Yard Mates (Hanging Out for the Long Haul)

The Pessimism of I.M. Beaton

All righty then, this may take some 'splainin', so bear with me...My grandmother was a Rosicrusian who would tell anybody who would listen that, "when she went, she wanted her ashes spread in her garden." As a precocious child I figured I could untangle this riddle. A Rosicrucian must be some kinda gardener specializing in roses. But where was she going and what did "ashes" have to do with anything? If I'm a nut case its partly her fault, I'm pretty sure. Her husband was a newspaper editor for the old Vancouver Times and a an amateur painter. He checked out the week I was born. All through my childhood I looked at two muddy oil paintings that hung above the chesterfield in Granny's livingroom.

My brothers used to ask our dad to draw stuff to illustrate the stories he would cook up for us kids. He couldn't draw worth a lick but he gave it a shot. My brothers were always impressed, but I would look at the drawings and shake my head, the ol' man would grin and that was that. When I would draw something he would show his poker buddies and generally advertise the productions of his oldest kid. Well he packed it in too, leaving the whole outfit shy of male influence. As luck would have it, my grandmother had a brother. In retrospect my great uncle was prolly a full blown loon, that no responsible parent now would let a kid anywhere near. But times were different and I was shipped off to see visit the iconoclastic recluse (that may be redundant, but you get the idea) for weeks at a time during the summer. I would be about ten and his shack was in the interior and it was hot and magical and I learned a lot of stuff that I maybe shouldn't have.

I called him, "Gunk"..a contraction of great uncle. Thing is, the ol boy was sort of a patron of the arts and a polymath and encouraged me to draw and paint. He was an incurable contrarian and encouraged me to question everything as a matter of principle. He had (wait for it, you can see it coming) wrecked cars and junk and told me what they were and how they got to his yard. I loved the idea of the junkers and the designs, colours and history...I was hooked.Gunk sent me supplies, books and encouragement until he joined the rest of the crowd up above (I hope). He lived to see my first big junkyard painting and was over the moon about the whole production, somebody else saw what he saw...beautiful junk.

Gunk's real name was Ian Marshall Beaton. An appropriate name for a natural "bad attituder" who didn't see any real future for mankind, yet whose bright light shone on his grand nephew (or whatever I was).

Drip, Drip, Rusting Away

A Cluster of Cabriolets

Snake Light Illumination

Barn Fresh Cabriolets

When a farmer advertises an old wreck he has hauled out of a web-infested corner of his falling down barn it is referred to as being "barn fresh".

The Car Lot in Cumberland Hill

Left Behind

Fletch Speaks From the Great Beyond

I would have liked to have been able to ring up Ol' James Fletcher Watson and ask him a coupla things. Maybe have had a little visit...a lesson or two. I re-read his wonderful, The Magic of Watercolor and was struck by his assessment of J.S. Cotman, after whom the paint is named. The Fletch was particularly impressed with how Johnny handled cloud shadows in the landscape. So I fiddled a bit with an old drawing and popped out this scribble. It prolly doesn't have much to do with what the masters had in mind but I liked the notion of darks and lights with no particular reason other than, "there they go...there you are!"

When the Wind Blows

I like to invent scenes that are hopefully resonant, the motion, the light...the way things were and still are in some places. Junk, clutter, the debris of the mid-last century, the fodder that I am compelled to re-arrange in my paintings to create my scenes. It is just plain fun for me and the reason I paint.

I am still working on this idea, there are a few things that are unfinished, but you can fill in the details like the unfinished chimney top...its the idea that is important. This is the middle section of a bigger painting that I thought could stand on its own. I love this breezy style of painting and I admit to being stuck not only in another world of old stuff but also an admirer of older painting styles and I lament their loss.

The Encore Performance of the Dowager Queen of Desolation Sound

When Vasiliev DeFrenz, a seminal influence on the local art scene, first batched up one of his "industrial art" pieces I was a teenager industriously working on perfecting the mechanics of a whole arsenal of bad habits. F'rinstance, I had taken up smoking filterless "Export A" cigarettes, learned how to roll a joint and was an apprentice acid dropper. My grandfather had provided me with the Panhead and I was generally a terror to no one in particular and a hazzard mostly to myself. The man I credit with my early career as a miscreant was the aforementioned Vaz DeFrenz ("seminal influence"...get it?), a charlatan of the first order and an instructor par excellence in the fine arts of dissolute inclinations and pastimes.

In the late sixties it was possible to get a Local Initiative Grant for any ol'hairball scheme and Vaz's proposal looked good on paper. Rolly paper, no doubt. He wanted to rescue an abandoned fishboat and restore it as an art piece, namely splash a coat of paint on it, drop it in the drink and hope it floated long enough for everybody on board to get thoroughly stoned. A noble enterprise in the opinion of the under-employed and heartily endorsed by the local council who were a bunch of comedians themselves. So, all righty then, grant given, boat located and hauled out and patched for painting. The usual rainbow- gaudy splash and dash paint job and sploosh back in the chuck. Well, some saboteur with a talent for the comedic had chipped out the seal around the propeller shaft and it took about five minutes for the boat to sink, right in front of the village council and the local M.L.A. It was seriously among the most pant-wettingly funny incidents that I have ever witnessed. Vaz beat it out of Dodge after draining the grant fundage into his pocket and I never saw him again.

