By Lara-Sophie Boleslawsky (Vancouver Arts Colloquium Society) Photos by Noriko Nasu-Tidball Walking in, one is greeted by a jovial atmosphere; the afternoon sunlight filters into the room, illuminating the dark wood of the piano at the front of the room. There is a small buzz, with the audience waiting in anticipation for the concert to begin. We begin with the classics: Jane Perrett’s soprano voice is soars as she sings ‘Quando Me’n Vo’, teasing her lover as Musetta in Puccini’s La bohème. It is then Gerard Satamian’s turn to take the stage, and the tone immediately shifts as he laments love in Poulenc’s heartbreaking ‘Les chemins de l’amour’. Each performer embodies not only their respective characters, but also the songs themselves. It is a truly magnificent spectacle, and the brief intermission is needed, if only to refresh after the emotional outpour of each performance.      Indeed, we are treated not only to Jane Perrett and Gerard Satamian’s brilliant voices, but also to breathtaking piano instrumentals by Jane’s son, David. Performing classics such as Chopin’s ‘Prelude in B Minor’ and Beethoven’s first movement of ‘Leichte Sonate in G Major’ he brings a voice to these songs, flitting about the room as if truly alive.      Following the intermission is a brief performance by mezzo soprano Ayako Komaki. She beams brightly before beginning her performance, only to transform before our very eyes, becoming the tragic Queen Dido, mourning her own lamentable future whilst singing ‘When I am Laid in Earth’. The intensity present in the room soon reconstructs, with Jane Perrett’s rendition of the classic Disney tune, ‘When You Wish Upon A Star’, whereupon everyone is urged to join in. Continuing along this nostalgic frame, Gerard Satamian ends the concert with ‘If I Were A Rich Man’...

By Katherine Dornian (Vancouver Arts Colloquium Society) Photo Courtesy of Salome Nieto In a quiet, bare studio at the Shadbolt Centre for the Arts, I watch Salome Nieto being born. Her movements are slow and deliberate, full of pause. She falls into herself and then unfolds, slowly, evoking something fragile and primeval, facing the world for the first time. Behind her, poet Shauna Paull approaches with deliberate steps. In a shy, vaguely singsong voice, she speaks of water, light, and my mind leaps to the quiet of a first creation. In the background, original music plays, vaguely evoking Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake. Shauna watches Salome’s transformation, watches as she looks around in wonder and fear. Soon Salome embraces her, childlike and seeking comfort, and a deeply intimate connection is established before she is sent back out on her own to discover. All this time, producer Eduardo Menesses has been scribbling away at his notes, muttering quietly with the lighting and sound directors. When the song ends, he calls Salome over to work out some transitions, then asks her genuinely, what she felt while performing the scene. So has this process gone for over a year and a half – this constant cycle of meditation, observation and dialogue that’s gone into the production of Umbral. “It grows organically out of what we have to say,” says Salome. “It’s not about a product; we’re working together to create an experience.” The production, co-created by Salome and Eduardo with the help of their close-knit community of artists, is a reflection on human nature, as well as a commentary on the reality of war. It integrates an interdisciplinary mix of poetry, video, music and visual arts to support the core element of the show and Salome’s strongest talent, butoh...

By Katherine Dornian Photo Courtesy of Bhavna Solecki Therapist, businesswoman, activist, healer, philosopher – it’s difficult to pin down an exact title for what Bhavna Solecki does, since her work is all-encompassing enough to defy simple description. As the founder of Inner Evolution Healing Centre and now as a member of the planning committee for the Kerrisdale Permaculture Garden, Bhavna seeks to foster mental, spiritual and community balance in everything she does. For the past 15 years, Bhavna has run her holistic practice with the goal of building communities around the pursuit of “mindfulness” – the harmony of the mind, body and soul achieved through healing foods, meditation, exercise, and other curative pursuits. Though she holds a BA in psychology, her practice is primarily based upon Shiatsu and ancient Indian and Chinese medicine. It also features a significant amount of spiritual counselling, which she believes is directly linked to mental and physical health. “Doctors may try to take away pain,” she tells me. “But you cannot do that unless you first identify its source.” Because of this, Bhavna finds that therapy becomes a very immersive experience; she cites the paramount importance of fostering relationships with her clients, putting empathy at the forefront of her approach to healing. “If you don’t feel it, you can’t help,” she says, and makes a point of telling me that she uses the word “help”, not “treat”. Her process must be team effort with the individual, who must be willing to fully participate. Since she gives full autonomy to her patients, she trusts that they will take that step towards healing when they are ready, at which point she is truly able to help them. It is this act of trust that Bhavna states is one of the most...

