6 November 2026 – I don’t notice these things because of mathematics. I assign numbers later, to unite them in a passingly acceptable theme. Truth is… I notice them because I notice them. Because I’m walking down a street and down an alley, and my eyes tell my feet to stop. My feet stop, and I pay attention. Then, later, to amuse myself — and you — I give the resulting post a title.
As promised: Math
2 bikes + 4 bike racks flaunt shadows.
1 wall flaunts 2 hits of colour, door + vine.
1 tree flaunts even better colour. (So there.)
And… and…
1 alley flaunts 33 acres of beer.
I stand here a stupidly long time, “stupidly” long only because I don’t even like beer, and I am mesmerized. Shiny stacked cans! Deep dark doorway! Shiny barrels! Wooden barrel! All this in a grotty alley!
It is even sillier, even more wonderful, up close.
Smiley-face emojis on every can!
One last backward glance, with even more wooden casks thrown in…
and I take my besotted self off home.
Where, also as promised, the Two Backstories come into play.
Looking at that colourful vine + doorway, I notice white letters — pyrrha — on black in the companion panel. I look up “pyrrha.” I learn it is a local boutique jewelry factory & showroom, and I am not interested until I read the building is an example of a Heritage Revitalization Project. The oxymoronic potential of this phrase has me wary. Are any of you also old enough to remember how the American army “pacified” Vietnamese villages? By blasting them out of existence, was how. So I sniff this phrase suspiciously and read that, in exchange for retaining and restoring a 1909 single-family residence, the developer was allowed to build this 6-storey tower on the same site. Hmm, well. But also, hmm-well, it does provide artisan industrial space for local entrepreneurs.
I fiddle with some more online maps & citations, and discover my alley-entrancement is the unglamorous back side of 33 Acres Brewing Co., a Vancouver company which, on its street side, offers a bar and a tasting room and other delights. Those smiley faces on the cans? In addition to a long list of beers with dramatic names (33 Acres of Sunshine/Darkness/Euphoria/Nirvana… ), the brewery also offers the straightforward cheer of Fluffy Cloud.
I am now quite done with promoting ornaments I don’t buy and a liquid I don’t drink.
Still… Look at all the local factoids I have learned, just because, out there on the streets, my eyes made my feet stop.
1 November 2026 – I hadn’t planned a capital-W Walk for today, I only had the “stops” part of this agenda in mind, but spectacular weather pull me out the door and onto the streets for a more ambitious adventure.
Late-morning timing and brilliant sunshine offer me “shadows.”
So here I am, me and my shadow, heading off north on Scotia Street. My destination — very eventually — will be St. James Anglican Church at Gore & Cordova in the city’s Downtown East Side (DTES).
More shadows on Station Street as I approach Pacific Central Station, thrown by a flaming maple tree not only on the sidewalk, but on the equally flaming Construction sign, which shows us the obvious: the new St. Paul’s Hospital / Providence Health Care campus, just ahead, is one massive (and much needed) project.
I’ve been chattering with people all along the way. We’re all beaming at each other, wriggling with pleasure in the brisk-but-friendly weather, exchanging the usual social small talk, agreeing it’s a great day for a walk, yessiree, it sure is.
Canada geese, here at Thornton Park just past Pac Central, agree with the humans. I stare at this trio calmly stepping their way across Station Street…
and think of Lynette d’Arty-Cross’ post on 19 October, A Duckie Adventure, with adorable ducks crossing a much busier street. (If you don’t already know her blog, Pictures and Stories of Life, here’s the moment to pay it a visit.)
I have to do a little navigating, in order to weave northward around the construction while still avoiding Main Street (a game I like to play with myself). This particular weave benefits from conversation with a DTES woman who describes where best, at this stage of hospital construction, to cut through barricades and make it to Gore Street.
I follow her advice. It brings me to the foot of Gore, between Prior and Union streets, where homes still display their Hallowe’en pumpkins.
