A view of Liverpool city towards the Mersey with the tall commercial buildings blocking out the bright sunlight until the sun’s persistence starts to break through and tear open the gloom. On the right, towering above the street, is the Liver Building with its clock tower and the Liver Birds balanced on the cupolas above. […]

GLIMMERS ON WATER STREET – WATERCOLOUR PAINTING

Brian and Anne Bradford, a retired couple who live in Waterloo, Ont., have been married for 56 years. Anne calls Brian her honey, and for their date nights, they go to the Tim Hortons drive-thru, order some food and drinks, and sit in their car in the parking lot, eating and chatting. Like any other…

Canadian seniors are learning to find joy in a world of fear

Having recently sold a couple of canal scenes I thought that I would paint a view of the Leeds to Liverpool Canal at Parbold. Another reason was to rattle the Troll’s cage – it gets agitated when it sees a canal – though never reading its rants, it might have changed for all I know […]

A PLEASANT PLACE TO PAUSE – WATERCOLOUR PAINTING

THERE’D BE BLIGHTS OF THE CITY. I was playing with my pastels, looking at options for an abstract, and turned this pair into something else. Though all the time fighting to keep to the spirit of abstract and not being too descriptive with a view to painting a bigger piece. With the first one I […]

WOULD, FOR THE TREES … – PASTEL SKETCHES

TJ Watt didn’t know where he was. On the southwestern tip of Vancouver Island, the roads were long and dusty. It was the summer of 2005, and Watt had never spent much time on the remote logging roads of the island, despite having lived in Victoria for his entire life. After three hours of driving…

Documenting destruction

“This is so weird.” That’s the thought Raechel Huizinga had during an email exchange with Indigenous Services Canada’s media relations department in December of 2020. Huizinga is the editor-in-chief of the Queen’s Journal, the student newspaper at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ont. Despite having worked as a student journalist for three years—she joined the paper…

Why are young journalists filled with self-doubt?