Dianne Bersea Perambulations

Holiday Gift Certificates for Art Mentoring or Art commissions

11/29/2021

Are you a brush and pencil person? Or the friend, parent or associate of an artist who is looking to grow in their create work?
Here's an opportunity to develop/practice or offer hands-on drawing, sketching, illustration, observational and painting skills in a supportive, knowledgeable setting. With over fifty years of practical experience in the art world Dianne has learned, taught and practiced art in many non-digital forms and mediums. Specifically Dianne is an accomplished and lauded watercolourist with similar success as an acrylic painter. "For twelve seasons I facilitated watercolour workshops at Hollyhock, the renowned west coast retreat centre, and more recently shared my painting expertise at various locations throughout BC with a focus on the Okanagan. Now I prefer one-on-one mentorships and teaching situations, from brief 1/2 hour critiques to longer engagements based on client need and preference." Rates are by the hour or half hour. Commissions also considered. Examples of my work below.

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Mrs. Cargill

5/6/2020

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I have a confession to make. I have a Cargill connection. It’s a bit tenuous, but still, the connection is closer than I suspected. It’s put a face on that corporate giant called Cargill, that pervasive transport and ‘agricultural’ monolith which has swept across our Canadian and world landscape changing what and how we eat.
Lets step back a few years...close to thirty years to be exact. At that time I was working as a publishing consultant and food stylist on a cookbook project, a collection of recipes and reminiscences from a famous Canadian prairie restaurant.
This restaurant inhabited several locations over the years, beginning with a few tables in the author’s home on the edge of the Alberta foothills. When it came time for the food photo shoot, this rustic, screen-doored, two story, wild rose surrounded, weather beaten home-place could not be reproduced in the cold confines of a big city photo studio.
Thus it came to pass that for an intense week in a hot July the production crew and a team of cooks laboured in Bett’s southern Alberta home. All in all we created some remarkably evocative food photos with a plethora of farm-raised corn, zucchini, potatoes, squash, poultry and a whopping forty-pound side of beef.
With the addition of a wagon wheel table, an old sideboard, wire egg baskets, collectible plates, decorative serving trays, checkered table clothes, canning jars from the cold room and a cheese wheel secured from a neighbouring cheese factory, the setting evoked nostalgia like a hay-rick at sunset.
            Barn-board walls and a window view of southern Alberta sky made an impossible-to-reproduce backdrop for a cornucopia of mouth-watering ranch food. And yes, we ate it all.
Late each day, when the hothouse atmosphere of location shooting was complete and all quiet in the house, Bett and I would spend the evening chatting and looking at her photo albums. A devotee of all things food related, Bett’s albums were filled with food photos and the people who enjoy it.
            Lively scenes of weddings, birthdays, holiday celebrations, community events and happy people chowing down on Bett’s legendary menu, cascaded across page after page. Well finger photos revealed local folks from town, area ranchers, friends, celebrities from near and far including, as I was often reminded, John Wayne and Bing Crosby.
Several albums documented Bett’s annual trip with an international gourmet club, each photo accompanied by a commentary on the who’s who of the culinary world, with chefs and dinner guests seated before plates of sumptuous food served in extraordinary settings…here castles in Spain, there a sun burnt palazzo in Italy.
Pointing at a photo, Bett might say, “Here’s Prince Vladimir of _ with Paul Bocuse at Paul’s restaurant in Paris. And this is Lord and Lady _. They were so funny! Oh, and here’s Mrs. Cargill at a dinner party on the SS France”.
Mrs. Cargill? Of the Alberta Cargills? “Yes, Mrs. Cargill, you know, the grain people”.
I leaned closer to peer at this startling image. What I knew of Cargill, “the grain people”, was of a monstrous corporation devouring small town Alberta. The Cargill centralization of grain collection and distribution, and the large Cargill granaries, three and four times the size of garden variety grain elevators, were reducing once viable towns and farms to dust.
            I looked down at the 4 x 6 inch photo, a patch of bright colours against the black album page. I wanted to know what people look like who are building an agricultural and marketing monopoly and, in the process altering our food and our relationship with its production? How do such people look?
Surprisingly, they look much like you and me. Tucked under faded photo corners I saw a prim, well dressed, grey-haired woman who looked a lot like my mother…if my mother were to be found dining with European royalty on a luxury liner in the mid-Atlantic.