Jack o’ Lanterns are a seasonal icon; over the next few blocks, I encounter three more icons with staying power.
Black Strathcona: This lamp post plaque is a tribute to Hogan’s Alley, a narrow lane home to Black immigrants “that became a flashpoint for its vibrant night life and for urban renewal schemes that ultimately destroyed it.”
Asian Strathcona: referenced in the sidewalk mosaic of lotus and koi at the corner of Gore and Keefer.
A crow! Of course. All the time, everywhere, with this particular one at Gore and East Pender.
Finally I reach Gore and Cordova, and this 1930’s take on 14th-c Gothic style architecture. The building is the third iteration of St. James Anglican Church, this one in durable concrete, unlike its vulnerable wooden predecessors (the first having been destroyed in the Great Fire of 1886).
I’ve attended architectural tours of this building, and would do so again. But that’s not my purpose today. Today is all about the church’s magnificent Casavant Frères organ — a three-manual, 31-stop organ of 1,760 pipes — installed in November, 1938. I and other event attendees, ranging from the deeply knowledgable to the humbly fascinated (like me), are here for a show-and-tell-and-play with the church’s Music Dirctor, Dr. Abraham Ross.
You see? I am now moving from the “shadows” of this post to the “stops” (and everything else to do with organs).
It turns out, I’m not quite done with shadows yet. I step into the church, where I am struck by the play of shadows among the sun’s rays, as light streams into the Lady Chapel.
Dr. Ross (“Call me Abe”), rounding off his first year in this post, wears his knowledge lightly, a characteristic that I deeply admire. We listen, we question, we discuss, as his fingers and feet dance and his words and music fill our heads and hearts.
Later, when he invites anyone interested to sit on the bench and make music, both Red Jacket and Blue Jacket (above) respond. They had each listened intently and asked thoughtful questions — no surprise they each also play the organ well.
Smiling and thankful and light-hearted, we all wind back down the steps, ready to leave. Then… a surprise. The organ again swells through the church, this time with a soprano voice in soaring duet. (I remember Dr. Ross’ comment, that in commissioning this organ, St. James instructed Casavant to adapt away from classic French cathedral style toward the Anglo-Catholic style of the Church of England, a more mellow sound suited to the C of E interplay between organ and choir.)
I look up from the nave to the gallery, and, transfixed, watch and listen for another moment: the singer standing to the left of the seated organist, an observer off to the right.
Then finally I do leave.
Because the day is so extraordinary, and I am so buoyed by both day and music, I do not turn toward home. Instead, I follow Cordova Street on east, deeper into Strathcona. Eventually it occurs to me that while music and sunshine are all very fine, lunch would also be fine, ’round about now.
So I say good-bye to Cordova at Hawks Street, and follow Hawks south to Keefer and to the Wilder Snail.
I’ve visited this venerable café/grocery store before, and I’ve already shown you its mammoth suspended snail mascot at least a couple of times. “Snail” could have been the third “s” in this post’s title.
But it’s not. Because, while I’m charmed by the spooky-season addition of a black tarantula, I am even more charmed by another discovery.
Along with its vintage wooden floors, and its vintage trick of steadying wobbly table legs with folded bits of paper, the Wilder Snail has genuine old vintage steam radiators. “S” for “steam.”
I warm my insides with broccoli-cheddar cheese soup, while the radiator gently warms my outsides.
Then I take my insides and outsides back home, and put on my lined jeans. T’is the season!
The colours of ordinary street-side plantings that much richer, with their faces fresh-washed in the rain.
I pause on the south-east corner of East 7th and Scotia, with two of the area’s iconic buildings in eyesight — Main St. Brewing opposite and (to the right) the back of the stone-and-brick Brewery Creek Building at East 6th.
I’ll be heading that way, north on Scotia, but I’m momentarily distracted by the shine that is almost literally at my feet.
Even a discarded mirror fragment works magic, when it shimmers a hydro pole at us in blurry brilliance.