By Katja De Bock Have you ever been in a situation of déjà vu before? Have you sometimes recognized places, tastes, smells or faces even though you’re sure you’ve never seen them in your life? In your present life, that is.   When Vancouver Island filmmaker Connor Gaston was four years old, he told his parents that in a past life, he was a carpenter named Peter, and fell off a roof. Gaston grew up in a Christian household and his parents had their faith challenged when they started looking into their son’s stories.   Some twenty years later, Gaston, an accomplished director of short films, researched cases of presumed reincarnation for a feature film screenplay.   The result, the buzz-making BC feature film The Devout, premiered at the Vancouver International Film Festival (VIFF) on October 2nd and director Connor Gaston promptly won the BC Emerging Filmmaker Award at the festival.   “I’ve always been interested in supposed accounts of reincarnation, and in theories about the afterlife in general,” says Gaston. “I read about a specific case where a little boy remembered a past life with incredible detail. He grew up in a Christian household and the parents had their faith challenged when they started looking to their son’s stories. This crisis of faith the family faced was so enticing to me. ‘What a great premise,’ I thought. The idea of reincarnation is so prevalent in society’s hive mind, but there really aren’t many movies about it. So I started writing.”   The Devout follows a young, devoted Christian family in a small Bible belt town, where the unthinkable happens. Darryl and Jan’s four-year-old daughter, Abigail, has terminal cancer with only weeks to live. Bedridden at home, Abi, while playing with her rocket ship toy, mumbles...

  By Sean Yoon   Having been invited by artist Colleen McLaughlin Barlow to attend the opening of her latest exhibition, “Whale Dreams” on September 30th, 2015, I arrived at the UBC Beaty Biodiversity Museum mindful of images I had seen of her work through her website. So in a sense, before I walked into the exhibition, I carried preconceived ideas of what I was to see and experience. The exhibition turned out to be highly different from what I expected, in a visually heightened, enlightening way to be able to experience her artwork in person. In particular, I recall being fascinated to observe the guests engaging with her art by taking pictures, conversing about her artwork in groups, as well as participating in some of the activities set up in the exhibition such as a drawing station where guests are instructed to draw blind contours of whale bone structures set up in front of them. Just as the Beaty Biodiversity Museum emphasizes how important the interconnectedness, or connection between human beings and nature is, Colleen’s art revealed a similar vein of thinking as we the spectators are made to contemplate the whale bones not just as one animal’s remains, but as a spectral symbol of our own mortality, our own bones residing within us. The exhibition provides an excellent opportunity to experience this in person, as well as check out the huge 26-metre long blue whale skeleton suspended in the museum’s atrium. If you have the chance, I would definitely recommend taking the time to visit the exhibition at the Beaty Biodiversity Museum in UBC before it ends on February 14th, 2016.   October 1, 2015 – February 14, 2016 Beaty Biodiversity Museum 2212 Main Mall Website beatymuseum.ubc.ca  ...

By Amy Cheng Photos Courtesy of Joanne Nakonechny   Art is not just about those usual paintings that hang on our walls. Rather, art is a way of understanding and unraveling how people piece their worlds together, with the medium being infinite. For Joanne Nakonechny, an avid connoisseur of textiles, this is especially true.   Joanne’s appreciation with textiles dates back to her childhood and that hasn’t dimmed. “While growing up, my mother regularly knitted and sewed, and in turn, she taught me how to cross-stitch, knit, and sew,” she fondly recalls. Additionally, she also has an aunt who is a weaver. Despite being well over ninety years of age, her aunt is still enthralled by the different perspectives in using Ukraine colours and patterns into her material work. ”It’s so incredibly inspiring,” Joanne gushes. Being surrounded by all those materials and inspirations involved in her mother’s and her aunt’s creative processes since young, her nascent fascination with textiles only grew. The more she wove, the more ideas came to her. And before she knew it, she was enamoured by a euphoric sense of freedom.   “I’m not only working with my hands, but I’m also working with various colours and my mind—thinking of the endless possibilities to the patterns. And within those frameworks, there is this constant rewarding engagement with chaos, which I just love,” she adds. “I understand that this can be overwhelming, but as long as you maintain within the weave structures, you have a hundred degrees of freedom. And this freedom is exactly what enables you to explore and find yourself within those very structures and boundaries,” Joanne explains. After all of her years of working with textiles, Joanne is still discovering herself in the process. For her, working with...

