Paintings, a drawing and far too many photos - perhaps.

Both of these paintings are acrylics that I painted in the winter of 1999.

Please excuse the moray in this photo.  That's my daughter's mom, wearing my boots, posing very patiently one morning when we were first living together,  The larger hangeul reads 'morning darling' and the small labels about her read 'flower', 'clothing' and 'hand'.

I did this drawing of 'Mashimaro' with a mechanical pencil my stepson Yeonshik gave me for my 33nd birthday.

This is an oil portrait I painted from a photograph of Yeonshik the next year.

And now here are probably far too many photos from Tuesday, June 29th, 2021.

 

Finally, the lake

This drawing, however, is not of the lake but of a beach near Kampo, South Korea. I started working in Ch'ongju, South Korea at the end of April, 1997. On my vacation in July of that year I decided to go to the beach.

The next winter I realised I had almost had enough of Korea for a while.  I made plans to teach the next summer in Poland instead.  You may recall me mentioning a Polish Canadian girl I had dated in the summer of 1984. She and her younger sister had gone to Poland for July to stay with relatives there, and I had asked her to send me a postcard. She told me a lot of things about Poland when we met again after her return, and when I finally got the chance I decided to go there myself.  I spent the summer of 1998 teaching English to children in a small town named Wegerska Gorka, near the border of Czech. I did a few drawings of wildflowers near the pensjonat which I tinted with watercolour and mailed to a friend in Canada. I also started painting watercolour portraits of the children I was teaching, which I gave to them as gifts for their parents.  The next summer in Poland I taught at a summer English camp in Mrzezyno, on the Baltic coast west of Kolobrzeg.  

Here is a drawing I did of the beach there.

I returned to South Korea at the beginning of December, 1998, when I met my daughter's mother.  We married, had our daughter, and were divorced by April 2002.

Here is a drawing I did on vacation by myself in south Chola Province the following summer.

I don't have any photos of the portraits of children I did during my two summers teaching in Poland, but this portrait I did of my daughter when she was six is in the same style. I coloured it with pencil crayons instead of watercolours.

I also did this drawing of Yeonshik, the younger of her two half brothers, who lived with their mother, Ella and me the last year that we were married.

And now, some photos of the lake, lots of morning glories, and the rabbit which was the source for two drawings in another previous post.

These photos were all taken during my walk to the lake and back on Wednesday, June 23rd, 2021.

 

1984 all over again.

A month after I turned sixteen I started dating a Polish Canadian girl almost a year older than me.  On one of our dates that summer we saw Under the Volcano at the Kingsway cinema. I read the Malcolm Lowry novel it was based on around the same time, and purchased several of his other books.  The poem of his that I remember best is titled Kingfishers in British Columbia.  I shot this video sometime in May of 2018 and composed and recorded the guitar track that goes with it later that month.

You might also be interested in listening to the song I wrote some twenty-five years later about that short-lived relationship in my seventeenth summer. I made a series of notes about what I could remember, which became the lyrics without any further changes,  It is track two on my 2015 album, do that again, and is titled 'lockers in the hallway'.

 Anyhow, here are the photos you were probably expecting from June16th, 2021. It was also a Wednesday.

And now some fauna to go with all that flora.

 

It is raining a lot more today than it was last year.

But first things first: I have been wanting to explain why I started using a fifteen year-old digital camera again when I have relatively new tablets and a quite new smartphone. 

My first digital camera was a Polaroid which I purchased in a blister pack for seventy-five dollars at the Grand & Toy in Cloverdale Mall sometime in 2005.  When I got it back to my mom's place, where my daughter and I were living that year, I discovered much to my chagrin, surprise and altogether mild amusement that it did not have a viewscreen on the back.  I would need to connect it to my second-hand G4 iBook in order to see the photos I had taken. In order to record videos - which were actually quite excellent, as were the photos, I purchased and installed a one gigabyte SD card.

I am pictured on the right in this image I photoshopped, holding that Polaroid digital camera. Misun on the left and the rock behind her will give you an idea of the picture quality it was able to deliver.

I began teaching myself photoshop in late 2019 with a free trial I had downloaded. The well-known artist Kent Monkman, whom I had met when I modelled for photos to be used as source images in his painted work, was looking to hire a studio assistant with photoshop skills. I did not even get interviewed for that job but I did have a lot of fun playing around with old images I had on my computer. I realized that the Panasonic Lumix camera I am now using on my walks to the lake and back delivered excellent images for my purposes, and started going out on walks with it to create more, Here is a self-portrait I photoshopped with two images I took that December.

And now what you have all been waiting for - some images that I took on my walk to the lake and back on Tuesday, June 8th, 2021.