At East 6th, some magic that doesn’t depend on rain — though somehow rain makes its story all the more vivid, and all the more poignant.
This handsome bronze cairn reminds us that although rain now courses down a steep roadway, until early last century rain simply added yet more water to a tumbling creek: Brewery Creek.
We are where the maps says we are (in turquoise letters lower right): on the banks of the old creek. In 1897, it still ran free. Now it is underground. The buildings opposite are not the ones shown on this map — Vancouver Brewing and Thorpe & Co. — but they are direct successors. Main St. Brewing, uphill, is the artisan beer company now occupying the 1920s building that was originally a garage for Vancouver Breweries (the amalgamated version of the original brewery), and the Brewery Creek Building, opposite, went up in 1903 as an expansion to the Vancouver Breweries complex. This structure later went through a succession of uses, including candy factory…
before 21st-c. restoration and expansion transformed it into live/work spaces for artists.
The “brewery” tag was, and again is, apt. Early breweries made use of the creek; a collection of new boutique breweries makes use of that history. The whole area now preens itself under the collective label of Brewery Creek.
Another plaque takes us back to much earlier history — some three millennia back — and to those earlier uses of the watercourse and surrounding forests.
Kitty-corner to the plaque, the Native Education Centre it references, and its gardens.
My mind full of what used to be, imagining a creek to complement the rain, I walk on. Walk “downstream.” There is no visible creek, but there is real rain, and colours punched that much brighter as a result.
Including plastic colours, here at East 4th.
But I’m not focused on those tip-tilted chairs, I’m watching the horizontal black umbrella beyond the chairs (upper right). It belongs to a member of the coFood Garden Project that occupies this space, who is carefully shoulder-balancing it with one hand as he uses the other to wrest something out of the tree overhead. Branches interfere, I have no idea what he is doing. (Rescuing an injured bird? Snatching up some Spanish doubloons? Leaving a note for a secret lover?) There is suddenly a loud crack, he pulls his umbrella again vertical, and walks away. Mission presumably accomplished.
One last look north, watching water rivulets course downstream, again imagining a creek instead of pavement ..
and I turn to walk my way back upstream.
One final slight detour into a driveway, to admire one more example of shine in all this rain…
and at last I start thinking about dry indoors space and hot soup.
11 September 2026 – Time travel: you’re with me on 8 September, downtown, corner of West Georgia and Granville. I’m about to turn from the former onto the latter and notice that busy Granville is barricaded, although its sidewalks are open.
I complete the turn, expecting some kind of kerfuffle to justify the barricade — nothing major, since no sirens or emergency vehicles, but something.
I get something.
A great big metal apple, on a car-free street.
I’m surprised, but then, as I walk closer, no longer surprised. The apple fits right in.
Its reflection sparkles in Fatburger’s doorway, across the street…
and the apple itself sparkles even more, viewed from across the street.
It embraces the woman who just wants to read her book…
and it makes neighbourly conversation with skyscrapers and sky.
I walk south on this peaceful street, see some workers busy with an installation at the next corner, and ask, “Going up? Coming down?”
They give me a friendly but puzzled where-have-you-been face, and explain it’s all coming down. This stretch of Granville has been a Pedestrian Zone all summer long. As of tomorrow, the cars return.
Okay, I missed that one.
But I’m all set for Car-Free Day on Main Street, East 10th to King Edward, this very Sunday.
24 August 2026 – My only context thought, as we set out, is geographic. This sunny day, we are off for a walk in Strathcona, a very mixed but always intriguing neighbourhood in Vancouver’s east end.
We, sort of, have an objective. We want to see one of the installations in the current Vancouver Biennale edition (2025-2027), a sculpture at the corner of East Georgia Avenue & Campbell Street. Titled 241.5 Arc X 2, it is a companion piece to 217.5 Arc X 13 out on Sunset Beach, both of them works in a series by French artist Bernar Venet that explores the “beauty, balance and malleability of raw steel.”
