Here is a short video with a few scenes from a sketching trip to Algoma and Algonquin Park in October 2026.
YEAR IN REVIEW - 2025
For the last year I have been endevouring to be a little bit more thorough in the cataloguing of my paintings, and originally had a vision of a larger narrative aspect on this site, but getting that to where I needed it to be in a timely manner just became too unwieldy. In the interests of perfect not being the enemy of good (or perhaps good not being the enemy of finishing something), I figured it might be better to decouple the overview from those more detailed narrative posts (which will come as individual entries), and instead post a gallery overview of the whole year to start. So, while I finish up some entries on trips to Mount Robson, Jasper, Europe and Algoma/ Lake Superior, here is a catalogue of (almost) all the sketches done in 2025 (subject to updates as I finish cataloguing of course). At last count I believe I did 157 sketches in 2025, most of them on 12x15 oil on board. Works done in studio are not included here - these are just the works sketched on site.
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A comparison of the Mount Robson Sketch (12x15) and canvas (40x50)
SKETCH PROCESS - UBC ENDOWMENT LANDS STUMP
In late summer I did a sketch of an old stump in the UBC endowment lands out by University golf course. Initially I wasn’t sure if I was going to do a full sketch or just a study of the stump - but ended up going for the whole scene (pretty much an identical composition to a sketch I had done in fall of 2013). While doing the sketch I took a couple of in process pictures and was able to line them up to show the development of the picture - which actually looks much more orderly and methodical than usual, due to the almost complete stump finished without any other sketching - but the effect seemed interesting - almost like a rendering of a VFX scene with complexity being layered on top of more simple foundations.
ENDOWMENT LANDS STUMP PROCESS
WINTER SKETCHING
I am hoping to add some more content to this website in the new year, but for now things are pretty slow. But I have been able to do a bit of sketching over the past couple of weeks, heading out when the weather has been clear in Vancouver. Below are a couple oil sketches. My main focus at the end of the year now is finishing off a few larger canvases that have been in progress for a while, so I can began with more or less a clean slate in 2016.
Evening at Tower Beach by UBC, looking up Howe Sound. The logs were covered with a thick layer of frost.
View from Spanish Banks, looking towards the North Shore mountains, covered in snow.
WORK IN PROGRESS
This website is still very much a work in progress, but hopefully in the near future I will be able to include posts about a variety of topics, with a variety of connections to painting and art.