For this week Discover Challenge: Flâneur Krista asks us to “Observe your city, town, street, or patch of earth and report back — in your favorite medium.”
No surprise that the patches of earth that I love to feature on The Changing Palette, as you know, are here on Kitsilano Beach Park in Vancouver with views out to English Bay.
Yesterday’s morning walk at sunrise was rewarded with these glorious Fall colors in the park…
the silhouetted figures seen between the trees…
and the tankers illuminated out in the Bay.
One final image from the walk you might recognize as I used for an eerie backdrop in my post for this weeks Photo Challenge: Transmogrify.
I rescued this majestic branch whilst walking home one day last summer and brought it back to the studio. It was about to be pulverized in a wood chipper but like the photinia that you will remember from my yard work to art work story, it became my model.
Using the small branches from the photinia as drawing tools it started to come to life transforming my empty sheet of Arches watercolour paper one warm July day.
Finally, as I completed the painting today with the brushes from the Gift of the Four Treasures, the spirit of the branch filled the studio once again and its story was complete.
I couldn’t resist re-purposing this image, which I originally posted three years ago, as a final submission for this week’s Photo Challenge: H2O, to celebrate the Nobel Prize for Literature being awarded to Bob Dylan today. I shall never forget hearing “The Times They Are A Changin'” for the first time in the sixties. His lyrics seem even more relevent today than they did all those years ago.
Read them, listen to them, reflect on them.
“Come gather ’round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You’ll be drenched to the bone
If your time to you
Is worth savin’
Then you better start swimmin’
Or you’ll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin’.
Come writers and critics
Who prophesize with your pen
And keep your eyes wide
The chance won’t come again
And don’t speak too soon
For the wheel’s still in spin
And there’s no tellin’ who
That it’s namin’
For the loser now
Will be later to win
For the times they are a-changin’.
Come senators, congressmen
Please heed the call
Don’t stand in the doorway
Don’t block up the hall
For he that gets hurt
Will be he who has stalled
There’s a battle outside
And it is ragin’
It’ll soon shake your windows
And rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin’.
Come mothers and fathers
Throughout the land
And don’t criticize
What you can’t understand
Your sons and your daughters
Are beyond your command
Your old road is
Rapidly agin’
Please get out of the new one
If you can’t lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin’.
The line it is drawn
The curse it is cast
The slow one now
Will later be fast
As the present now
Will later be past
The order is
Rapidly fadin’
And the first one now
Will later be last
For the times they are a-changin’.”
This week Cheri asks us to “look to the bond between human and animal for inspiration…If you currently have or have had a pet,”she writes, “you know the bond between human and animal is special, strong, and irreplaceable.”
Well the bond between Sunday, who walked into our lives twelve years ago on a Sunday, and me is indeed “special strong and irreplaceable.” These twelve calendar photos show why, particularly the last one where she has joined me in the studio and where she is right now as I am writing this post.
Wishing all my friends here in Canada a very Happy Thanksgiving.
Back home in Vancouver after our memorable visit to Québec, a photo for this week’s Photo Challenge: H2O to add to my 1000th post yesterday with this view approaching the Montmorency Falls in the Parc de la Chute-Montmorency on what was simply a perfect Fall day.
thechangingpalette 