Lou Lynn: retro-active

Lou Lynn. Tools as Artifacts. 2009. glass, bronze

There used to be a junk store in Inglewood that just sold tools.  Most of the stuff I have came from it, a few pieces were bought new when I first moved to Calgary – my hammer and saw, and when the old CPR fellow across the alley died his son came to clear out the house and told me to take what I wanted from his father's workroom.  Which I did, except for the 4' piece of steel rail bolted to the bench.  

What I love about these old wrenches and planes, rakes and shovels, saws and chisels is the excellent steel of which they were made and the beautiful handles, satiny with long use under pressure. Compared to new tools with their bright dayglo colours and plastic handles, these old pieces are quiet and still, dark and graceful.

Lou Lynn, a sculptor living in the Slocan Valley, has had an exhibition, Retro-Active, travelling around the province this past year.  She works in bronze and glass, using the heft and monumentalism of basic tool shapes.  Some of the pieces are very large: cast glass adze heads, so large one's hand is Lilliputian.  Tools as Artifacts, 38 bronze and glass pieces pinned in a long line on the wall, are hand-scaled and like many old artifacts, each piece looks like a tool, but the function is unclear.  A piece with a bronze handle and a frosted glass prong is both humorous and mysterious.

In the Nanaimo Museum & Gallery installation Helen Sibelius, the curator of the retrospective, has paired Lynn's work with mining and forestry tools from the museum's collection.  These are no less mysterious: a half-inch thick iron spike like a 6-foot long knitting needle with a small wood handle at the top.
 
In all of this it is the small details that are so poignant.  A plain turned wood handle has a tiny line inscribed half an inch from where it joins the steel: a small, non-functional reference to a ferrule.  Lynn's sculptures makes much of these small details: she isn't making tools, but she is very aware of the hands that made tools, once, and all the small vanities they added to them.

Lou Lynn. Ladle. 2009 bronze, glass, 56 x 46 x 26cm.

Jaclyn Shoub

Jaclyn Shoub. At This Point in Time. 2004Jaclyn Shoub works with large photographs, removing information in a process of distillation.  They are highly painterly as the removal of much of the photograph is done with a brush and solvent: one knows one is looking at a photograph, but so much content is leached from the surface that these landscapes become magical.  Shoub removes everything about the landscape except for the marks of human occupation which appear small and fragile.

For On Site 23: small things, we have been sent a narrative, a short story written in notes, as the beginning of an architectural process.  This narrative, which you will read when 23 is published in May, also has a delicacy – it describes the process of removing a building from public perception, so that the architecture is everything but the building. 

Both these two works are the opposite of abstraction, where one thinks of an essence and then displays that essence.  These start with the large and complex environment, urban or rural, and remove everything but a thin line of meaning.  What we are looking at is almost incidental to the fullness of life and world but, incidental or not, is extremely important to us.

small urban things

Projet : Concept développé par Leblanc + Turcotte + Spooner. Crédit photo : Leblanc + Turcotte + SpoonerMontréal recently held a competition for the design of new bus shelters.  The design chosen was by Leblanc + Turcotte + Spooner.  The press release outlines a way of thinking about urban design that all cities might adopt. 

Montréal has 'made a firm commitment to making such competitions a widespread practice, promoting innovation and excellence in architecture and design, and continuing to position Montréal as a UNESCO City of Design. This project is a concrete illustration of our willingness to ensure that Montréal’s designers play a paramount role in shaping our city’s future.  This design competition is one of the five shukôs, or creative challenges, issued on September 30, 2008, by the Mayor of Montréal. Besides providing tangible impetus for creativity in design and architecture, it aims to widen access to public design commissions to greater numbers of practitioners.'

The Ville de Montréal has within it the Design Montréal office, which runs the competitions; its mission is to improve design throughout the city and to position Montréal as 'a city of design'.  This is how a city uses its designers and architects. 

The bus shelter competition was a public, not a private, initiative involving the Ville de Montréal, the Société de transport de Montréal and the Québec Department of Culture, Heritage and the Status of Women.

The shelter is good too: free standing, modular, a communications column containing digital components and back-lit ads, and an integrated solar system freeing the shelters from dependence on the grid.  The bench is interesting - more like a perch.  Calgary's latest bus shelters have seats divided by a small handrail, presumably to make it impossible to sleep on the bench – a nice little punitive touch.  In Austin, Texas, the downtown bus stops had a row of flip down seats on the side of the building lining the sidewalk. 