The beach installation is a legacy of the 2009-2011 Biennale; the city installation is very new. The former is a great favourite of mine (you’ve seen it in this blog several times already); the latter, therefore, interests me a great deal. My companion is just as interested, so we are well pleased to have an appealing neighbourhood walk ahead of us, with this sculpture as the grand finale.
And it is appealing, this historic pocket of the city — shabby and exuberant, gentrified and raffish, very human, very alive. Evidence of all this life, this very mixed life, wherever you look.
A benevolent society on Union Street near Jackson Avenue, painted & polished & scrupulously tidy, with thriving potted plants as décor (plus a barred gate, for prudence).
Just few doors farther east, bikes out front not bamboo, with a few dying plants and a line of beer cans as décor. But, please note, also bright with recent paint and equally tidy.
Still on Union, farther east again, shrubs and trees and sidewalk flowerbeds and wooden-frame homes, this particular one boasting not prayer flags but political flags, flags of all nations. (Or maybe FIFA-nation flags, left over from the games, and it’s fine either way).
An urban glade, as we turn north on Hawks Avenue, close by Strathcona Linear Park — mulch underfoot and a peaceful stand of trees. (Last time I was here, some years back, it was all dug up for sewer-pipe renewal or some-such… now look at it.)
We pause in the Wilder Snail, at Hawks & Keefer, opposite MacLean Park…
which began as a neighbourhood grocery store back in the 1920s and, despite a succession of events and owners ever since, today is still a neighbourhood grocery store and now also a café.
So, you see, Strathcona is delightful, and stimulating, and entirely rewarding, even without an Arc.
But here it is, the Biennale installation, here it is on East Georgia just west of Campbell — and so quietly in place that we almost miss it.
Track your eye from that black crow above the storefront glass, downward to the ground. There.
241.5 Arc X 2, meaning 2 arcs of steel bent to 241.5 degrees. We walk all around it, take some photos, make appreciative remarks to each other, but fact is, I am underwhelmed. I have its Sunset Beach sibling in mind, and I expected… something else. I expected some kind of more, the power I associate with the other one.
But this is still a good walk, there is really no such thing as a bad walk, not if you’re willing to pay attention, so it’s all fine. We walk our way on out of Strathcona, and we are in perfect good humour.
Still, that other Arc is on my mind. Once home, I look up some of my photos of Beach Arc and do myself a little compare-and-contrast.
It surprises me. It gets me thinking about context, about art-in-context. I find myself looking at both installations in a different way.
Here’s 217.5 X 13 (aka Beach Arc) in its context:
It is set in wild grasses and sand, against water and a long line of mountains. Urban Arc (scroll up), is set in pavement and potted plants, against storefront glass and a line of aged townhouses.
City Arc, so slight!
Beach Arc, so robust!
City Arc, rich in urban context..
matt black against the matt black framing for those storefront windows; a companion to that storefront and the time-battered housing next door; with reflections in the windowpane of street and signage and city traffic.
Beach Arc, rich in its very different context…
rusty metal echoing rusty metal on freighters out in English Bay; companion to beach scrub and storm-tossed logs; reflections from sun off water, and the water offering all the dynamics and traffic of that maritime world.
I look back and forth, city to beach, beach to city. I let the Arcs tumble into new places in my mind. Both are by the same artist, both express the same theme with equal skill and grace. Each, in the other location, would be out of scale and out of place. Each, in its own location, is exactly right.
21 August 2026 – I step off buzzing Main Street, still intent on my Proustian challenge: to bring “new eyes” to familiar landscapes, and in so doing reward myself with a “voyage of discovery.”
I am just one alley east of Main, here at the corner of E. 22nd, but it’s a whole new world. Even as my eyes take in that Vancouver Special on the alley-corner opposite…
my ears register the big difference. Silence! My ears hum with silence.