The boat was eventually refloated but it was washed up in a storm and settled on the rocks across the bay and you can see it as the sun goes down, resplendent in it's glorious hues.

Before it was rescued and temporarily revived it had worked as the "Dowager Princess" in Desolation Sound. __________________
Ron Morrison

The Tub Unplugged

Light Circulatin' in the Holler

Pre-Study for the BIG PIC

An idea I am working on...bink to explore.

Seclusion Fusion

Truck-you-lent..."defiant".

have dreams about vehicles I have owned and collections of "stuff" that is stored and lost...I can't find them...because I never had them in the first place. Trucks that I lent to people and they disappeared. This is the shape of a lost truck that haunts my dreams sometimes...where the heck is it?

Left Behind

Stuck in the Mud

Doodlepot

Christian Ryder's Back Forty Relaxed

Bink to explore!

The Fish on the Watertower

The Miraculous Conversion of the Deacon, Christian Ryder

Deacon Christian Ryder, despite the implications of his sonorous appellation, was not particularly Christian until he was left a message just before his thirty-third birthday and on the eve of the birth of his twin girls. Left by natural forces at the command of a higher power, a fish appeared on his freshly painted watertower. Only he knows why he painted his water tower mud brindle brown, prolly got a signal from outer space, that being the origin of most important messages. He was supposed to paint the nursery, and not brown, but he decided it was a better idea to use up some old paint on the water tower. Now, it was hot and the paint was not inclined to form a permanent bond with the wood and that night a nasty little summer storm blew in and pelted the tower smartly. When all was blown and gone the watertower had a freshly inscribed fish. But it wasn't the stylized fish that school children stencil on catch basins to deter the pouring of used motor oil into the ocean or the bumpersticker fish identifying a certain type of zealot...it was a tropical fish, maybe an angel fish. Well Christian took this as a sign that he better get with the program on the brink of his wife delivering what they knew would be twins. So he looked in the phone book under "religious instruction", found the Holy Triangle Gospel Church and signed up for Wednesday night bible study classes. While not exactly mainstream, it seemed like a good fit and he was on his way to Deacon-hood.

Alrighty then, dial forward seventeen years, give or take. The Ryder twins, Debby and Dianne are in high school and are both gorgeous. I decide it might be a good idea to take a stab at asking Debby to a sockhop in the spring of '70. She says yes, but turns out "stab" was the operative word here. The Deacon decides to deliver his darlin' to the dance himself, what with him havin, a car and me not. So I hop on the' 65 Panhead (Harley) that my grandfather bought me on my sixteenth birthday and fixed up as a reward for me skipping grade ten. ('member him? Ironically he was another lay preacher...but I digress). I meet her at the door and we go in. I pay for the tickets and take her coat to hang in one of the cloak rooms. I put it on a wire hanger and the hanger slips out of my hand and stabs the back of her hand, producing quite a little geyser. Being a man of action (and scared &%$#less) I grabbed some masking tape from a sockhop sign and taped her up. I got her on the back of my bike, took her to emerge where she got three stitches, a tetanus shot, and later a scar. Her dad picked her up after I had beat it outa there. I steered clear of the whole gang for a while, but we all still live in a small town and Debbie never was mad that I could tell. Prudence kept me outa the reach of the Deacon as he was fairly sturdy and quite quick for an older guy.

This is how the spread looked in about 1980, long after the Ryders built a new shack...you could still see the "fish" and that brown paint stayed unfaded for years.

ImAginato Menacing on Easel

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Back to the easel for a quick sketch from the imaginato department. I have been reading Rowland Hilder and he was not a follower of traditional rules. Surprisingly, I have always just used transparent watercolor according to the "rules", mostly no opaque white, until recently no black, no chalk, pastel, graphite, carbon or plutonium. However ol'Rowland who shed his mortal coil some dozen years ago, used whatever he felt would work and his work is inspiring for/to me. I always wanted more texture and atmo in my productions, my wrecks are mostly dilettantes, they gotta be more wrecked...more menacing...

Riding the Bus

Fake Plein Air (Dodge-ing Traffic By Riding the Bus)

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I have always admired the P.A. practitioners and while I am constantly out photoging, it is nevertheless cold and dangerous out there, what with cranky bears and bottle collectors. So I closed my eyes and read the back of my eyelids and this is what was there. I painted it quick before it vapourized....so I guess I pulled it out of "thin air". I should fix it and color the windows but I like the play of whites against the linked darks so this is what you get. I will paint it again but this is the idea and I like the loososity factor. I will also cook up a story for the half dozen charitable souls who claim to enjoy them. In conclusion, while P.A. remains an item on the bucket list, the best I can come up with is T.A.

The Old Farmer Had Piles (of Cars)

The Brothers Chayne, whose sobriquets were trimmed from the cumbersome "Clinking and Clanking" to "Clink and Clank" and who were referred to as the Chayne Gang, ran an informal wrecking yard on their family apple orchard for at least fifty years that I know of (to end a sentence with a preposition). Piling things up in any sort of monumental configuration with the emphasis on "mental" was a favourite diversion from actually working. This set piece was was constructed as a tribute to nothing in particular and was erected with an enthusiasm that can only be fueled by an excess of alcohol. To the untrained eye it looked as if some practical purpose might have been served by the "piles" but in fact they were the products of an unleashed mechanical aesthetic that was not to be denied. "Art just doesn't happen, its created!" was the unlikely axiom of these two creators of rural art.

Oliver Stacks