I’m on the MV Chelan, headed back to San Juan from Saltspring Island, up in British Columbia. I went up for the weekend for a graduation and an art show. Kris’s son Julian graduated from Gulf Islands Secondary School this week, before heading off to Emily Carr in Vancouver next fall. I’ve known Julian all his life, virtually, so it was terrific to see him graduate and move onward. In a school which seems to cultivate individuality, Julian still stood out at graduation: tall, dressed in green sport coat and combat boots, and with a foot-high green mohawk, plastered into a rigid fin. He won four scholarships or bursaries — a strong performance even for a community which gave away dozens of awards totalling $80,000. At any rate, his parents and friends are very proud of him and can’t wait to see how he does at Emily Carr next year.
Yesterday, my friend Kim participated in the annual group photography opening at Artspring in Ganges. Four of her works, including a series of terrific close-scale landscape shots from Saltspring, were featured along with other island artists. Several folks had intriguing work as well, but the most interesting from my perspective was Janet Dwyer’s “scanography”: a technique where solid objects are arranged, sculpture-like, directly on the bed of a flatbed scanner, covered with black cloth to block extraneous light, and scanned at very high resolution. The resulting images are utterly stunning in detail and richness of color. Dwyer’s website isn’t up to date with many of these remarkable images, but if you’re curious her website includes contact information.
(I wrote this a couple of days ago and forgot to post it — when the WSF wi-fi installation finally includes us poor northerners sometime in 2008, it’ll actually be true that I’ll be posting from the ferry. But until then…)