I am now un-buzzed, and I prowl on up the alley with renewed interest.
Small details, in this stretch of alley, on this particular day.
The awning-covered table & chairs behind a commercial building…
offering employees (so I hopefully imagine) somewhere to take a break…
life in the alley, with two women on the balcony and the young man below all suddenly distracted by a crow’s raucous call…
and the crow himself.
I don’t see the crow…
but I do see his shadow, thrown on a building wall across the alley.
I turn east on E. 21st Avenue, and marvel at how old-fashioned, how peacefully residential, it still is — with vine-shrouded walkways that lead to wooden-frame homes behind tall hedges…
and climbing ropes coiled on the sidewalk…
an invitation to explore the tree from higher up.
I turn again, north this time on Sophia Street…
and think for a moment about Sophia, goddess of wisdom. How badly our world needs wisdom!
The street delivers, if not wisdom, at least plenty of peaceful charm. There is even a whole block with a dirt path rather than a paved sidewalk, guarded at one corner by Mountain Ash…
and at the other by an explosion of sunflowers.
A bit farther north, a happy (albeit wooden) child high in a tree, no climbing rope needed…
and then I’m face to face with Tea Swamp Park.
The name evokes the Labrador tea plants that used to thrive in this boggy stretch of land. Now, drained and firmed, the bog is a small park, a place for people to thrive. Two teens sit on a bench, comparing notes about their mothers (yes, I eavesdrop), while a young woman strides by, carefully balancing that flat of eggs as she walks.
Far distance, a basic but well-used children’s playground; medium distance, the community garden with its allotments; foreground, a stretch of grass, where a mini-drama is being repeatedly played out.
The dog, again and again, fetches the orange ball, drops it in front of the woman, and then bounces & quivers to get her attention. The woman, again and again, briefly interrupts her scrolling to stretch out one hand, pick up the hurling stick, and send the ball flying. Happy woman, happy dog.
Beyond the park, some prayer flags in a doorway…
and beyond that, a time-out nook for pedestrians, complete with chairs, plants and a curious little table.
I walk under yet another towering Horse Chestnut tree.
Look!
All those spring “candles” are now turning into fall conkers.
Finally, finally, I am about to say farewell to Sophia Street.
And to Tattoo Legs as well. She and I have been playing tag for blocks — she walks faster than I do, but I catch up at every red light.
My own legs tell me it’s time to go home. So I do.
13 August 2026 – An escaped balloon gets me thinking about “benign neglect.”
This is not what caused US political advisor Daniel Moynihan to coin the phrase, back in 1970. In a memo to then-President Richard Nixon, he suggested that the issue of race relations “could benefit from a period of benign neglect.” Not surprisingly, it was controversial, and is still argued today — both his own good/bad faith intentions, and the consequences over time.
My mind is not there. My mind is on this blue balloon.
I am at the corner of Pine and West 6th, early for an appointment and therefore with time to kill. What better than a bit of a bimble into the Arbutus Greenway? That’s the plan, but then, as I’m about to cross Pine and enter the Greenway, I look north on Pine and get distracted by a blue balloon.
OK, first I am distracted by the double hit of blue: car plus balloon. Then I focus on the balloon. And then I focus on what is all around it — the happy eco-consequences, for this street corner, of human neglect.
I start to explore. I’m smiling at everything, even though I can’t identify any of it.
Not entirely true. I can identify a bee when I see one, and I am seeing a great many.
Like this guy, dragging down one of these bright orange flowers.
A late-summer abundance of shaggy growth. There is cool green-&-silver elegance to be had…
and also the hot flamboyance of magenta.
I turn my back on Ms Flamboyance, and notice that there is a degree of human intervention after all: a picnic table and benches.
Severely functional — weathered planks atop metal grids filled with rubble — but also elegant. Designed. And, look, there’s a pathway, edged with the same design signature.
I follow the path out to the corner of Pine and West 5th where I see both a line of grubby concrete blocks and a weathered black plaque.