            By Patrick McGuire Photo credit: Noriko Nasu-Tidball, Keiko Honda, & Albin Sek              If spray paint is the brush of the times then the stencil artist is king.               Banksy and Shepard Fairy are among the most popular and influential artists in the world and the street art movement they’ve lead has created the images that have captured the spirit of our times. Both honed their craft on the streets, using stencils and spray paint to reflect and shape their urban environment. Robert Naish is not a street artist because that is not where he shows his art, but his stencils are from the street but his art encompasses the whole urban environment.                Naish finds his stencils everywhere. In thrift stores, junk shops, roadside stands and garages sales, they are the fly swatters, the kitchen tools, the plastic railroad tracks and children’s toys, the ones we throw away, the ones with interesting shapes that he can pin to the canvas and spray. He uses them for their shapes, for the lines they create when he places them with precision. He sprays on top of them with bright colors on giant canvasses to create intricate works that are stunning to behold. He has thousands of stencils to choose from.               “It’s endless,” says Naish, “I have more stencils than I could use in a dozen lifetimes. The things people throw away are like gold to me.”   Naish first began to paint with stencils and spray guns after painting extensively with oil and brush and exhausting all his ideas with them. He needed to do something different and found his answer in the city around him.               “Stencils allow me...

  By Sean Yoon Photo Courtesy of Colleen McLaughlin Barlow   Despite exhibiting artistic talent early in her childhood, artist Colleen Barlow had been channeled towards becoming an English teacher or journalist by her family based upon her aptitude in reading and writing with the idea that an education should lead to a job. Colleen would follow this thought process throughout the early stages of her education, going on to pursue a bachelor’s degree in journalism at Carleton University in 1976. What she encountered in studying journalism was that the field of journalism quickly proved to be an extremely rigorous and competitive environment as Colleen recalls, “Fifty percent of your mark in 3rd year reporting was running the C.B.C. News Room for one afternoon in Ottawa and you were being watched by professional journalists who at the end of the day, would say whether you passed or not. You might’ve been working for three years on a degree and you could have just been cut right then.” Ultimately surviving the competition, Colleen began her career as a journalist at the age of 21 after graduating in a class of only 42 students from a starting pool of near 400 first year students.   The stress that came from a rigorous, competitive environment would persist throughout Colleen’s career as a journalist, which culminated in instances where her moral values were skewed negatively. Colleen recalls a particular instance of this phenomenon stating, “It’s very stressful and you start to get some very odd values like I actually remember being in a war zone in the Bekaa Valley. Nothing had been happening for about three or four weeks and then suddenly there was some skirmishing going on and I thought to myself: ‘Great we’ve got something for...

By Amy Cheng   This spring I had the pleasure of being invited as a participant of the Weaving History Together: Making a Collaborative Blanket project led by Vancouver Arts Colloquium Society, which is an interactive and collaborative scheme designed to bring our neighbourhood together as a community through weaving a community blanket. Not community in the way it is used to describe a target market where conversations are only grazing the surface level. I’m talking about a real community of diverse people, of all ages and backgrounds, invested in each other. With that in mind, I spoke with the project facilitator, Debra Sparrow, an eminent weaver on her vision and inspiration for the project, and some of the other participants, like myself, on the process and the significance they have found through this initiative.   “I wanted to facilitate art that both the young and the old could easily participate in, because I believe art can be created by everyone—we are all creative,” says Debra. Of her own work with textiles, Debra describes, “The art of weaving is familiar to every culture, making it an ideal tool in creating communication. Conversations and understanding can’t help but manifest across a loom.”   Also inspired by the her affectionate memory of the Kerrisdale Community Centre as a child, Debra says, “I think it would be really fun to weave stories from the threads of our experience and communicate our stories with others. Binding our stories together in creating a beautiful community blanket.” She hopes to demonstrate the way our stories reflect the knowledge and wisdom that are part of every generation. “We need to listen, then listen some more,” Debra explains. “We just have to pay attention.”   “This project will do just that. As others...