Bus shelters are small projects that look after the street.  They project the way a city looks after its people.


Amy Switzer. 2 Word Bird. Ice Follies 2010, Lake Nipissing.

Ice Follies is a biennial exhibition on the 4'-thick ice of Lake Nipissing, this year from February 14-March 20.   Hosted by the WKP Kennedy Public Art Gallery, Ice Follies is – 'eight site-specific artworks that consider or thematically reflect the idea of the ice fishing hut'.  Ice Follies started in 2004 and has some documentation of previous Ice Follies on their website: www.icefollies.ca

Steve Sopinka who wrote about Lake Nipissing's ice fishing huts in On Site 21: weather is one of the artists this year with Out<side>in, an architectural piece that disappears in the wider landscape because it reverses the ice hut tradition of protection, opacity and interiority to an exteriority of perception – of winter, of ice, of the huge space of a frozen lake. 

We have, all around us, artists and designers who think carefully, all the time, of what the architecture of Canada is, with our climate, our weather, our understanding of landscape as a powerful cultural force.  We may huddle in cities, but those cities sit in enormous landforms.  We may have warm houses, buildings, cars and parking garages, but we still come in contact with the weather, no matter where we live.  We have artists, architects and designers who are immensely articulate about being in Canada, and you don't have to look too hard to find them.

Steve Sopinka. Out[side]in. Ice Follies 2010, Lake Nipissing

small countries

Teemu Kurkela. Finland Pavilion, Shanghai Expo 2010

Expos are strange things.  What are they for?  The Seville Expo was a chance to present post-Franco Spain to the world.   It seems that the Shanghai Expo is an opportunity for the world to present itself to China.  Each pavilion struggles to something about the identity, the ambitions, the intentions of its country.

Finland's pavilion, by Teemu Kurkela of JKMM Architects, is a serene bowl floating in a lake.  Minimal, calm, the sky looms large.

The Netherlands pavilion is an antic figure-eight street of little houses.  It looks much more interesting on site than in the presentation rendering, which looks absolutely mad.  John Körmeling is the architect; on his website is a left hand column of conceptual ideas often for highway treatments -- sections of roads that  float off into the sea, etc.  The right hand side shows the Expo project, called Happy Street.

One does get a sense of the intensity of the Netherlands: it has 16.5 million on 33,900 sq km, the size of Nova Scotia.  The open landscape of Finland has 5.4 million people on 338,000 sq km, half the size of Saskatchewan.  These two countries are small in area and population.  They both seem to have a clear idea of how to do a pavilion that says something significant about themselves. 

Is Canada too big?  I ask this rhetorically, as our pavilion says nothing that I can recognise about this country.  

John Körmeling. The Netherlands Pavilion, Shanghai Expo 2010

small pavilions: large expos

Canadian Pavilion at Shanghai Expo 2010Lisa Rochon wrote a good piece in the Globe and Mail on the Canadian pavilion at Shanghai Expo 2010 which was handed off to Cirque de Soleil to sort out.  Who needs architects any more?  Theatre designers must be much more fun, however, this pavilion is a dreadful crinkle of stuff, inward-looking, quite random.  But not, perhaps, as embarrassing as the Canadian pavilion at the Turin Winter Olympics in 2006 which was a gigantic log cabin with a Mountie parked outside.

We are not alone in having ghastly pavilions.  Ireland's pavilion is a P3 project out of the Taoiseach office.  Thomas Heatherwick did Britain's pavilion, a great waving anemone-like haze of fibre optic tentacles.  Miralles did Spain's but I expect he wishes he hadn't.

The Shanghai Expo website describes all the pavilions with a particularly child-like wonder: the Russian pavilion, which looks quite beautiful, is  '12 white towers inspired by traditional Russian womens' costumes.  A 15m tall central building will link the towers.  The 20m towers, in white, red and gold, will duplicate the ancient Ural towns dating back 3,000 years ago, but given a modern touch with their irregular shapes'.

Oh dear, oh dear, what does that mean, given a modern touch with their irregular shapes?  Would one not think that in an exposition of science, technology, arts and architecture there would be just a little sophistication in how architecture was explained?  It all sounds like a second-year design studio – lots of wild expression and very little rigour.