I read the plaque.
And it all makes sense. It’s a pollinator project in a pop-up park. By the look of it, the project was established some years ago, and since then has benefitted from human inaction. The benign consequences, for nature, of human neglect. Indeed, the plaque urges non-action upon us: “Do not disturb. Please don’t bug the pollinators…”
Later, at home, I read more. This street-corner project is a good decade old by now, and slated to be incorporated into a new park, Burrard Slopes. (On this 2016 Park Board map, it is still place-marked as “Future Park.”)
I am still too early for my appointment. I walk west on West 5th, back into the busyness of the city…
and very agreeably fill the last 15 minutes of spare time with a latte at Elysian Coffee, over on Burrard Street.
See the dog bowl, under the Elysian sign? Yrs Truly took in a near-empty bowl, waited for the barista to refill it, and returned the full bowl to the sidewalk.
Benign neglect has its place. So does benign activism.
26 July 2026 – It is no longer hot and not yet raining. I am out the door.
Out the door with only the vaguest of plans, but at least the intention to capitalize on this moment of walkable weather. False Creek north shore why not, but farther on down the creek than my casual Cambie Loop and a return by ferry. Also why not.
Lots of flexibility in the plan, which I promptly celebrate with an extra loop into/around City Centre Artist Lodge — long a city motel, slated for razing & redevelopment, meanwhile the entire complex is covered in murals and its 79 units are reborn as low-rent artist studios.
Rivers of colour, on the walls and on the ground.
When I get to real water, it is silver-grey.
I’m now at False Creek, the eastern end that proves it is a false creek not a real creek at all, just a whopping long inlet, and here’s the end of it. To my east Science World; at my back Creekside Park; immediately west of that, an exercise in PR:
The map excludes Creekside Park since this development corporation didn’t create it, but it does feature their own “Community Pop-Up Park” right next door. I grr-grr slightly about the use of “pop-up” to describe a park that will continue to be here for some years yet — even as I recognize it’s an exercise in managing expectations. Don’t get too comfy, folks! it tells us; we will eventually be building on this land.
But not yet. So, meanwhile, I eye the map and let it inspire me. I’ll at least walk past Cambie Bridge and Coopers’ Park, at least to David Lam Park. Maybe farther?
I don’t know it yet, but the answer is yes. Farther.
I’ll carry on past George Wainborn Park, under those two distant bridges (Granville and Burrard, respectively), past this map’s named territory, all the way to Sunset Beach before doubling back to a ferry dock at the Aquatic Centre.
Probably under the joint influence of map plus planned ferry-ride home, I begin noting where I am in terms of those two sets of landmarks.
Parq Casino, for example, with its splendid reflections…
is located just behind the Plaza of Nations ferry dock, east of Coopers’ Park.
A bit farther west, mid-park, I eye this dragon boat in some amazement. It’s just sitting there! I’m used to seeing them furiously in motion.
I want motion? I get it.
Coopers’ Park (on the footprint of Sweeney Cooperage and Saw Mill, which operated here until 1981) includes a playground, right under Cambie Bridge. The playground is closed these days, for upgrade work on the bridge — but that doesn’t mean nobody is playing.
Skateboard city on the detour path! With two young skateboarders taking turns, and one photographer filming their jumps.
Watching Seawall action, yet another crow, on yet another lamp post.
I happen to see him as I approach the Yaletown dock, midway between Coopers’ and David Lam parks, but he could be anywhere.
Each time I’m at the Yaletown dock, I read another of the incised historical vignettes. This one reminds us of the Great Fire of 1886, when a fire set to clear brush instead razed the entire community.
(Reader alert: I later look up further references, including the link above, and discover discrepancies in the data, even in the June date itself. )
More small discoveries as I go, including this mini-causeway as I round the curve that will give me my first view of the eastern end of David Lam Park. (It’s been here all along; I’ve just never noticed it.)