By Lauren MacFarland   It’s a goal of any artist and Stuart Ward has managed to achieve it: to create something truly original. Based in Vancouver, Stuart is the head of Hfour, a design company which pushes the boundaries of art as an immersive medium, bringing his installations out of the confines of galleries and into public venues, making his work more accessible and interactive, introducing the public to art they might never have discovered. It’s a fine balance to strike, to create innovation while keeping it approachable, as he explains, “if it goes so far that you need to have a large explanation to understand it, then maybe the visual communication is missing something.” Public art which is funded by taxpayers should especially be something that can be appreciated by anyone of any age.  “I don’t think there’s going to be a great big cultural shift, but if one person who doesn’t want to go to the art gallery has an interesting art experience…they might wonder what there might be in the world.”  This year, Stuart’s work ranges from a light installation at the annual Cherry Blossom Festival to working with performance artists, merging the physical beauty of dance with projection mapping technology that turns the sky into a stage. But perhaps the most exciting project Stuart has in development is ‘Divine Lights’, a stunning mix of craftsmanship and video art that comes together to create art pieces that are both state-of-the-art and a callback to the stained glass masterpieces of centuries before. It starts with projection mapping technology, the projection of video onto a solid piece, but Stuart takes it one step further, displaying video on LCD screens behind an overlay. The video displayed corresponds to the lattice, and the result is...

    By Oliver Hockenhull  Photo Courtesy of Oliver Hockenhull         Beginning with some key definitions: 1.  The technological singularity is the hypothesis that accelerating progress in technologies will cause a runaway effect wherein artificial intelligence will exceed human intellectual capacity and control, thus radically changing civilization in an event called the singularity.   2.  Norbert Wiener, mathematician and philosopher, defined cybernetics in 1948 as “the scientific study of control and communication in the animal and the machine.”  The word cybernetics comes Greek κυβερνητική (kybernetike), meaning “governance”, i.e., all that are pertinent to κυβερνάω (kybernao), the latter meaning “to steer, navigate or govern”, hence κυβέρνησις (kybernesis), meaning “government”, is the government while κυβερνήτης (kybernetes) is the governor or the captain.   3.  The Anthropocene for the current geologic chronological epoch that began when human activities had a significant global impact on the Earth’s ecosystems.   We’re navigating rough waters, living in highly accelerated times and we haven’t caught up socially, culturally, intellectually, institutionally, economically nor ethically to the incredible capabilities of our computational technologies. It bares repeating —each of us is wandering around with the power of devices that are more powerful than the computers used to help land Apollo 11 on the moon — and what do we use them for? Typing to one another and downloading cute videos of our feline overlords. Our society and our politics are becoming increasing polarized, contentious, violent — though most of us would agree that our government system is falling to successfully manage our today let alone to envision a livable future  — and that our politicians and pundits are grotesquely over paid windbags of one sort or another — whose decisions are rarely wise. We will soon have the capabilities to realize the utopian dreams of generations — a united world living sustainability in creativity, peace &...

