Ciao from Roma! We spent this evening walking through Rome in the rain, the shadows and reflections of this ancient city bounced back at us on the glistening cobbles, as we passed boutiques and wine bars, music and light pouring out of the wine bars. This morning we walked over to Vatican City, and yesterday it was the Colosseum, …
Postcards from Lucca
I’m sending these postcards with a heavy heart from Lucca, a night after the new attacks on Paris, hoping someone out there needs a reminder that there is still good in the world, that beauty remains as imperfect but undiminished as always. That our ways of expressing grief and compassion and empathy for others may, like beauty, not be perfect, …
Postcards from Venice
Ciao from Venice! I shared this last week with 3 new friends in Venice, all here to do the first in what is, for me, a new kind of workshop. With just three students, all here to see Venice, of course, but also to work on a very specific body of work, it was a very intimate workshop. The week …
Postcards from London
Some things are over far too quickly. 3 nights in London has gone by like a shot. But the days were packed with long walks and sights I haven’t seen since I was 15 years old, juxtaposed by things that weren’t even here 30 years ago. The city remains terminally cool – in fact it just seems to get cooler. …
The Thing About Rainbows
I made the mistake recently of saying, out loud, that I hated rainbows. I could have said, “I like to eat kittens and gravy” and the reaction would have been no less appalled. You HATE rainbows? It wasn’t exactly what I meant. I had been called to the deck of the sailboat with “Get your camera!” I came on deck …
Postcards from Skye
We arrived in London a week ago and, jetlagged and a little confused about driving on the left and how exactly one determines the speed limit, we made our way to Scotland’s Isle of Skye. It’s beautiful here – almost magical. It has some of the remoteness and magic of both Iceland and Newfoundland’s Fogo Island. We’ve spent our time …
Postcard from Isla Mujeres
Since I was a kid I’ve been fascinated by sharks and whales and anything large that swam the seas, and there’s none larger in the shark family than the Whale Shark. There are a couple places in the world you can reliably swim with congregations of these large, peaceful, sharks; the closest to me is Isla Mujeres off the coast …
Back in the Khutzeymateen
Three days is not enough for these adventures, even less so when Air Canada loses your luggage en route to Prince Rupert and you’re socked in by fog the first morning, but when we finally flew into the Khutzeymateen Inlet in British Columbia’s wild west coast, and began sitting with the grizzlies from our inflatable zodiac, it’s like time just …
Northern Kenya, Pt. 1
The black road leading towards the dust-shrouded sun is warming, Flanked by a thousand citizens walking to work, to school, to anywhere but here. Nairobi wakes to birds and dogs and the honking horns of every car and bus That soon will choke these roads. And we, today, head-fogged and time-lost from half a world away, Are heading north, half-drunk …
Hokkaido Boat Abstracts
Halfway through this last trip to Hokkaido my brain needed a break from all the white, elegant, graphic stuff. Beautiful, to be sure, but I needed something tangental, something different. In part, I think, I wanted something manmade, probably longed for some colour as well. What I found in the old boat yards, the boats all up on blocks, some …