The David Lam shoreline contains two of my favourite False Creek sculptures — more precisely, the twin elements that comprise one art installation:Marking High Tide and Waiting for Low Tide, by retired landscaped architect turned sculptor Donald Vaughan.
I pause to read, as always, the words written around the High Tide concrete ring, set on tall pillars. “As the moon circles the earth the oceans respond with the rhythm of the tide.”
This time I also note, crossly, how grubby it now looks. I’m all for new installations, all for upgrades — but could we please also maintain what we already have? Even if you just give them a scrub, every now and then?
On west I go, on and on west, past George Wainborn Park and under the Granville Bridge…
with its slam-damn view of all the activity across the water on Granville Island, in the water itself, and among the marinas and complexes here on the north side.
Things are markedly tonier than they were farther east, and private property suddenly disrupts the public Seawall. Arrows direct us around these towers; signs politely tell us that if we instead insist on walking through the grounds, we are to keep moving.
I walk through. I stop moving long enough to contemplate the sidewalk promo for Ancora, which on one side advertises its sake/oyster offerings, and on the other…
invites diners to bring their dogs.
I decide not to spend time sulking about the fact that dogs are more welcome, in this enclave, than I am.
My non-sulk policy is promptly rewarded. Back on public-access Seawall territory, at the foot of Hornby Street, I see a cheerful, handwritten invitation to walk half a block up Hornby and visit the inBtwn Café. I am charmed. I walk the half-block.
It is indeed a tiny café, clearly a local hangout, with a DIY artistic vibe. Ancora offers sake and oysters; inBtwn offers watercolour paint-pots and brushes. People use them.
I settle for a latte, not artistic expression, but I do ask co-owner Christy Evans about the backstory. She had hospitality experience, and COVID pushed her to act on what she meant by “hospitality”: bake treats to go with the coffee, create a community hub for socializing, give people resources for creative expression while they are socializing and eating treats and drinking coffee. Eventually husband and co-owner Wade Edwards quit his construction business and joined her full-time — as an artist (whose works always include a tiny red Christy-figure) and, it turned out, as master scone-maker as well.
After that break I carry on, energized by more than the caffeine.
Past the Hornby dock, past Burrard Bridge, I’m right up to the Aquatic Centre dock at the eastern edge of Sunset Beach. I could just drop down for a ferry — but, no-no, I can’t do that. I have to walk on. Down there, halfway down Sunset Beach, I can see my absolute-favourite False Creek artwork.
That dark, U-shaped curve on the sand toward the right? That’s it.
I keep walking. I want to visit it close up, and then I’ll double back to the Aquatic Centre dock. (Since it’s the last dock on this north shore of False Creek, I have no choice. Not if I want to stick to my home-by-ferry idea. And I do.)
Pretty wild flowers along the way, also tangles of bushes to which I’m not paying much attention until a woman striding past me points at them and calls out, “Blackberries!” I look, and yes they are. Not yet black, but working on it.
Then, finally I’m up to the sculpture. I can never remember the title, but when I read it again, it makes literal, mathematical sense.
This is 217.5 Arc X 13 — 13 arcs of metal, each curved to 217.5°. It is the work of French artist Bernar Venet, one of his Arc series designed to celebrate “the beauty, balance and malleability of raw steel,” and a legacy installation from the 2009-2011 Vancouver Biennale. (Later, I learn the 2025-2027 Biennale has brought us 241.5 Arc X 2 by the same artist, which is already installed at 884 East Georgia Street in Strathcona. Yes, I will go visit it.)
It’s ferry-time. To get all the way back east to the Village dock, I have to transfer to another boat on Granville Island — which I do.
I chat with the couple next to me, who, it turns out, used to live right opposite where I now live. We agree it’s a terrific neighbourhood. We also agree that it’s an uphill climb from the dock. We grimace, they in memory and I in anticipation. (I do not confess that, just sometimes, I wimp out and take the bus.)
