A Walk to the Lake (and back): 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.