art, trees & birds

One lovely day last week, after an appointment in the vicinity, I went to see a couple of art exhibitions on Granville Island that I've mentioned here earlier. The first one was the exhibition of fibre art by Kaija Rautianen & Hanna Haapasalo at Crafthouse Gallery. Their computer-aided tapestry technique is fascinating and the works are beautiful. You can still see them until July 2nd.

BIMPE IV, an international mini-print biennial exhibition, was most interesting to me personally as a printmaker. (No, I'm not in it as I rarely work this small.) The numerous works (100?) were all very intriguing in many different techniques and kept me occupied looking at them all for quite a while. I recognized some friends and some names and there were works from around the globe. Have a look at the updated BIMPE website for images of the works by the prize winners. (This will be up for until end of July but moving to another location so check the links for info.)

Then husband, taking the afternoon off work, joined me and we had a little picnic lunch on a bench overlooking the boats in False Creek. Lovely! Afterwards we headed over to Queen Elizabeth Park to see the Abakanowicz sculptures (watch for another post dedicated to that!) and to have a walk around the lovely gardens built around a former quarry.

For the first time in all the years we've lived here, we went into the Bloedel Conservatory, which amazed us how huge it is. What a wonderful atmosphere in there, full of tall tropical trees reaching to the top of the dome, trees such as figs, palms, and a lovely African Fern Pine with its very soft needles (left of the palm in the photo above) plus gorgeous flowers, and many colourful tropical birds. One beautiful blue and yellow macaw(?) displayed a big temper - he did not like my husband making some bird whistle and so he squawked so loudly that it echoed throughout and set off a multitude of other birds. Only when his human caretaker came to take him onto her shoulder did he calm down. Oops!

Seeing all the huge old trees in the park and the tropical ones inside the conservatory inspired us to take some photos of them and share them with Dave Bonta's Festival of the Trees.