Dianne Bersea Perambulations

Bumble Bee & insect pollinators - Nature Wise column, Sept. 27, 2023

1/16/2024

I love writing these Nature Wise columns! I really appreciate that they're well received. I'd like to do a collection of columns and essays like this as a stand alone publication.

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May 17th, 2023

5/17/2023

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Fifty-plus years of artistic endeavour and celebration...a sampling....

5/13/2022

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The following images are a select exploration of my work in a variety media including watercolour, acrylic, graphite/coloured pencil, printmaking (etching, lithography, transfer assemblages), and photography spanning the years 1967 to 2021. They are arranged by date, beginning with my first formal art training at the Jack Wilkinson Art Studio in Victoria, BC, 1967-68 to a recent commission (2021) inspired by my Cortes Island adventures.

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Bringing it all together on the page...in words and illustrations.

4/26/2022

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I'm always looking at everything; listening for unusual sounds, interesting words; following narrow paths, gravel roads; connecting things in unusual ways. These days, I'm fascinated by our relationship with food, inspired in part, by my food forester friend Richard. He introduced me to growing food in a thoughtful relationship with natural systems, even welcoming invasive vegetation. He recognizes that 'invasives' survive and thrive in the increasingly hostile world we've created. I'm also fascinated by folks who hesitate to shop at our local Farmer's Market or our excellent locally sourced and low waste stores because..."their food is too expensive!" Is it too expensive? By what measure? I want to know! Perhaps it's the "local isn't really food" syndrome. I want to investigate our local food hesitancy and local food suppliers...all the whys, whats and why nots of the local food industry as it becomes increasingly important. Why? Because growing conditions are changing and supply chains are collapsing. I want to invite my readers to walk with me as we visit nearby farms, farmer's markets, local food outlets...to know the people who are willing to work eighteen hour days in all kinds of weather to provide our food. I want to share the sweet tasting produce from those who are attempting to save the world, one lettuce at a time.

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Literary adventures!

4/9/2022

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Join me as I embrace...words written or spoken, delivered with enthusiasm, passion, care, wisdom, depth, creativity.

In my idea of a teenage journal I mapped-out my life's big dream...to write and document the natural world. I saw this as an expanded journal of my evolving relationship with all those amazing wonders; large, small, embracing, challenging, perhaps even frightening, but always intriguing.

It’s not as if I haven’t visited that dream many times in many ways. But for more than fifty years my primary occupation has been professional visual artist, working in the fine and commercial arts as watercolour & acrylic painter, illustrator, cartoonist and graphic designer. That has taken me into many interesting places, into a variety of landscapes and business environments. I've also written hundreds of radio ads and published a number of self-styled word pieces that began with a four-page centerfold story in a 1967 Victoria Colonist weekend tabloid. That one was inspired by a personal visit to Clo-oose, an Indigenous community repeatedly overshadowed by early white development, situated on a fragile delta of British Columbia's famed Vancouver Island West Coast Trail. You can find Clo-oose on my blog of September 2015. Or check out Kootenay Keepsakes as it appeared in Western Living Magazine. It's on my blog of October 2015. My creative non-fiction story, Mrs. Cargill, found a home in Watershed Sentinel's summer issue, 2021. And my Nature Wise column really took off on the Opinion Page of Penticton Western News as a feature item filling two-thirds of a tabloid page with a large photo and catchy headline...until I decided I'd like to get paid.

I have a love for writing to length...perfect training for writing articles, essays and columns, from a short form 100 words to 1400, or even 2500. Although I find 500 to 800 is a fun length to work with…get to the point, draw a conclusion, especially if it can be done with energy, humour and concise sentences.

Now I just need to learn how to use my Weebly blog. Where IS the type editor button?

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Holiday Gift Certificates for Art Mentoring or Art commissions

11/29/2021

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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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