I'm pleased to announce Wild at Art has accepted our proposal for a grant to organize an exhibition.  The UpStares Gallery on Cleveland has agreed to work with us in presenting this event. 
 
During the same period, the Foyer Gallery will also host a show for us.  Below is the Call for Art for The Foyer Gallery. 
 
The Call for Artists for Wild at Art's Spirit of Squamish Festival is attached.  Click here for attachment.
 
We have the potential for a third opportunity, at the Adventure Centre, for our more accomplished 2D artists.  Details to come next week.  Please make careful note of all deadlines and requirements as we move forward into a very busy period.
 
For those artists who are not yet VISUALS members, now's your chance to sign up.  Our Membership Application form is attached.  Click here for attachment. The fee has been revised to $25 and your membership will be valid until the end of Feb 2011.  Please mail your Membership Application Form and cheque, payable to VISUALS:  45 Beach Drive, Furry Creek, B.C.  V0N 3Z1 at your earliest convenience or drop off at the UpStares Gallery.  Applications and inquiries for the calls to art are to be directed to the Exhibition Co-ordinators/Curators.

<http://www.squamishart.com>  or call 604 896-0159

Sometime ago I was sitting in the garden of one of Lions Bay's waterfront properties. The garden in full May bloom; the day sunfilled; Howe Sound glittering; the mountains still snow-capped. I recalled far off art student days when one revelled in such experiences, painted them with fervour and did so for many years later. The essentials of many a painter or poet were still in that garden. Monet, the Pre-Raphaelites, the Group of Seven were there to be seen. Keats also was there and Al Purdy was everywhere else; one could hear his unforgettable voice.

But now, although we still react to such sunfilled days with considerable feeling, some of us now have little desire or need to paint them. It has all been done before.

In the 1960s, painting as we knew it arrived at a terminus when a plain black painting was exhibited and met with much acclaim by the art critics; a plain black painting, no other colour was included; it was deep funereal black, marking the end, indeed the death of progressive painting as we had known it since Giotto (c1267-1337) to the 20th century. A century firmly established with many "isms", all bent on destroying or replacing that which had been accepted for years in society and the arts. None more readily than the Italian Futurists' manifesto (1909-1912) with their emphasis on violence in a fast moving, machine driven world. A violence which found full expression in the Great War (1914-1918) and in the early murmuring of Communism and Fascism, both ultimately intent on replacing established orders at the cost of millions of lives.

The arts did not directly cause the horrors, but the finger of most of the "isms" was definitely on the pulse of the real world - and it still is.

Shishmaref is an Inupiat Eskimo village of roughly 600 people, living on a small barrier island 34 kilometers south of the Arctic Circle in Alaska. In September this year I had the opportunity to spend a week on Shish, photographing the impacts climate change is having on this remote Arctic community.

Through a project funded by the UN Environment Program (UNEP) I am working with other photographers to help create a mosaic of images documenting the resilience of northern communities as they cope with the effects of climate change. The residents of Shish may soon become the first refugees of global warming as rising sea levels and melting permafrost are causing their island to quickly erode into the Chukchi Sea.

Our stay in Venice had come to an end, we left our hotel, the La Calcina on the Zattere at 11 A.M., a fog was covering the city and the Lagoon. The Venetian in the water bus (vaporetto) ticket office closes it after I have bought our tickets - closes it at this time of day!? Anyway no one else is waiting, no one else approaching out of the fog.

As we stand on the pier still waiting for the water bus to the airport, another man eventually arrives and reopens the ticket office and then sits looking blankly and lonely looking out of his small window. I look out over the wide fog bound expanse of the Gindecca Canal, wondering if the bus will be on time in such weather. To my left the Church of the Gesuati starts to ring its bells in a way unfamiliar to me. I notice a group of dark winter clad figures clustered on its steps that go down to the water. Then to my right emerging from the fog and gliding silently out of a small canal, the Rio di Travaso, a funeral gondola appears with a coffin draped in black with a red design on the fabric. It curves round in front of us, a dramatic ghostly image in the fog and then turns slowly to the steps of the Gesuati, where the bearers and mourners receive it to carry and escort the coffin into the church: they disappear; the doors are then closed to the world outside; the tolling bells stop.