A Sample of the Haida Gwaii Canvases:
November 2024 update:
Since returning from Haida Gwaii in late July, huge progress has been made on the paintings. It’s an infinite amount of material, and a finite amount of time, as there are two shows booked for the paintings in 2025.
Everything must be ready! So I cancelled a few things, and postponed others. To keep this cranky old body going, I upped my exercise, water intake, and sleep, but I draw the line at giving up chocolate, not even for Haida Gwaii.
With a load of fresh canvas in stock, and with a little luck, paintings will keep slowly appearing off the end of my brush.
It still feels like a wonderful dream.
Check Facebook and Instagram for regular progress updates!
Sketching Whales, and Wild Trees…
Regular Updates on the Facebook Event: https://fb.me/e/3OuFJxpwM
Exciting news! The Emily Carr House museum has granted a show space for the canvases inspired by the Sketching Whales in Haida Gwaii. Watch for it: September, 2025! 
www.carrhouse.ca
We were bumped from the SGang Gwaay (Ninstints) tour, a world renowned Unesco Site. So, that money went instead to a tour of Ts’aahl on the West Coast, an area Emily painted in, and to Hlk’yah (Windy Bay and Hotsprings) on the East side. Lucy is first on the waitlist for a spot to the SGang Gwaay tour, but Jean decided it was a blessing to have dodged that long a day. If Lucy gets in, and send your good vibes her way, Jean will happily paint somewhere near the cabin.
Jean also sent off a grant attempt to secure funding for the Sketching Whales graphic novel. Hey, you can’t win the lottery if you don’t at least play, right? The novel is complete except for the infusion of Haida Gwaii inspiration that will bring the book alive. We’ll hear about that long shot (grants are notoriously hard to get) in September 2924, so, fingers crossed. (Grant was rejected.)
For now, we’re in contact with Haida Gwaii locals we’ve met online, and looking forward to seeing them all in person. We wait, potting up our garden seeds, and otherwise keeping super busy with life until it’s time to head out.
“Don’t pickle me away as done.” This is Em’s most inspiring answer when it comes to process, and why we artists and writers pursue this crazy obsession (despite the many good reasons not to). I had hit a wall, what was the point? I sometimes fantasize about quitting art, closing the studio, putting up my aching feet–Silly. As if.
The first Haida Gwaii “Sketching Whales” newsletter has gone out. If you’d like to have one in your inbox, please shoot me an email at: jeanoliveris@hotmail.ca. There won’t be many, I promise, I’m too easily distracted by shiny paint. Once a month maybe, and while there, I hope to get a blog link/email off once a day, wifi permitting.
Following where Emily Carr leads has long influenced my life as an artist. In July of 2024 I’ll listen for echoes of her, and learn from our Indigenous family in Haida Gwaii, BC, Canada.
See Facebook: P Jean Oliver Writer and Artist
March 4, 2024: May the fourth be with you! Truer words were never spoken, even if it is March, not May. We’ve made it! We booked our accommodation for July 18th to the 30th in Cassie’s Cottage.
https://www.facebook.com/cassiescottageonhaidagwaii
Central to everywhere, and not that everywhere is very far on this island, this sweet little cottage will be our base of operations out of Daajing Giids (DAW-jing-GEEDS) (formerly Queen Charlotte City until 2022).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daajing_Giids
The two tours we booked are to the UNESCO sites of K’uuna (Skedans) and T’aanuu (Emily mis-spelled as Tanoo) and SGang Gwaay (Ninstints) (Tours 1 and 3 on the list, if funds allow, we’ll add the west coast Cha’atl)
https://www.haidastyle.com/cultural-tours/#logistics
Flight (Tessellation) P Jean Oliver
March 1, 2024: The Canada Council for the Arts refused our grant proposal: unsuccessful. While disappointing, it wasn’t surprising, fine art world funding is notoriously difficult to access. If I’d had to leave Victoria, and arrive in the archipelago with nothing but fortitude, I’d have followed Emily to Haida Gwaii one way or another. Fortunately, through private donations just enough $ was raised to book flights, a car, 2 guided tours in Gwaii Haanas, and a stay of twelve amazing days in a small cottage. My heartfelt thanks goes to the true patron of the fine art world: The Art Lover
2023: Created Sketching Whales.
March to June, 2020…
Writing in a vacuum is pretty lonely. Praying, keep people safe. Thank goodness for social media during this gap thing.
Convergences
January 6, 2018: A curious man came to see my paintings one day in the winter of 2018. Over cups of tea in my home studio (tea being a must in any Emily Carr art story), I discovered he owns the House of All Sorts, apartments designed and ordered built by Emily, who named it Hill House. It’s steps away from Beacon Hill Park. He wondered if I’d heard of it? 🙂 He left with, “Big Red” and “Are-Beauties” tucked under one arm, destined to be hung in Em’s treasured home and Studio space.