By Katja De Bock* Photos Courtesy of Coni Martin   A young woman sits on a racetrack, holding a prosthetic leg in her hand. “This is my everyday leg,” she says, “The toe is split, so I can wear thongs.” Then she looks over to a metal leg adjusted to her left knee. It looks a bit like the “blade runner” tool that gave Oscar Pistorius his nickname, but it is prettier. “This is my running leg,” she explains, with my new, beautiful cover over it.” Using those legs is what made North Vancouver’s Andrea Holmes famous. She is an award-winning Paralympian. Holmes was born with a condition of her left foot called fibular hemimelia. Her parents made the difficult decision of amputating her foot, so she could have an active lifestyle while using a prosthetic leg. She represented Canada in Athletics from 2002 to 2007, winning a Bronze Medal in long jump at the Para-Pan American Games in 2007. She has also competed on the BC Para-Alpine ski team. Holmes is a four-time Canadian long jump champion, three-time 100m champion and a Canadian record holder in high jump. Five years after her retirement as a professional athlete, a Langara College graduate of the Documentary Film Production program made a film about her. Coni Martin’s fine short My Favourite Leg recently screened at the Vancouver International Women in Film Festival (#VIWIFF2015). It will also be shown as part of the Just Film Festival, an annual festival of short films made by students in the Langara College Documentary Film Program. That screening will take place Sunday March 22 at 12:15 PM, at Langara College, 100 West 49th Avenue. “It made me cry,” says Holmes about the film, hardly 15 seconds into our interview for Kerrisdale Playbook. “She so eloquently was...

  By Pia Massie  Movies tell stories in the most profound way possible.  The images flicker like a fire – throwing light on the human condition.  The sound and music surround us, enveloping us in feelings ranging from pleasure to terror, depending on the genre we are in the theatre to watch.  Every frame, every picture tells a story that we read and file according to our own experience, our own individual set of associations, questions and desires.   We live in a global community of storytellers; all trying to make sense out of the ongoing chaos of our daily lives. Movies since their earliest moments have provided us a roadmap, a template of how to be.  Or not to be.  Opening a window on another point of view, whether it is from across the tracks or on the other side of the globe, movies help us understand how to live. They help us make meaning.   People have learned how to love, how to forgive, how to steal the show or start a revolution – all from watching movies. As audiences have become more adept at understanding film language, stories have naturally become more complex – speeding up, breaking apart into fragments, reversing themselves, even playing backward.   In this vast ocean of moving images, documentary films have become ever more important, ever more resonant in this quest of making sense and meaning of our lives.  Our hunger for real life stories has increased in direct proportion to the declining sense of community that all our high tech cities with their sleepless, rushing populations have fallen prey to.   This hunger for truth and shared storytelling, have given rise to a frenzy of documentation. Does an accumulation of tiny proofs : I was...

 By Haley Cameron Photo Courtesy of Mariko Ando When Mariko Ando first moved to Vancouver fifteen years ago, she craved a local network, a connection to her new home. In the end it was art that led her to the community she was searching for, shaping her career and her life for the better.   Mariko first picked up printmaking at college, back in Japan. She loved the art form, but recognized that it was a difficult one to pursue. “Printmaking requires a studio, chemicals, a press machine…” at eighteen she chose to continue on with other artistic outlets, including drawing and acrylic painting. She landed a job at a magazine where she illustrated for the advertising department, offering a steady income and a means to develop her skills. “In Japan it’s more common to use illustrations everywhere,” explains Mariko of her role in graphic design. “Our company was huge, the Japanese economy was so good at that time; I was always busy with work.”       When Mariko and her husband relocated to Canada, she assumed the same publishing opportunities would exist. She quickly learned that wasn’t the case. It made the move to Vancouver more difficult. “I didn’t have a great job, I don’t have kids, I wasn’t connecting with people,” she explains. Having always maintained an interest in printmaking, local artists suggested she approach the Malaspina Printmakers Society on Granville Island. “That really changed my life,” Mariko shares, honestly. “I had bought a press machine, but I returned it right away and started to work in their studio.”       The Malaspina Printmakers Society is a local organization that brings printmakers together to create, workshop and exhibit their work. For Mariko it was a comfortable setting in which she could...