            Fascination bound me to the page. I asked Bett to point out Mrs. Cargill in a series of opulent shipboard dining photos. Despite the wealth and array of exotic food, Mrs. Cargill continued to look very much like you or me. And why not? She was someone’s mother and grandmother, a wife. Still and all, it was difficult to reconcile this proper older woman with the wreckage of lives and rail lines that I knew to be occurring.
            Only a few weeks prior to finding myself perusing photo albums in an Alberta farmhouse, I had visited an artist friend in north central Saskatchewan. Magda had hopes of creating an ‘artist’s colony’ in the remnants of a small town decimated by the Cargill juggernaut...the town elevator merely awaiting demolition to finish the job.
            For $200, Magda had bought a church for a studio and home, offering choir loft benches to visiting overnight guests. With a couple of old codgers they constituted the entire town.
            Despite the depopulation, my visit to Magda coincided with a community reunion. By the afternoon of the second day, the nearby playing field had filled with people milling about or eyeing long tables sagging with potato salads, meat loaves, buns and biscuits and breads, juices and jams and jellies, hot dogs and cold cuts. Over three hundred people had come home on a summer afternoon to eat, talk, drink beer and play ball…just plain folks sitting around on lawn chairs telling tales and remembering.
  I noticed eyes drifting to the derelict elevator and the line of trees where the grain cars used to run.
When I stopped in at Magda’s a number of years later, the elevator and railway tracks had disappeared. Now Magda had the town to herself. It had been so since the last of the old-timers passed on. With a couple dozen sheep, a small wheat field swamped by nearby agribusiness over-spray, and a shop by the road filled with relics of how it used to be, Magda managed to hold on.
            It is easy to feel nostalgic for the demise of a small town in the vast Canadian prairies, for a way of life that kept people in touch with the land. But there are even larger issues at stake here, issues that are large and frightening because Cargill and like-minded corporate interests are reaching far beyond a monopoly in transportation.
            In the late 90’s I came across a news release published in the Ram’s Horn, an 'occasional journal of food system analysis,' sadly now defunct. In its hey-day, the Ram's Horn was a clarion call for our attention to eroding food safety and control.
  The Cargill press release trumpeted the intent of Cargill and Monsanto to form a worldwide joint venture, first to create “a system that links biotechnology research and development from seeds through processing to the customer.... with plans to explore future opportunities to expand the partnership into agriculture and food.”
            As we know, these pronouncements have largely come to pass. More centralization of transport, terminator seeds, cattle cloning and genetic engineering…a process that violates species and organism boundaries.
            To be honest, I was initially taken in by the propaganda of genetic engineering; appreciating the idea that genetic engineering is merely a step beyond natural selection, a tweak here and a tweak there, and voila, a marvelous pest free, self fertilizing, sunshine producing agricultural marvel. I liked the media reports that extolled GE and its offer of abundant and overflowing crops for the starving masses.
            When I learned how genetic engineering introduces genetic material into a cell that would not normally accept such an addition, I felt shocked. It is done with great violence. In fact, the Ram’s Horn article likened it to rape.
            My mind flashes back to Bett’s photo album and pictures of her gourmet dinner companions. I see Mrs. Cargill lifting a fork to her mouth, glancing casually at the camera. Granted, this Mrs. Cargill may have had little to do with the decisions being made to dramatically and violently manipulate our food. Somehow I envision the people behind such threatening science, such mono-focused, bottom-line oriented thinking as dark-suited power brokers with leering grins.
            What intrigued me then and intrigues me now, is a frightening suspicion that the Cargill’s are real people, who eat, travel and live their lives, just like you and me.
            The only difference that I can imagine is not superficial. It’s not in the clothes they wear or the trips they take. It’s deep inside where different values about our independence, our food safety and nutritional needs reside. Where money and a willingness to use harsh methods and even violence to change our food and food systems is uppermost.
            Addendum: I wrote this many years ago. Today, May 6, 2020, a social media post caught my eye. It revealed Cargill’s manipulation of their meat processing staff to stay on the job despite numerous cases of Covid 19. The objectives have not changed.