His intrepid family are the kind of people who are in the realm of heritage preservationist heroes. We need more plagues for people like this. They are the dedicated few who take what last resources they have, and hold up valuable places of connection for us.
I’ve been trying very hard not to freak out while talking with him, and finding out where my poor attempt at Expressionism paintings were destined to hang. Emily wouldn’t have liked it, she’d have referred to me as a muttonhead for gushing.
It’s been a long time getting here since I first felt her pull at age eight in 1967. Once a few years ago, in 2016, the house was open for public viewing in a citywide heritage building tour. I think I was second in line to get in. After seeing her studio inside, and taking in every nook and corner, I ditched the rest of the houses on the tour to spend the day in her backyard, Emily’s energy was strong there, and soothing.
When I first went in, and climbed the long, narrow staircase to the top floor to the Studio, I was overcome by the time I crested the landing. The house is configured in a similar way inside as my childhood home in Quebec, which wasn’t always a fun place, it was confusing to be both happy, going all fan-girl, and swamped with grief at the same time.
It seems a long journey, and no time at all, from that eight year old girl me, who stood transfixed in front of Emily’s “Grey” at the Montreal World Expo in 1967, a painting that struck me as my own self portrait would. Who wrapped her thin arms around a chunk of conifer from one of BC’s wild trees on display–to this old-woman self, who waved off two of her darlings to go “live with Emily”.
Like so many, Em’s path is mixed with ours, I should stop being surprised by the convergences. It’s a profound honour to have a thread added to that tapestry.
*What would it be like to live there?* To have access to the strong, murmurating energy the house vibrates with. A place with wholesome, good lighting for painting, where I could work and hang out in nearby Beacon Hill park, or along the beach, just as Emily did. For now, my paintings live there in my place.
Emily has a knack for enduring, of bringing us all along with her in an unbreakable bond, like the material in one of her hooked rugs, her unseen hands weaving us in.
*In the summer of 2020, that same special patron who bought and hung two of my paintings in Emily’s studio upstairs (now a famous Air BnB) invited me to move into a corner of the basement of the House of All Sorts. That little room became my private Studio I’ve dubbed, “Studio All Sorts” for obvious reasons. As my sponsor-now-landlord says, “I think Emily would have liked this too.”
The Back Story Archive: A short interval at the public Cedar Recreational Centre Art Studio in Saanich, BC, Canada …
Post March 2020: The lovely space at the studio inside the Cedar Hill Rec Centre gave me confidence, and breathed air into my career. It facilitated paintings, commissions, residences, shows, and connected me to other artists. Having tried to paint at home in a one-room apartment, it was a sanctuary. This studio option ended when it re-opened after the shut downs in 2020.
The new requirements became barriers to participation, and insurmountable: there were higher ‘pandemic’ costs that made it unaffordable, shorter booking periods (meant for hobby painters presumably) made it an impossible space for a professional artist. And I had to be even more energetic and mentally nimble online, and by phone to register.
But as these things tend to be, serendipitously, some may even call it destiny, this blocking lead to my reaching out to a friend, and the owner of Emily Carr’s House of All Sorts, who took me in, saying he thought, “Emily would have approved.”
January 2020: The grounds around the Cedar Hill Rec Centre Studio become an absolute wetlands wonderland in winter–soaked through, lush, the soccer field submerged under great-flood amounts of rain and flooding, teeming with life.
Everyday I watch quiet drama playing out under spring-swept skies, my brush paused over the canvas. An eagle overhead looks for an unwary squirrel, the ganders and drakes follow their women, those good men of nature, necks on point, swivelling eyes guarding egg-heavy mates who trust their mates completely, as only wives of good men can, as they focus on gaining fat for the work of laying, and the lean weeks on the nest.
Occasionally, a dog or boy is let loose, and allowed to chase the birds, shouted at, encouraged, or ignored by turns, by their handlers. The males sound the alarm, and everyone leaps to the air in irritated batches, sounding more pissed off than afraid.
Watching this amazing act of supreme organization, the training of an army used to each other in battle, who have each other’s backs, the groups lift, and shift, murmurating in mixed breeds to over another part of the field, before floating slowly to the ground to feed or watch. Emily called this survival mechanism, this drive the “great push of life”, all of nature getting ready for babies.
Post Script: An entire Blog was lost in a Weebly attempt to extort a shocking amount of money to restore the content. So I did the only thing a sensible person can do when being blackmailed, I abandoned the material, and went to WordPress.