Coal Harbour, Vancouver

Beacons of light pierce darkness, glowing shapes soften it, and reflections fracture, shatter, play rebel games.

I saw this display one evening in downtown Vancouver’s Coal Harbour, set over silks of myriad blues drawn up from the black. The light was utterly misbehaving. A gentle hallucination, or a sleep-fogged trick of the eye? Or, perhaps, the light was simply refusing the laws of physics and letting me in on its wild ways.

To tell what I witnessed, I needed hundreds of true lines, and a few rogue ones—agitators to destabilize the order. The maverick kind, the first to take on an empty dance floor, mastermind a midnight joyride, stay up to watch the dawn, and sweep everyone along with their punk spirit.

Watch for it, and maybe you’ll catch lights in riot, too.

Archival inkjet print on acid-free cotton paper
18” x 18” (16” x 16” image size) $175
24” x 24” (20” x 20” image size) $275

Merritt, British Columbia

If you go, you know.

There’s a place I go in the summer, an off-grid arts and music festival. More than a wild good time, it’s an annual pilgrimage for me, a journey to the sacred. It requires effort, and I come back changed.

It’s also a wild good time.

I live, for a few days, experiencing humanity in its glorious, absurd, innovative best. We all seem to be fuelled by soul, carried by spirit. I created this painting to capture, maybe, a tiny piece of the gorgeousness. How we welcome shadow in the surprising days and we light up the nights with our reverence. It’s what I know.

If you’ve ever been transported, suspended in time, washed in the magic of a liminal space where anything might happen, and it does…then you know, too.

If you go, you know.

Archival inkjet print on acid-free cotton paper

16” x 12” (12” x 10” image size) $105
24” x 18” (18” x 15” image size) $215
30” x 20” (36” x 24” image size) $325

I have a dream of being underwater, suspended in a miraculous liquid emerald, with flashing fish-like beings all around. I am mesmerized. It’s impossibly beautiful.

Then my chest seizes in fear: I am underwater and cannot breathe, I don’t know how to find surface, I will die. And then a deep knowing comes: breathe in the water. You will not drown. Breathe in.

I am so afraid. And then I breathe in, feel water rush into my lungs, and….it is oxygen.

I can breathe water. I am breathing underwater.

It’s an epiphany, a sudden certainty streaked through with sheer awe.

I start to swim, effortlessly, twirling and bounding alongside the shimmering beings, and we are all fish-people. We are dancing for joy in the glassy green depths. We are magic.

The divine makes its way to you, even while you sleep.

Archival inkjet print on acid-free cotton paper
12” x 12” (10” x 10” image size) $85
18” x 18” (16” x 16” image size) $175

This painting is an expression of the suspended moment­ when you come into the space and place that is precisely yours to fill. The simple, true physic of yourself in balance, a tumbled stone come to its angle of repose. You will, again, loosen, shift, fall. You will, again, find your equipoise, accept and attest to the scandal of your own flawed, magnificent humanity.

Archival inkjet print on acid-free cotton paper
12” x 12” (10” x 10” image size) $85
18” x 18” (16” x 16” image size) $175

English Bay, Vancouver

I grew up in Vancouver as it became a city of silver towers for postcard shots. So many summers, we flew from sidewalks and buildings for the beaches, welcoming us day and night.

The beach at English Bay is where two of us sat, side by side, watching the skyline. As the sun and people faded away, the downtown towers and Burrard Street Bridge turned into brilliant jewels splayed out against the lapis-blue-velvet sky.

Becoming more daring with the darkening sky, secrets dropped between us, embers falling to the trusted cool sand.

We took turns, in the ritual of reveal, safe in the close space between our shoulders as we looked at the light show, with the sound of slow water slipping on and off the low slope of shore.

Maybe you remember, one time, the view while you came into love.

Archival inkjet print on acid-free cotton paper
12” x 16” (7” x 14” image size) $105
18” x 24” (11” x 22” image size) $215

Wreck Beach, Vancouver

After the tramp down, down, down steep wood and dirt stairs, beneath the cool canopy of western rainforest, the trees thin, part, and reveal this stretch of sand and ocean. In the summer sun, umbrellas and sarongs dot the tawny beach with carnival colour, and laughter hangs in the air. It takes a while to get yourself to this place, and it is worth it. Everyone is lost in paradise here, for today, and the city’s broken dreams must wait. Here, there are no bad days.

Archival inkjet print on acid-free cotton paper

18” x 18” (16” x 16” image size) $175
24” x 24” (20” x 20” image size) $275

When you find yourself facing an unsparing field of flame….There’s nothing but ruin if you turn back, and you don’t know how to keep going…..When you drop to your knees despite your searing skin, in prayer, in despair….It is now something not of you but from within you growls. Get up, it growls. Get up, walk onward, you must. Walk with me at your side. We are ferocious, and we will walk right through this hellfire.
This is Firewalker. She comes to me, impossibly blue, when the flames are all around. May you have a fire guardian to walk with you, too.

Archival inkjet print on acid-free cotton paper
12” x 12” (10” x 10” image size) $85
18” x 18” (16” x 16” image size) $175

Merritt, British Columbia

Part Wild West frontier town, part fairytale stage set, all of it a temporary, wonderful alternate reality. For a few summer days, a couple thousand people build, inhabit, and whisk away a loosely organized village for this annual arts and music festival.

Each year, I am witness to—­and entrenched in­—the display of humanity at its best: our capacity and zeal for creativity, celebration, kindness, learning, gorgeous absurdity, bacon sandwiches, and playing dress up.

Archival inkjet print on acid-free cotton paper
12” x 16” (7” x 14” image size) $105
18” x 24” (11” x 22” image size) $215