By Haley Cameron Photo Courtesy of Pia Massie   Pia Massie was working on independent film No Words Will Ever Do in Geneva when she decided that Vancouver would be her next home. “I had moved almost every year for thirty years,” Massie says. For the fearless artist/activist, who calls herself a fish in need of water, Vancouver seemed an obvious choice. “I flew here for five days twenty-eight years ago and immediately knew I wanted to stay.”   Proximity to the Pacific wasn’t all that made Vancouver appealing. Massie wanted to live in an English-speaking city with a thriving film community. In the end it was the community as much as the ocean that solidified the deal. “It makes it easier to do your work as an artist knowing that there are others working on the same thing; there’s a place for dialogue about effort,” she shares. Thanks largely to a supportive local film industry, Massie was able to focus on the documentary stories she felt passionate about. Apart from a six year hiatus that took her back to her hometown of New York City, Massie’s love of the west coast has supplanted her nomadic ways, making Vancouver her true home.   Massie has always been one for recognizing great opportunities as they arise. Perhaps most notable in her captivating story are the two years she spent training under National Living Treasure calligrapher, Shiryu Morita. Massie was working at an art gallery in Kyoto, Japan when the honorable Sensei happened to see her work and requested to teach her. That she had no formal training in shodo, a form of Japanese calligraphy, and had no intention in seriously pursuing the art form, didn’t stop him. “My boss explained that to refuse Morita Sensei...

    By Haley Cameron Photos: Noriko Nasu-Tidball   When Etsu Inoue first came to Vancouver from Fukuoka, Japan back in 1989 it was to explore. The twenty-four year old had caught the travel bug while working for a Japanese airline, prompting her to apply for a Canadian working holiday Visa. Fast forward twenty-five years and Inoue is still exploring — but these days it’s with water colours and calligraphy.   “There is so much more nature here than in Japan,” Inoue shares, explaining how she came to stay in British Columbia and what inspires her creative work. “And there is quite a strong community of artists,” continues Inoue, a member of the Federation of Canadian Artists who is graciously appreciative of her local support systems.   When Inoue first landed in Vancouver she remained in the tourism industry, working with a local tourism company until 9/11 and SARS fears began to hurt the travel sector. “That’s when I started pursuing my art and calligraphy more seriously,” she shares.   Inoue first began studying calligraphy at the age of eight, when it was introduced to Japanese children as a part of their regular academic curriculum. Since leaving Japan, Inoue has continued to train under the guidance of her master, whom she calls Kisui, using his artist name. “I’m still learning,” laughs the humble student, explaining that she sends her work back to Japan for feedback once per month.   Her water colour work is an entirely different story. “It is all self-taught,” she says. She began pursuing painting professionally fifteen years ago. “Before that it was always a hobby; I love painting very much,” says the artist. Inoue has customized her watercolor painting by incorporating materials traditionally used for calligraphy. “I use the washi...

  By Dr. Richard Niles Photo courtesy Dr. Richard Niles   I have been a professional arranger in popular music since 1975. Most people, even some musicians, have little idea what that means. Many think that studio musicians make up their parts in a joyous act of spontaneous inspiration. So what do arrangers do, anyway? Consider the explosive, instantly recognizable brass melody in the opening bars of “Dancing In The Street” by Martha and the Vandellas. Who wrote it? If you assumed it was written by the songwriters, Marvin Gaye, William Stevenson and Ivy Hunter, you would be wrong. Paul Riser, one of Motown’s staff arrangers, composed that melody and decided on the instrumentation of trumpets, trombones and saxophones to play it. Riser, usually un-credited, composed instrumental lines such as this to enhance many hits and act as a “hook” to the listener, encouraging them to buy the records.        My book presents the work of some of the most influential arrangers in pop, artists who have been uncredited, undervalued and misunderstood. Yet, despite being “invisible” to the public,  during a critical period of popular music history arrangers have played a significant part in the evolution of musical genre and content. In the U.S. arrangers have the opportunity to be recognized by the Grammy  Awards in two categories—Best Instrumental Arrangement and Best Instrumental Arrangement Accompanying Vocalists. At least winners and nominees can use this to promote themselves and bring in more offers of work. In Britain and the rest of the world there is no such award. The financial rewards of an arranging career are limited. Arrangers are paid a fee for each job. It’s not huge. Keep working, get jobs in every week and you can pay the mortgage. Arrangers receive no royalties unless they...