Wojciech Kakowski, Marcin Mostafa and Natalia Paszkowskahe, the architects of Poland's pavilion, seem to have the scale right: a folded plate that shifts the ground plane and shines like one of those lovely cut out tin lamps.  It appears as less splash, less hubris and more thought.  I wish it had been ours. 

Polish pavilion, Shanghai Expo 2010

climate and weather

Steve Sopinka has been discussing with us a project to develop a climate zone map for building.  The climate zone map for planting tells you what species of plants will survive in specific areas and is well known to gardeners.  Calgary is zone 2b because of its elevation, the mountains and its chinooks, föhn winds that come from Pacific weather systems and which wreak havoc with plants who wake up on a balmy January morning thinking it is spring only to be blasted with -30 the next week.  Within zone 2b however there are frost pockets and warm spots.  I live in the lee of the downtown with all those tall buildings blocking the wind and giving off heat and so I can garden to zone 4.  North Bay is zone 3b . Vancouver Island is mostly  7a and b, parts of the Fraser River delta are zone 8, meaning they can grow almost anything.

There is a building corollary to all of this: with each climate zone come various fine-grained built responses.  Tarps, amusing as I find them, are one.  For example. 

We are launching a call to contribute to a database of local building traditions.  This database will include specific examples of local building habits, from form to roof slopes to door placement, with a hazarding of why things are built the way they are.  The stepless door, so famous in Newfoundland, is not about climate, or weather, or materials, but is about social propriety.   The ubiquity of the tarp, a building material in its own right on the west coast, is not about propriety, it is about rain. 

This project is outlined on this page: climate zone building responses.  A rather dull name, but you have to start somewhere. 


tarp archaeology

This might be the end of my disquisition on tarps for now.  It stopped raining, got some more pictures, found some more conditions, shall think about them for a bit.  They have so many applications, from storm walls to weed killers.  Most are blue, some are silver and really beautiful.  They are the foreground to many glorious touristy views, the background to the back yard.  They appear where unnecessary, they are slowly buried when forgotten.

With weather comes architectural adaptation.  We have been taught the traditional responses to weather: the tight roofs on the Nova Scotia shore where any roof with an overhang would be ripped off by horizontal Atlantic winds, the deep eaves on the west coast which protect the walls and the foundation from quietly endless vertical rain.  The steep metal roofs of Revelstoke shed great snowfalls into the sideyards; the prairie two-storey frame house, an almost perfect cube, has an extremely low surface to volume ratio, minimising heat loss.  These are the broad strokes, none of which prepared me for the finer grain of tarp culture.   

tarpology

I'm beginning to think that tarps also indicate ownership, that the pile of leaves on the boulevard covered in a tarp indicates that you have intentions for these leaves, they are yours, they aren't abandoned leaves. 
These pipes in the yacht club parking lot ought to be fine in the rain; no one is worried that water will run in the ends, no, the tarp appears to tidy them up.  The sight of a bright blue tarp is preferable to a pile of pipe lengths.  I find this a bit curious, but clearly I don't quite get the nuances of tarpdom yet. 

I grew up here and can't ever remember tarps everywhere.  Dark mildewed canvas, yes, and tarpaper, lots and lots of tarpaper.  There was a small house on the way to school that was only tarpapered.  It is now stuccoed, but for twenty years the tarpaper did its job.  Now it would be neatly faced with bright blue plastic.  

Tarps R Us

Midland Liquidators, immortalised in Bob Bossin's Nanaimo, and the heart of Island tarp culture.

Tarps are everywhere here, as water is exceedingly thin and can get into the tiniest of hairline cracks in gaskets, flashing, window frames, putty, sealed joints. Woodpiles are tarped, there are tarps on cars, tarps on boats, this morning saw a pile of rocks covered in a tarp, something completely inexplicable.  And because it rains so much, all organic matter is leached from the garden leaving it a gravel bed, you see a lot of piles of manure and topsoil covered by tarps. Deck furniture is tarped, lawn mowers have tiny tarps, roofs have huge tarps.  The mad lady who walks on the path by the yacht club beach wears a tarp. 