No wimping today. Uphill I walk heading south, and then more uphill as I swing to the east. I pause a moment crossing Quebec Street. Not to catch my breath! How could you suggest such a thing!
I am merely paying my respects to les belles dames. the guardian angels, of Quebec Manor.
21 July 2026 – Mist hangs in the air as our shuttle bus prepares to leave downtown Vancouver for Whistler, some 120 km to the north…
mist still with us, as we drive the aptly-named Sea to Sky section of Highway 99 that will take us there, threading its way between the Pacific Ocean and mountain ranges, beneath a great brooding arc of sky…
and mist still, though beginning to clear, as I approach the building that has called me here: the Audain Art Museum.
More precisely — though the building itself is a joy — it is the current exhibition that has called me here.
Takao Tanabe 100: Inside Passage celebrates the life and extraordinary eight-decade career of this BC artist, who will turn 100 years old on 16 September 2026. I think of Tanabe in terms of his iconic coastal scenes — for example, Rivers 1/01: Jordan River, 2001. These works breathe mist. Today’s weather is an appropriate homage.
But the exhibit teaches me that the words “Inside Passage” in the title refer to more than these coastal scenes. They also honour Tanabe’s life-long curiosity, his own internal or “inside” passages that have been reflected in his evolving artistic expression.
Pure abstractions early on, during a 1950s stint in New York (here, Interior Arrangement with Red Hills, 1957)…
a brief period of hard-edged abstractions, in the 1960s…
followed by a fascination with the Canadian prairie landscape, as of the early 1970s (here, The Land 10/72).
Curatorial notes refer to the “hard-edged discipline” of this 1972 work, one of the earliest of his prairie pieces, “announcing the shape of an entirely new direction.”
I look around, and admire the prairie era as a whole.
I also admire the building — the way it serves the works and frames the forest beyond. Later I visit the Patkau Architects website, the Vancouver firm that designed this building, and read their intention that its form and character be “deliberately restrained [so as] to form a quiet backdrop for the collection.” Bravo.
I go upstairs to visit the linked exhibit Vistas: From Takao Tanabe’s Travels, where I again think about art galleries and their architecture.
The power of this space!
Yet it does not overwhelm the art (NWT 1/97: Beaulieu River, 1997). I pulse between the art and the space, the space and the art.
I remember my volunteer years at the Art Gallery of Ontario, in the days when the Frank Gehry expansion was still very new, and the joyous reaction of visitors to the building itself — not as informed architectural connoisseurs, purely as people who liked where they were. The little boy, for example, who barrelled into the atrium, spun 360 degrees, gulped and spluttered and just had to blurt it all out to somebody. I was the somebody. “This is so cool!” he cried. “And… and, and… and I haven’t even got to the art yet!”
I do not spin 360, but I do spend some additional vertical time with the building itself — namely, outside and underneath.
To quote that little boy: “This is so cool!” Hard-edged, like Tanabe’s prairie paintings, but at home with the surrounding shaggy forest, just as Gehry’s AGO extension is at home with its own busy neighbourhood (where Gehry’s grandparents lived and very much part of his childhood).
Then I take myself back up to ground level, back onto sidewalks and gangways.
And a good thing, too.
It puts me at a safe distance from which to enjoy this bit of … oh, let’s call it… street theatre.
A black bear ambles out from under the building, and begins a leisurely snuffle of the shrubbery.
I keep a watchful eye out for bears as I walk through Florence Petersen Park en route the bus depot…
but none jump out from behind these old logging stumps.
By the time we are rolling back south, the skies are bright and blue.
"Traveller, there is no path. Paths are made by walking" -- Antonio Machado (1875-1939)
"The voyage of discovery is not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes" -- Marcel Proust (1871-1922)
"A city is a language, a repository of possibilities, and walking is the act of speaking that language, of selecting from those possibilities" -- Rebecca Solnit, "Wanderlust: A History of Walking"
