Various and sundry snapshots from where I've been for the last few weeks. Basically: camping, hiking, and attending spur-of-the-moment art exhibitions indoors and outdoors. Hey, sometimes life really does seem like an objet trouv�.

1) It actually *is* possible to go camping (and not go insane) with four very small children, two preteens, and a very large and rambunctious black lab/retriever/collie dog called Cody. That was with our Rover scouts group of friends. I learned a couple handy knots and hitches suitable for tacking down my tent's fly, and tying up the dog and small children.

2) Part of the beauty of walking in Presqu'ile Pensinsula in Ontario is its Old Growth forest. This is an old growth deciduous forest that has not been touched by axe or saw, nor "cleaned up" for tourists (i.e. the ancient "messy" dead and fallen trees have never been removed -- a rare sight indeed.) And unlike many conifer forests which are relatively dead and sterile at eye level, this forest was vibrant and green green right down to the thick layers of moss and marshgrass on the ground. Magnificent.

3) Frequent deer in the area can leave a fair amount of deer droppings in the fields. For some reason, well, some dogs just love to roll in the stuff -- all four legs up in the air. Maybe it's the canine version of sweet-smelling Performance Art...


Then two weekends ago, I went to visit the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa.

4) Admittedly, I normally find fine-art museums to be very pretty places that don't tell me very much. As typical, the Gallery is filled with extraordinary treasures from ancient times until today. For example there are copies of Roman bas-reliefs, and 17th c. Flemish canvasses so perfectly preserved and vibrant, they seemed to have been painted yesterday. Or Alex Colville's famously foreboding "Horse and Train". And native art based on repeated fractal patterns. And then there's Newman's much-maligned "Voice of Fire" acrylic (controversial, because it's an 8 x 18 foot blue canvas with a broad stripe of red painted down its middle, and it cost taxpayers $1.8 million, or $617,000 per stripe. Duh). Well, Voice has a cool name, anyway. It was also amusing that one of the modern art installations ("Davidson Gate") was simply two huge plates of hot-rolled 1/2" steel placed upright and diagonally inside a small room. They weigh 800 kg each. I see those plates at work all the time, so is that art too? ;) Anyway, I *did* enjoy most of the contemporary art displays from the last 10 years; I surprised myself. Heh. The security personnel mentioned there's cameras in the Gallery which track and tabulate visitors' attention spans as people look at each piece. Maybe the curators use the data to help select new artwork that us taxpayers would actually like!

5) Viewing reams and reams of Renaissance, Baroque, Post-Impressionist, Abstract and 20th Century artwork over the space of two hours gets kind of empty and jaded after a while. So the best part, I find, was getting to talk to a professional artist in the Gallery who was busy copying a Byzantine-style icon. Her name was Kathryn Finter. She was painting the first of two duplicates of "The Madonna of the Flowering Pea" (Germany, c. 1425). It's a half-figure of the virgin and child in a gold-ground design, tempera on wood. She'd started painting it in October 1999, and had been doing it every workday since then for ten months (whew!)... She was using traditional paint pigments, like colored earths, ochre and vermilian, and crushed lapis lazuli mixed with egg yolk. The halos around the Madonna and the angels were shining gold foil and paladium applied using a wet-gild technique. It was delicate and beautiful. The copy was about 90% finished at the time I saw it. Kathryn Finter is a manuscript artist, and her thesis was that some layering techniques in medieval manuscript illumination were derived from painting Byzantine icons. So she was recreating the Madonna in order to experiment and find out if that were true...

6) One of the security guards confided in awe that Kathryn had taken "fifty to a hundred" qualifying exams in order to get permission to paint in the National Gallery! She thought that tale was hilarious.


And finally, I went to visit an international floral-sculpture exhibition in the Old Port: Mosa�culture Planet Montreal 2000 (until Oct 9).

7) Let's see, no one's ever been to anything like *this* botanical exhibition before. Montreal has a mayor who's a world-class botany expert, so instead of shoving money at the local baseball team, we get major flower-power instead. You know those sculpted topiary trees and bushes at Disney World, which are shaped into the forms of Mickey Mouse and the Beast, or Aladdin or the Lion King? Well, there were four displays of those at the exhibition, and they're pretty pale compared to the main attractions, mosaiculture. The latter are elaborate sculptures up to 30 feet high, in two- and three-dimensional designs covered completely with colourfully patterned plants.

There were totem poles and giant sinuous dragons chasing phoenixes; mallards in flight, and three different peacock sculptures designed by three different countries; a recreation of Van Gogh's "Sunflowers" painting, a surreal Magritte canvas you could walk through, and a Peanuts canvas of Charlie Brown. I walked through and under a recreation of Hokusai's famous "Hanging Big Wave" from Japanese painting. There was even a Terry Prachett-like floral World Turtle done by the Assembly of First Nations (the Turtle was singing a native woodwind and percussion accompaniment :-). The mosaicist gardeners used a gazillion bedding plants of 30 different species, cultivating subtle shades of colour. The actual plant-sculpting technique is an ancient artform perfected in Harbin, China. A Harbin specialist gave a demonstration of the method. He made use of a nutrious bedding matrix of braided rice straw, clay and horse manure (Woohoo!) Then the straw, clay, and manure are rolled into thick ropes, which are wound and plastered into the elaborate metal frameworks which support the sculptures. Baby plants are poked into bedding matrix wrapped on the frame, and the plants continue to grow and spread in this rich, um, earth, even while growing vertically or upside down. I must say most of the displays were jaw-dropping even knowing their humble origins. I've got some photos of the completed floral sculptures which I can scan in, if anyone's still interested...

Wolf "went camping, brushed dog, got cultured, saw horse-manure sculptures as fine art :-)" spirit