Remember the park?

 This time it's Vancouver's VanDusen Botanical Garden.

Remember the art students?

They've thronged into VanDusen and are particularly taken with the sculptures of famous botanists along the margins of a small rose garden.  And who could resist a particular "favourite son" of West Coast botanical legend, Archibald Menzies.

Distinguished looking dude, isn't he?  -- with a distinguished track record:

 

Just think:-- He identified and recorded our cherished Arbutus tree.

AND one of my all-time favourite BC wildflowers, Youth-on-Age, growing here in the spring just inside my front gate.

It's said that Menzies and Captain Vancouver became shipboard enemies -- maybe because of the 10x12 foot greenhouse the Royal Horticultural Society sent along for Menzies to fill.  Or maybe because Captain Vancouver was prone to be as irascible as Captain Ahab and wasn't amused at losing some of his deck space to a greenhouse.  Nonetheless, when the ship's official doctor became ill himself, Doctor Menzies saved the day and brought the crew home safely -- though it's said that all the greenhouse plants died en route.

But never mind.  Menzies' noble features were worth recording in a quick cardboard study done with one day's leftover paints.

 And then an art student edged into a preliminary sketch.

Add some plants for Dr. Menzies and a sketchbook for the art student, and away things went:

As always, lots to learn, and the distinguished physician/botanist can take a bow with "Dr. Menzies Holds the Pose." (copyright 2019)

Before leaving Dr. M. to the peace and quiet of this corner of the gardens, it should be noted that he was also the first to catalog the giant, thick-barked Pseudotsuga menziesii  -- commonly known as the Douglas fir.   Misnomer times two -- since it's not a fir but a pine; and it's named for the slightly later botanist-explorer David Douglas solely because he identified its commercial value!!!

Summer camp is almost over

For the past two months I've been in Summer Camp Mode -- straying freely when the spirit called from my to-do lists and curriculum and goal-setting.   My mother, like all the best ones, carefully saved all my school reports and one of them I remember her showing me years later said, "She gets along well with other children, and she is also happy playing independently, especially with crayons and clay."  

Hey! - that's the spirit of Summer Camp which led to my buying some modelling clay in a package that gave me about three handfuls, in a quality just a step up from the kids' brightly coloured variety.  Two weeks ago, I had the idea I might make a small model of "The Dreamer" -- the very romanticized statue of Christopher Columbus in "Il Giardino," a beautiful sculpture garden created by Vancouver's Italian community.

I started at Cristoforo's waist and worked downward to establish a base.  Messy fingers and all, the first half-hour was exciting.  I thought I might need to prop up his swinging leg but otherwise things went well.  But then...when I added the weight of the torso and the head -- oh, dear.... he looked like a shocking example from an orthopedic textbook.

Too bad, Colombo.  Maybe you'll make it to the New World next time.  I rolled him into a ball and decided to work flat -- a relief sculpture of, um, maybe one of the other personae at Il Giardino.

Even though this plastic clay requires working with wet hands, it still air-dries fairly quickly.  Now I had almost a handful of clay that wouldn't last much longer.  So what else could I do?  How about making my own almost-life-sized "manicule" or "index." 

Okay.  I left these two productions to dry and planned a comeback a few days later -- about the length of time I thought I could leave the remainder of the clay in its resealed package.

On Day 2 in the Summer Camp Sculpture Studio, I thought I'd work free-form on the kind of head you might see in the Uffizi Gallery  -- maybe a Dionysus with wild hair.  And this time, I made a sort of armature which is what the big kids use -- an internal support for the weight of the clay, something like a skeleton...except mine was a super-simple assemblage of newspaper and masking tape.

So I was off to a fresh start,  with plastic sheeting (and stones to hold it down as a breeze blew pleasantly through my campsite), carton of water, my fist-sized armature, and half of the opened package of clay. 

Everything I needed except...........enough clay.  Once I covered the armature, I barely had enough left for the face's nose, let alone its ears.  So this is what I was left with:--

I felt slightly cheered when I read an article about the recent discovery of a head of Alexander the Great -- long-lost in the store room of a Greek museum.  (Maybe I should tuck mine away in a corner, and some day it might be considered an archaeological find)

But seriously, wasn't the best option to cover this bald ear-less head with a cap?  The internet abounds with instructions for sewing, knitting, gluing, folding, felting a simple 3-pointed jester's cap.  And I was certainly feeling the fool at this point -- but not foolish enough to spend another two hours making a head covering.

Instead, I gathered some of the Chinese lanterns my neighbour gave me along with some small dried flowers from my garden for an extravagant garland.  Let's imagine this as "Gaia,"  -- perhaps as seen in the Uffizi Gallery!

Within a few days of finishing Gaia, I was walking along Stanley Park's sea wall and found that Mother Nature had carved a perfect stone face, apparently without effort.  And if you wonder how this caught my eye, check out this week's BBC video on "Why We See Faces in Clouds."