what you perceive is easier with a digital camera, and easier still with a film camera (but

… is in part the inability to let things be. It was time to make this piece from 2020, called Stanchion, “exhibitable”. My bricolage settings for poems tend to defy convention and complicate my intention to submit pieces to juried art shows, which can have particular rules. And now I have a poetry reading coming

This is what remains of Sgang Gwaay, a UNESCO World Heritage Site in Gwaii Haanas National Park, Haida Gwaii. (In 2010 the Haida Nation “respectfully repatriated” the name “Queen Charlotte Islands” back to the Crown.) Trying to write there, I found myself silenced by the power of the constantly moving water and the still shoulders