BRITISH COLUMBIA ARTISTS  

Vancouver Daily Province (?) 1926

Vancouver Offers Plenty of Material For Art Students

"The Paint Box" Emphasizes Beauty Spots Near City

     Do you see Vancouver with an artist's eye? Is Vancouver to you merely a collection of houses and office buildings, separated by paved streets and roads, or do you see its infinite possibilities for color and line and composition? In an article called "Places To Sketch," in "The Paint Box," the first annual publication of the Vancouver School of Decorative and Applied Arts, M. Sherman has painted several word pictures of Vancouver and environs:
     " ... the city itself with its fine skyline and its setting of mountains and sea, tree-shaded streets ending in a glimpse of blue mountains and a white sail on blue water, busy streets going down to ships, and the bustling, colourful life of the waterfront. There are great Pacific liners and battered, rusty tramps from the Orient and the South. There are wheat ships for the Panama, and big windjammers being loaded with lumber for Australia by turbaned Hindoos.
     In Stanley Park there are huge old fir trees and miles of paths through the tangled forest. One can sit and sketch the great brown trunks of firs and cedars, set off by the delicate green of vine maple and salmon-berry, or the flowers and lawns of the cultivated park. The rock-gardens are beautiful at nearly all times of the year ...
     English Bay provides splendid material for one's sketch-book. Near by are Coal Harbour and the Lost Lagoon. False Creek, too, has its hour of beauty when the sunset turns the smoke of the sawmills to splendid colour, with the orange light of the sawdust-burners beginning to glow, when the water lies flat and blue, splashed with the brown and orange of great booms of logs pulled by little tugs. A subject for a Turner.
     ... there is Fairview with its view of the city strung out against a background of harbour and mountain.
     ... On the delta lands of the Fraser, there are the Chinese gardens, where yellow men in huge conical hats work in the geometrically patterned fields. These flat fields stretch back to where a row of cottonwoods and Mount Baker -- rising in the distance like a pearl in an opal sky -- complete the picture.
     Steveston offers Japanese fishing-boats, dykes with little wooden bridges leading to little shabby houses, and tiny gardens full of purple iris and pink daisies: where family wash in brilliant colours is displayed across the front verandah, and the little brown Japanese children crowd around and stick their fingers in your paint.


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