Midland Liquidators used to actually be a liquidator, full of tools and work clothes mainly, and once, unforgettably a stand of high-end eyeglasses of which I bought many.  Dad and I used to go down and look at stuff – screwdrivers that worked at right angles, clever pliers and such.  One of my earliest memories when I would have maybe been five, was going with him to Capital Iron in Victoria, a gaunt old warehouse of tools, hardware and navy surplus, oiled wood floors and dim light bulbs up in the rafters.  Neither my father or I were particularly handy with complicated building.  He was a librarian and I generally smash things together with lots of nails and glue, but we found such places endlessly fascinating.   It is quite tough at Midland now, a serious contractor's tool store, but, the tarps, the tarps.

small things: tarps

My new, very small garage.  Is this inventive?  Absolutely not, it is cultural.  This is the west coast where it rains interminably and tarps are a way of life.  The large thing would be to have a two- or three-car garage.  The small thing is to protect a leaking window seal.

small things: Josep Muñoz i Pérez

Josep Muñoz i Pérez. New Door, Foment de les Arts i del Disseny, Barcelona.This is one of the projects that has been sent to us for On Site 23: small things.  It is a door on the Plaça dels Ángels, dominated by the chapel entrance to the Convent dels Ángels in Barcelona.  Muñoz' project was to push the entrance to the FAD into view. 

That's it.  The whole project, which won several awards, is a door.  It wasn't just one part of a larger project, the FAD existed, and needed a presence on the Carrer dels Ángels.  Can an architectural commission be smaller?   Barcelona is stacked with young architects, and has been so since the mid 1980s.  As a result, every detail, every litter bin, every bollard, door handle, window frame, sign, news kiosk, bench and handrail has been designed by an architect.  And these architects treat every project, no matter how small, as the making of their reputation and the development of their architectural voice. 

I weep at the really horrible nature of the utilitarian objects in the public domain in our cities, and how institutions that should know better: art galleries, publishers, design schools, libraries either camp in some other building and accept the generic details of their host, or treat their entrances as just a way to get into the building.  That sense that the contents of the building can spill outward into the public realm is missing.  Doors here shut the outside out and the inside in. 

Is an appreciation of small urban moves, marginal architectural interventions, possible here?  We can all think of how things could be better, but what does it actually take in terms of approaching city parks departments, or transportation departments (the heart quails) with self-generated projects in hand?  Because if we wait for them to make a move, we will be old and grey before it happens.

small things: ice fishing huts

Paul Whelan. Ice Fishing Hut on Lake Simcoe, 2008.

Both Steve Sopinka and Paul Whelan wrote, in different articles, about ice fishing huts in Ontario for On Site 21: weather.  The Globe & Mail had a piece on them last weekend, and Rob Kovitz has released his long in the making book, Ice Fishing in Gimli. a novel.  Kovitz's book is huge, complex and about Gimli, and winter, and Canada, and takes its name from a study Kovitz did about 10 years ago of the ice fishing huts on Lake Winnipeg. 

Beautifully crafted little pieces of architecture housing one or two people who spend long days in them with a fishing line dropped through a hole in the ice, ice fishing huts are on their way to being one of the enduring and iconic images of the Canadian winter. 

Although a highly individual activity, the collective of huts form a community of sorts, with unwritten rules and oral traditions.  They represent a culture that is local, historic, spatially precise, half-sport, half-social with an architecture that has developed from it.  Perhaps one can buy a little garden shed from Rona or Canadian Tire and adapt it to sitting on the ice, but Sopinka's and Whelan's research indicate that this is not really what happens.  These huts are handmade with considerable care and attention. 

Vernacular architecture is a form of building limited by the scope and scale of the individual builder, working with ordinary tools and found materials: things are put together in ways that make professionals both blanch and wonder why their education battered the impulse to make things out of them. 

Ice fishing huts are small, the tradition is long, the lake is huge. 

small things: lipstick

The Liberation of Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp, April 1945. The Imperial War Museum, London

Last Remembrance week The Relief of Belsen (2007) was on TVO.  It was both drama and documentary, intercut with Richard Dimbleby's BBC footage taken in 1945.  The ambulance crew which had been sent to the prison, and subsequent Red Cross and military reinforcements were played by actors, no one played the survivors of the camp, they were all shown in the intercut documentary portions.  The ambulance crew did not know it was a concentration camp; the horror of their discovery was manifest and enormous, the task of humanitarian rescue nearly impossible as thousands died even as they were trying to give them proper nourishment, medicine, clothes and bedding.

