Yesterday we went to the downtown library, an amazing 9 story building with shops and eateries in a covered square. We wandered around inside, and it sure looked as though every one of its 1200 chairs had a patron sitting in it, reading, writing, or using a computer. I don't think I've ever seen a larger or a more fully used library.

Today, we went to a yoga class at the Coal Harbor Recreation Center. There, too, many classes were offered, and they were full. Not only that, but this was the first fully racially integrated yoga class I've been to.

We took the bus and then another bus to get to Granville Island. There was a toy store where the guy recommended "Strategies," "Descent," "Arkem Horror, "Zombies," and "Labyrinth." None of them were in stock.

We wandered around shabby import stores and a bustling covered market, like the one at Pike Place in Seattle or on Fairfax in Los Angeles. We had a great conversation and saw no art to speak of.

The art scene in Vancouver, as far as I can tell, is close to dead. There is a lot of decorative stuff which I wouldn't mind on my wall, but nothing that slaps your brain around.

The best part about the aquarium is the jellyfish exhibit. These creatures barely have two neurons to rub against each other, yet there they are, with eightfold circular symmetry, trailing feathers and spangles and beating time to a music that you can almost hear.

The Stanley Park totem poles are impossibly heavy and masculine compared to the jellies. They stand just on the other side of a pond, looking like forever.

I pulled my luggage behind me from the Granville Sky Train station to the Vancouver Art Gallery a few blocks away. The museum has four floors, three of them with current exhibits and one in transition. I was expecting to enjoy the top floor exhibit, "In Dialogue With Emily Carr" but it didn't seem particularly arresting.

What was amazing was "Waste Not" by Song Dong, a Chinese dude who collaborated with his mother to create a deeply moving exhibit. His mom had fallen from middle-class to scrabbling poverty in China, and as a result, saved things like bits of soap, pop bottles, scraps of fabric, mismatched shoes, cardboard, wash basins, and other artifacts of daily life. Ten thousand of these objects were laid out, sorted into categories, in several of the rooms. I was reminded of the things my mother said about her own experiences with poverty as I walked through this exhibit. I'd look at a display of rolled-up wire, short and long, and remember our own garage when I was little, full of objects salvaged from our profligate neighbors' trash cans - screws, hinges, wire, and broken-handled hammers.

When people are wealthy, they have the option to manifest their idiosyncracies, but when they're poor, there are stereotypical behaviors that seem hard-wired to help us survive.

Another amazing thing was an art-encrusted car, pictured below. The driver was parked, smoking dope with the windows open. It's a foreign country!

The permanent collection includes some lovely old crazy quilts from the late 1800's, with palm-sized silks and velvets connected with big bloopy embroidery stitches. The temporary exhibit was a little less inspirational, except for the white lacy word embroideries at the top floor by Maura Donegan.

Made 90% of a fabric collage of my neighbor, using kimono silks. Further work will be to refine her face, turn the blob between the figure and the truck into a dog, and add a lot of squiggles representing foliage. I think I'd like to develop this medium further, it was fun and satisfies my need for chaos/clarity dialogue ... but maybe not this year!

I spent this week working on this painting. The studio is pretty dark, with snow on the skylights, but we ran the generator and I turned on the lights to work on it. It's a 24 x 18" canvas, in oils. I seem to be running out of white, but luckily, Daniel Smith is having a sale.