Places Where I've lived: Ferndale 16 and the Bungalow in East Van.

I became an artist January 1993.  I was thirty-six years old, soon to turn thirty-seven.  I had been working on a series of abstract drawings with felt pens, highly coloured and showing an interesting strength and sophistication.  I wanted to continue with this but wasn't sure what direction to take.  I didn't yet think myself an artist.  In late January I had a chat on Davie Street with a local artist whose paintings were already locally known.  He looked at my drawings and told me to start painting.  He was emphatic about this and I obeyed.  I started with small pieces of canvas board and whatever cheap acrylic paints I could purchase.  I started with a triptych of small moonscapes.  One seemed particularly good though I couldn't vouch for the others.  I continued painting, all abstract, until I painted my first birds, two hyacinth macaws.  Then I bought stretched canvases and continued to experiment with ideas: abstract renditions of the human iris, bird paintings, abstract renditions of the Jerusalem Cross.  I was suddenly obsessed with painting.  I worked at it, visited art galleries, openings and talked to artists.  I finished twelve large canvases of bird paintings: four by three feet in size, ten interpretations of the human iris, and half dozen Jerusalem crosses.  They looked okay, but not great, rather like the work of a promising beginner, in a tenuous and nervous novice artist sense of course.  In the fall I did my first exhibition: a café on the Sunshine Coast.  Then I showed at a couple of cafes in Vancouver, downtown, in West Point Grey, then later in the West End where I met my agent.  She, it turned out was the girlfriend of the artist who got me started just over a year ago.

The young woman helped me find a client, an architect who commissioned three huge parrot paintings plus a large canvas of hyacinth macaws for a hotel he had designed.  The paintings were finished after a lot of work with a looming deadline and suddenly I had enough money for my first trip to Costa Rica.

I was gone for twelve days.  The Rwanda genocide was underway, and while eight hundred thousand plus Tutsis and a small population of Hutus were being slaughtered I explored the cloud forest in a country I had long dreamed of but never thought I would succeed in visiting.  Except for my two plus month excursion in Europe in 1991 I assumed that I would always be too poor to travel to anywhere further than Vancouver Island.  I saw birds that previously had existed for me only in library field guides and picture books.  I hiked mountainous trails hugging cliffs and precipices shaded by a canopy of palms and tropical hardwoods.  I met people, amazing people seeking the elusive satisfaction that lures the restless traveller.  I celebrated twelve glorious days away from Dippy and Dopey and their often self-inflicted problems and drama.

I didn't want to leave but I had to leave.  I had to go home again, not to Ferndale but to the house in South East Vancouver we had to move to the previous Halloween night when Dippy and I almost killed each other, the moving day from hell.