This is an excerpt from the diary of Lieutenant-Colonel Gonin DSO who, in the film, was shown as the head of the medical team:

It was shortly after the British Red Cross arrived, though it may have no connection, that a very large quantity of lipstick arrived. This was not at all what we men wanted, we were screaming for hundreds and thousands of other things and I don't know who asked for lipstick. I wish so much that I could discover who did it, it was the action of genius, sheer unadulterated brilliance. I believe nothing did more for these internees than the lipstick. Women lay in bed with no sheets and no nightie but with scarlet red lips, you saw them wandering about with nothing but a blanket over their shoulders, but with scarlet red lips. I saw a woman dead on the post mortem table and clutched in her hand was a piece of lipstick. At last someone had done something to make them individuals again, they were someone, no longer merely the number tattooed on the arm. At last they could take an interest in their appearance. That lipstick started to give them back their humanity.

Such a small thing, a lipstick.

small things: Zoe Keating

Zoe Keating.  Pop!Tech, 18 October 2007 at Camden Opera House. 

video by Kevin Fox

A small assemblage of cello, Keating, laptop, a short composition of 9 minutes, a huge, complex and beautiful sound.  The large thing would be to compose a piece of music, find an orchestra to play it, record it, get it distributed, etc, etc.  The small thing is to sort it all out yourself with what you have: talent, new technology and an idea, or several ideas, and your own website.   

Issue 23 (call for articles) will consider small moves, small projects with large consequences.  New technological changes in the arts seem to appear when the art form is at its most corporate and most proprietal. Photography was seen as the death of painting, which was not what happened, however small cameras put the making of images into amateur hands.  Music sampling put the making of music into the hands of disenfranchised youth: it didn't kill off the recording business, it just allowed individuals to make and reproduce music themselves.  One might see all inventions as reinvigorating overstuffed productions that force audiences to be passive consumers.  New technologies are constantly put into the hands of ordinary people who use them in personal and idiosyncratic ways.  And these things start out small.  And then they get big.

small things: Josh Silver's adjustable glasses

Michael Lewis. Adjustable Glasses, The Guardian December 22, 2008Josh Silver is an atomic physicist at Oxford who invented adjustable liquid-filled lenses for eyeglasses.  Given the lack of eye doctors in Africa especially, such glasses allow the wearer to adjust the lenses themselves.  A clever little syringe on the frame fills flexible sacs, sandwiched between two durable plastic shields, with liquid and when the sac is the right thickness to correct the vision problem, the lens is sealed with a screw.  Silver is the archetypal rumpled and brilliant inventor, seen demonstrating his glasses in a TED lecture here.  There is a fairly complete description from 2008 in the Guardian here.  There is, of course, the website asking for help in this project here.

I would say this is a small thing, with huge consequences.  Esther Addley in the Guardian article points out that having glasses improves literacy rates and extends the working life of people who use their eyes to read, sew, embroider, mend nets – any kind of fine work.  A large scheme would train thousands of eye doctors to work in remote regions without much infrastructure or services – a large task indeed.  The small scheme is to put into production simple, self-adjusting glasses and to produce millions of them. 

Issue 23 (call for articles) wants to look at how small moves, small projects, small things can make large changes.  It is important to look at this for many, many reasons, not least of which is that western society is cut off from fine scale detail.  We can't fix our own cars, make our own clothes, cut our own hair or fix our own glasses; we seem incapable of invention. 

I would like a pair of these adjustable glasses – I'm wearing +1.25 readers bought from Nanaimo's Midland Liquidators in 1996 for $10 and they could use a bit of tuning. 

138+2

What an end to 2009: a project that has lost its direction and more and more killed. 

We did On Site 22: WAR to see what effects war has on architecture, urbanism and design.  The articles submitted to us filled an issue; it is clear that we are able to work because of wars, in the aftermath of wars, in response to wars, but at the sharp end, in our name, people are dying. 

Salish Sea

Thinking about the flatly named Park Bridge of yesterday's post – maybe there was a Mr. Park connected to the CPR or Golden but it is hardly a name to capture the imagination – yesterday on CBC there was a repeat of Paolo Pietropaolo's radio documentary on the Salish Sea.
 
This is the new name for the waters known as the Johnstone Strait, the Strait of Georgia, Puget Sound and the Strait of Juan de Fuca.  Georgia for George III, named by George Vancouver, happy coincidence that.  Juan de Fuca was a Spanish explorer who was in the area in 1592 looking for a northwest passage.  Peter Puget was a lieutenant on Vancouver's expedition in 1792.

