Time for spooky tales around the campfire?

As Summer Camp wends onward, I’d planned for a landscape focussed on an old house.  The abandoned tavern shown here is from a regional vintage photo site in New York state  -- not fair game for my purposes.  I hoped to locate another old Vancouver house like the one that enchanted me last year. 

 

My time for exploring has been limited lately as Serious Stuff – a research project I mistakenly volunteered for -- impinges on my summertime fun.  I used Google maps to explore some possible neighbourhoods, to no avail.  I was much more successful in finding a painting I might emulate, titled “Deserted House.”

 

It’s by 20^th century Canadian artist Prudence Heward who is top of my list right now for preferred painting partners.

 

How could I have forgotten her after seeing a blockbuster show at the Vancouver Art Gallery in 2023?  Here, she has painted another similarly “lost” artist, printmaker Edna B. Hopkins, an American of roughly the same period. 

 

I would love to have painted this!!  And once found, it quickly led me to abandon the abandoned house motif and any thought of spooky tales.  Instead, I decided to paint two “sisters in art” – Prudence herself and the close friend of a coffee buddy I’ve become acquainted with in the past year.  This young woman (“young” equals 50-ish, right?) wears different hats so stylishly and, just incidentally, has started taking watercolour lessons.

 

Here’s the first lay-in:

 

A midway point:

 

And the final version, “Sisters” – Summer Camp Series, copyright 2026.

 

I’ve left the equivocal facial expressions just as you see them.  Is Prudence viewing a younger version of her friend group, wondering about how future generations might express themselves?

 

And here’s more food for thought:  I’d hoped to suggest there was still time to grab a spot in another summertime Commedia program.  Then I had the wisdom (!) for once to check out the meaning of its title, psicodramma.  I should have known! – psychodrama – and my extracurricular research activities of the summer have already brought too much of that!!