Copyright Dianne Bersea

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A LONG RANT BECAUSE THERE ARE THINGS THAT NEED TO BE SAID:

4/3/2020

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1) Please walk, bike and jog in single file when passing other people on sidewalks, pathways, trails. Common sense! And good courtesy. The life you save may be your own.

2) I love outdoor work. I would be happy to work in our farm fields if I were still under 60. Even if individually we only did a few hours a day, we would have a big impact on the ability of our growers to plant, tend, harvest and deliver. We are going to need labour to do the jobs migrant workers have done for far too long. They have made our food seem so accessible and inexpensive, we have been royally spoiled! Do I hear the word privileged?? I know migrant workers support their families back home and this will be a hardship if they can't come to Canada, but at some point we need to step up and provide for ourselves. If not actually on a farm, we can do a lot with some gardening of our own.

3) Did the folks who relied on horses, carriages, livery stables, hay farms, saddlery and harness makers have a nervous breakdown and insist the government subsidize their endeavours to keep them afloat when gas guzzlers came along?? Any harness maker worth his salt got busy making leather goods for cars. Livery stables became garages and gas stations. About time our fossil industry recognized they are horses that need to be put out to pasture.

4) The folks who make big money in times like these are the innovators!

5) I can't believe our government values our collapsing and destructive fossil industry so highly. In fact, I'm offended that my endeavours have never been treated so well. I suppose artists can always "make do," but why can't oil industry workers be given the chance to see how they can "make do." Is a young oil worker more valuable than a writer, artist, musician?? Are oil industry workers worth more because they make a product we're addicted to?? In an industry that makes big bucks for a few people and works others hard in dangerous trades, where they live in mass temporary housing provided by their employers? I do feel seriously slighted that nothing I have done merits the money and attention that is still showered on an industry that refuses to make changes...an industry that has left us thousands of abandoned wells and mine workings that need cleaning up. Why am I less than that, and my work rarely deemed essential? I have noticed recent posts that remind us how valuable are the books, games, movies, songs, and musicals we are now enjoying and deem essential to mental health. Those are produced by millions of creatives that are rarely acknowledged when billions of dollars are plopped into the pockets of oil industry cronies and their government shills.

6) Despite all of the above, I am overwhelmed by the news of folks who are shifting to PPE mask making, gardening, supporting, caring and more. I just heard a story this morning that the engineers at Magna, a major Canadian auto parts manufacturer, are transitioning to researching / designing a sterilizing system for ventilators!!

7) I'm actually excited by the creativity I'm seeing. Creativity is what moves us forward. It was creativity that invented the car and all the strange and wondrous oil production enterprises. It's creativity that gave us fracking and other amazing technologies. Unfortunately all creativity is not necessarily healthful and environmentally sensitive. Perhaps we can temper our creativity with compassion, sensitivity and immediate reversal when something we design does more harm than good. May we have the wisdom to recognize the diversity, integration, interconnectedness that Coronavirus demands of us. May we be open to challenges and changes to our expectations, our needs, our relationships and how we relate to this remarkable planet. And if we don't get it...the planet has a way of dealing with us.

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Out on a Limb - lecture Series 2020

2/23/2020

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Regretfully, this lecture series has been postponed until Coronavirus pandemic has run it's course. Please practice all safety measures. Take care. Thank you......
I'm delighted to announce that I've been invited to speak on my fifty-plus years as a professional artist. I will surely be "Out on a Limb!" I will reveal the secrets of creativity, my personal process, enthusiasms and how I weathered the art school of hard-knocks. Expect the unexpected!

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Nature Wise Column - October 12, 2016

2/23/2020

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Nature Wise column - November 23, 2018

2/23/2020

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Nature Wise Column - Oct 16, 2019

2/23/2020

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June 07th, 2019

6/7/2019

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I'm an occasional Nature Wise columnist for the Penticton Western News. Here's my latest contribution as of today, June 7, 2019.

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Should art be non-political? Is that even possible?

9/20/2018

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This short piece appeared in 2013 on the Cortes Island Timeline, an island message board, following a dust up about an art show presented by the Raincoast Conservation Foundation in which I was an exhibitor.

Oil Free Coast Art Show Stirs the Waters!