The Johnstone Strait is bordered by Queen Charlotte Strait and is towards the top eastern end of Vancouver Island.  James Johnstone was another member of Vancouver's expeditionary fleet and was the one who ascertained that Vancouver Island was an island.  Queen Charlotte was the queen of George III and also the name of one of the ships of George Dixon who surveyed the Queen Charlotte Islands, known now as Haida Gwaii.  Puget Sound and the Strait of Juan de Fuca are within US territory, the rest are in Canada.   The Strait of George is sometimes known as the Gulf of Georgia, thus the Gulf Islands, which extend into US territory and are there known as the San Juan Islands.

This whole waterway shall soon be officially known as the Salish Sea, surrounded as it is by the Salish peoples.  The naming of the Salish Sea removes the political markings on the water delineated by colonial names.  The old names are all related to land ownership.  Salish Sea is about the sea, not the land.  One of the Salish chiefs called in 'our highway'.  Interestingly it includes, within this name, the watersheds of the streams and rivers that feed it, thus extending way into the land confounding our usual notions of a sea as being something like a salt water lake.  The Salish Sea defines a very precise bioregion, reminding us that colonial political boundaries almost inevitably sliced apart all the natural divisions of the land and people.  The naming of the Salish Sea is a rather miraculous decolonising act, and one that is, equally miraculously, supported and promoted by all the governments within its territory. 

Park Bridge, Golden BC

Park Bridge in construction, 2006. Kicking Horse Canyon, east of Golden, BC

One of the most spectacular bridges on the Trans-Canada is the new (2007) Park Bridge on the descent into Golden.  Now that it is open you barely know you are on a bridge, so wide and smooth is it, but during the several years of its construction you drove on the old highway underneath it (the highway and the CPR tracks show in the image above).  The central piers are about 150 feet high, tall and elegant; from the old highway it was clear we were all going to pitch off into space way up the hill, shoot across the ravine and catch the hill on the other side, bypassing the dangerous twisting old road all together.  You can't see any of this now from the new road, it is all just more highway, safe and fast and that marvellous registration of the extreme topography is lost. 

Anything under construction is so exciting.  It is when concept, theory and practice are all evident to the eye, and the architecture, in its widest sense, is diagrammatic and understandable.  Construction workers give the scale, one understands the size of the project.  Once it is all done, scale is subsumed by a comfortable opacity, the process of building has become an object, with a function, and we use it unthinkingly.

Placing the girders on the piers

This photo is from the Park Bridge girder launching on the Kicking Horse Canyon highway construction website photo gallery.  This is the link to the girder launching, but the rest of the site is worth a look.

James Trevelyan

James Trevelyan. Frozen Lake, 1986. 27 x 20", mixed media on paperThis drawing came up for auction recently.  There are four large Calgary art auctions a year, each with about 600 lots, maybe 400 of which are paintings of the mountains in landscape format, blue skies, sharp shadows on the peaks, snow at the top, usually a river in the foreground.  The views are often recognisable from the road or from hikes radiating out from the old CPR towns - Banff, Lake Louise, Field, Craigellachie, Glacier, Golden and date from the days when artists came from England or Ontario and Québec via the CPR to Banff to paint.  It established a way of looking at the mountains: from a safe distance, from a valley, in the summer.

Today these same towns are ski centres, contemporary art has long turned away from landscape painting, and although there are some brilliant abstract painters of landscapes across the prairies, few look at the mountains and it is rare indeed to find much work painted from the depths of winter.  The obvious reason is that it is bloody cold in the winter. 

Perhaps a less obvious reason is our fear of winter.  The winter on the prairies and in the mountains is not the cozy Group of Seven kind of winter where snow lies like puffy duvets on everything and shadows are a lovely violet or a deep azure.  This is black and white winter, hard and mean. The frozen lake in James Trevelyan's drawing is scoured clean by a high mountain wind, its ice like basalt.  And yet there is a lovely intimacy in this piece, an ambiguity of surface and light that one never finds in work painted on bright sunny days. 

Like lots of Canadians, lots of Canadian artists go to Mexico for the winter.  I'd take this view of a sere, cold, empty, beautiful winter over the florid landscapes of the south any day.  Visually, I get this climate.