Choreography and performance: Salome Nieto Artistic Direction: Eduardo Meneses-Olivar Exploring the scope and depth of her Mexican culture and bringing her curiosity over its marvelous reality and surrealism as the starting point for this work, Vancouver’s Salomé Nieto uses religious iconography, beliefs and traditions as inspiration for this work, an investigation into the themes of devotion, ritual and myth. Camino al Tepeyac is a metaphor for the convergence of two cultural and religious beliefs in one female deity that is the origin and end of all things. The Mexicas called her Tonantcin (Our Mother Coatlicue) and after the conquest her name became Virgin of Guadalupe and the Mother of the Mexican people in the Catholic faith. pataSola Dance wishes to acknowledge the support of the 2014 International Butoh Festival in Argentina, the project “Puedes Volar Mariposa” directed by Master Gustavo Collini-Sartor, the auspice of the Mexican Embassy in Argentina and the Canadian Embassy in Argentina during our stay in Buenos Aires, and the support of Canada Council for the Arts, the BC Arts Council, the Province of British Columbia and Shadbolt Centre for the Arts for the full production of Camino al Tepeyac. Camino Al Tepeyac runs from Wednesday November 19 2014 to Saturday November 22 2014 in the Studio Theatre Reserved 6450 Deer Lake Avenue Burnaby BC V5G 2J38 pm Approximate running time: 120 minutes Ticket through box office 604-205-3000 Tickets are now available to purchase at tickets.shadboltcentre.com Here is the sneak preview of Camino Al Tepeyac    ...

By Aryan Etesami Photos courtesy of Tim Sullivan    Tim Sullivan, a local contemporary abstract artist, was born into an Anglophone family in Montreal, Quebec in 1946. Ever since childhood, Tim had a ceaseless interest for various art forms as well as philosophy, and spirituality. Despite his passion for the arts, Tim decided to pursue a career in his other area of strength, the sciences and specifically Chemistry. He obtained his Bachelor of Science Honours and later his Master’s degree in Chemical Kinetics from Concordia University in Montreal in 1971. He then moved to beautiful British Columbia to further his Chemistry education at Simon Fraser University, where he left as a Doctoral Candidate in 1974. While Studying at SFU, Tim spent 5 months in London, England on what turned out to be a life-changing odyssey for the future artist. There he embarked on a journey of self-discovery and enlightenment, and came to the realization that Chemistry is just not what he was born to do! Following his return to Vancouver, Tim left the PhD program at SFU and took on a number of jobs as a chemist before changing course to studying Psychology; he was accidentally re-introduced to art in his late 40’s when a romantic partner gave him a book to read: “The Artist’s Way” by Julia Cameron. After reading the book, he immediately purchased the necessary supplies and started experimenting with paints and canvas, using his creativity. Tim’s reunion with his artistic side was followed by a series of demanding posts as a counsellor and a trainer for a mental health facility, as well as the responsibility of raising a child, which together would not allow for him to focus on art. The fire had already been lit however and as soon as he...

Text and Photos By Valerie MacGregor-Rempel www.valeriedrempelphotography.net http://valeriedrempelphotography.blogspot.com/  My journey to British Columbia started off with a friendly request from a college and friend Timothy, artist/owner of Timothy J Sullivan Studio on Bowen Island. BC.  As am Humanitarian/Social Photojournalist and Women’s Advocate/Life Coach, I know my journeys are always filled with so many amazing stories and experiences.   British Columbia is a beautiful provinces and the scenery is eye candy to a photographer. This experience honestly touched my heart in so many ways. I new the BC’s landscape would be spectacular but the people I met along the way was simply marvelous.  I am honored and humbled that so many could feel my gentle/energetic spirit and felt they can open-up their hearts to a complete stranger. To some my camera intimates them but to other my camera is a tool to share their personal stories and set them free from what ever they are experiencing at the time.   A met Timothy O’ Sullivan on a group Facebook page for Artist over two years ago. We have established a working friendship and thought it was time to collaborate together in a joint exhibit at his studio on Bowen Island, BC. It was an awesome experience to work with Mr. O’Sullivan and to meet fabulous people from the Artisan Square.   It my quest to set up for the exhibit, I felt a wee bit out of my element. Not having all the items that I usually decorate my exhibits with I was truly fortunate to have met Sharon Dunbar owner of Bell’ Occhio. Mrs. Dunmar was so gracious and let me borrow several items from her store to contribute to make the exhibit sparkle. It is important to me that I include local shops...