Lots of controversy surrounded the display of Art for an Oil-Free Coast at the Calgary City Hall Atrium a couple of weeks ago (April 2013). Not surprising perhaps as Calgary is the heart of the Canadian oil industry.

Despite being entitled Art for an Oil-Free Coast and clearly presented by Raincoast Conservation Foundation, claims were made that the show snuck in without the proper authorities knowing what it was all about.

I found it startling that there were even a few claims that art shouldn't be political. Someone has failed to grasp what art is about! Creating awareness is political.

But it felt good to have stirred up conversation about oil tanker traffic on the coast. Given recent events such as a large fish boat crashing into a naval ship in Esquimalt harbour, it's hard to argue that an oil tanker will never be in trouble. And TROUBLE on this coast could devastate miles and miles of fragile coast and render thousands of miles of ocean uninhabitable.

I'd like to see the financial and physical energy currently invested in 'proving' the efficacy of oil instead invested in alternative energy. Didn't I just see that Germany now claims to be a major solar power? All in all, it's interesting to be deemed a scary radical because I painted a watercolour of some bull kelp floating near the Athlone Islets in the Bardwell Group on BC's Central Coast.

Is it because tanker traffic may render this painting a document of something that could be lost? Will be lost??

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/anti-pipeline-art-exhibit-stirs-controversy-at-calgary-city-hall/article11299560/

http://www.cbc.ca/player/Radio/Local+Shows/Alberta/ID/2379483443/

http://www.calgaryherald.com/Anti+oilsands+show+sets+City+Hall/8246576/story.html#ixzz2QbGgssGC

http://globalnews.ca/video/487014/controversial-exhibit-stays-at-city-hall

http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2013/04/17/anti-pipeline-art-show-calgary-city-hall_n_3101092.html

http://www.canmoreleader.com/2013/04/09/art-for-an-oil-free-coast-comes-to-canmore

http://calgary.ctvnews.ca/exhibit-paints-different-picture-of-pipeline-project-1.1239071#ixzz2QZjhMlrd

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/story/2013/04/14/calgary-oil-sands-art-exhibit.html

http://www.calgaryherald.com/news/calgary/City+pulls+permit+anti+pipeline+show/8251765/story.html#ixzz2Qk3iKZEr

http://globalnews.ca/news/486404/city-hall-art-exhibit-stirs-controversy/

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/story/2013/04/17/calgary-oil-pipeline-art-exhibit-pulled.html

http://beaconnews.ca/blog/2013/04/northern-gateway-protest-art-sets-up-at-calgary-city-hall/

http://artthreat.net/2013/04/calgary-artists-oil-free-coast/

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Trouble on the Road to Paradise

9/18/2018

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An explanatory note:
            A lot of misogynist horror has transpired since I wrote this essay in June of 2017. My fear that my words would provoke strong criticism has been overwhelmed by intervening events. The enforced departure of Harvey Weinstein for assaulting female staff and performers, the endless male perpetuated civilian massacres, and the ongoing display of juvenile anger by Donald Trump has confirmed my premise that there’s Trouble on the road to Paradise.

            My original story:

In four days I’m expected on Cortes Island, my old home place, an isolated wilderness isle in the BC Northern Gulf Islands. In sharp contrast to the heart wrenching events happening elsewhere in the world, Cortes is often said to be and isle of Paradise.
Long sandy beaches, rain forest trails, healthy lifestyles and friendly community are the order of the day.
I could use some of that.
But I feel confused and unprepared for a vacation, or even the idea of a vacation. I’m reeling from the magnitude of human tragedy in Manchester, Paris Brussels, Aleppo, Yemen, and cities much closer to home. How do I respond to men slashing viciously into unsuspecting crowds? How do I respond to mad men gunning down dozens of young children in a classroom?
I attempt to set these anxieties aside when friend Jodi and I leave by car from the silvery sage of the South Okanagan for the coastal vistas of Cortes Island.
Within a few kilometers we turn away from the Okanagan corridor and head West on Route #3 to the coast. At this early hour we are lonely travelers. There’s barely a vehicle ahead or behind.
In the deep valley of the Similkameen, loose gravel and rough pockmarks on the highway indicate recent slide activity from the ragged cliffs above.
My mind drifts to a world where humans too fall among others in catastrophic ways. What of the men who attempt to shield young Muslim women and are murdered for their compassion and bravery? What of the profoundly disturbed men who terrorize unsuspecting crowds? What trauma clings to those who witness these events?
This fragility is difficult to shake. I’m mesmerized by the size of the boulders that rear up beside the road. I scan the steep hills and follow the trajectory of ancient rockslides. I see houses and farm buildings among the boulders and rock fall.
What is the difference between choosing life at the base of an unstable mountain and an unprovoked attack? Both are unpredictable. Rocks fall and rivers flood and crazed radicalized males do attack without provocation.
I find myself reviewing recent terrorist events. I can’t help but note the gender of the attackers. Strange. I sense that I’m not to mention this. Women friends often jump to defend the men in their lives, as if identifying men as the chief perpetrators of violence somehow threatens their own relationships.
We drive onward through flickering light and shade. We pass from cool to warm and back again. I’m grateful that in this moment I am spared rock fall, or flood, or brutal attack.
Beyond the town of Princeton, we ascend into open rangeland and evergreen elevations. But a distant pale gravel slope stained by dark water-like marks and grader cuts unsettles me.
I wonder at this unstable looking slope, the tailings pond at the Copper Mountain Mine operation. Again my mind takes me away to recent stories of tailings pond collapse…the rush of destruction that has followed, then been ignored…and recent reports that the government has approved the dumping of mine waste into a central BC lake.
In my present moment, new swooping highway curves hardly require a change in speed and expose the open landscape on the edge of craggy mountains.
In the high elevation passes of Manning Park light glimmers on remaining snow, and I blink at narrow light through skeletal evergreens that are no longer green. I recognize withered Douglas, Balsam and Alpine Fir. Stately Engelmann Spruce, normally almost black-green, is gaunt with leaden colour and down turned branches.
I sigh and push myself to admire the late dusting of snow.
Beyond Alison Pass we gather speed on a steep decline and encounter another crumpled mountainside. I feel acutely aware of the sharp edged, house-sized boulders of the Hope Slide.
The rock face above is still monitored for oscillations. I mentally review a photo I’ve seen of miners in a tunnel when the mountain ahead had been sheered away, leaving them blinking into daylight where moments before darkness prevailed.
Now we slide down a long hill away from historic disaster and scoot out on the other side of Hope. It’s mid-morning. The veil of interior BC slips aside. The mountains ride low in a soft haze on the far side of vast level fields.
Traffic increases, as does the speed. The sun glances off car windows and chrome wheel covers. I put on sunglasses and pull the visor down. Vancouver hovers on the horizon.
I feel anxious.
Low shiny-roofed barns expel manure-scented air into strangely unpopulated rich green pastures. A plant nursery interrupts the flat agricultural fields with unidentified exotics.
At the huge multi-lane section of highway leading to the Port Mann Bridge and the Fraser River, I am purposefully breathing with Yogic awareness.
“Just don’t leave this lane, or turn off anywhere,” Jodi says, fearful that we’ll be lost in the mysterious streets of endless suburbs.
Abruptly, an exotic sports car driven with masculine confidence by a trim grey-headed man, whips from a right hand on-ramp and abruptly switches back and forth across four lanes. Moments later men in a maroon SUV and a dusty van play tag at high speed, cutting me off with their games.
I’m grateful that stats indicate a continued decline in vehicle accidents since 1995, though I’ve heard men still account for more than 70% of aggressive driving charges.
We finally enter the cities of the Lower Mainland and a myriad of roadways.
On the Ironworkers Memorial Bridge I’m again purposefully breathing. On my right I glance down into Burrard Inlet…the inlet where oil companies directed by male CEO’s, push for an expanded pipeline terminal and an 80% increase in tanker traffic.
On my left the massive superstructure of a tanker seems about to brush the underside of the bridge.
Then we’re out onto the serpentine concrete byways that sort traffic into those headed for Horseshoe Bay Ferry and those rushing to countless destinations, east to Dollarton and Deep Cove, west to Burnaby and Vancouver. We merge onto the Upper Levels, ferry bound, wheeling past high-side retaining walls and tree shrouded off ramps toward Horseshoe Bay.
On the expansive ocean crossing to Vancouver Island we read and people watch. The newspaper shares more horror as humans take out their frustrations on families, each other and our extraordinary landscape.
In mid-afternoon we arrive in Nanaimo. At a simple motel we trundle suitcases up a flight of exterior stairs.
Jodi departs to visit her mom in a senior’s complex. I settle in with my current favourite book, Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us.
I’m fascinated by Weisman’s premise…a devastating reveal of how we live now and how the earth might respond if humans vanished in an instant.
Weisman fearlessly examines our present moment, often in unsettling detail. With well-researched clarity Weisman exposes our 21st Century as it begins to self-destruct within days of our magical departure.
I am especially shocked by Weisman’s description of Houston’s devotion to oil derivatives production, from chemicals to gas. I flip open Google Earth to view the actual physical domination of Houston by this intense industry. I am shocked. (Shortly those very facilities will face the wrath of Hurricane Harvey with explosions, fires and release of deadly chemicals manifesting the very scenario I’ve been reading about.)
Again I’m pressed smack up against the reality of what we have wrought.
We? Women are rarely participants in Weisman’s dissertation, or in most histories…or in most boardrooms and war-rooms where disastrous decisions are made.
I remember checking out a friend’s video he encouraged me to watch. “It’s a really good history of Poland,” he said, “where I’m from.” After dutifully watching centuries of warfare, plunder and decimation, I primarily noticed the total absence of female references. What happened to the women?
I momentarily ponder Weisman’s futuristic world where we’ve all vanished in an instant. I’m tempted to consider a more gender specific dematerialization.
The next morning I wander without direction. I’m sandal shod in a semi-industrial area without sidewalks. I forego a dark underpass for a lengthy trudge to a distant traffic light. The day is already hot.
At a compact mall I push open the door into Tim Horton’s. The sunny morning heat activates the sugary, coffee edged smells. I watch the patrons around me for a moment. Then I pull a small coil bound notebook from my bag and begin to write.
Half an hour later, I tuck everything away to explore other mall offerings.
I walk into an unexpectedly cool, bright, expansive grocery featuring an enormous deli.
To my left, a large woman refills coffee carafes.
She happily walks all the way back to the distant clean-up area to provide tap water to go with my bulky ham and cheese. On the way, she chats volubly with a burly balding man in a hair net who is serving at the luncheon meat display.
“I worked thirty years in the sawmill,” he shouts back, “now I’m here.” He lifts his chin to let a customer know he’s caught her order. Change affects all of us.
At an outdoor table I continue to write. Waves of warmth rise from the sun heated concrete.
The next morning we hum along the highway north to Campbell River.
We enjoy the flowering yellow density of roadside Scotch Broom, and question the thrumming demand for its removal along with hundreds of other invasive plants.
We consider the challenge of aging, a matter of immediate concern for Jodi and her mom.
We speculate on our approaching sojourn in Paradise.
At 1:42 pm we glide into the Cortes Island ferry dock, arriving at last…in Paradise.

Post Script:
On the afternoon of our second day on Cortes, we visit Manson’s Lagoon, a natural wonder of sheltered tidal waters and home to a Government dock.
In the cry of gulls and whisper of ocean wind, we find an island friend unloading his pick-up truck for a dockside boat repair.
We chat in comfortable familiarity of island life and changes. Larger worldly events creep into our conversation. In London, three men have slammed a vehicle into a crowd.
There is a pause. All three of us look away, unable to formulate a response.
With his hands resting on the pick-up rail, our friend says quietly, “I’m sorry.” I look at him. “I apologize,” he says more clearly. I’m still puzzled. “I’m embarrassed to be a man.”
I’m startled. I had no idea I had been waiting for these words.

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Holiday Gift Certificates for Art Mentoring or Art commissions

Mrs. Cargill

A LONG RANT BECAUSE THERE ARE THINGS THAT NEED TO BE SAID:

Out on a Limb - lecture Series 2020

Nature Wise Column - October 12, 2016

Nature Wise column - November 23, 2018

Nature Wise Column - Oct 16, 2019

June 07th, 2019

Should art be non-political? Is that even possible?

Trouble on the Road to Paradise

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