Venice evenings are rarely the same. The colours of the hazed skies vary from aqua ro pinks and yellows and oranges and warm and cool greys. And the wters empty themselves as the sunsets bring on early and later dinners and the hordes of visitors and resilient Venetians head home for the day - before the evening events begin anew. . .  To paint Venice is a privilege few are lucky enough to experience and be blessed by. What a painter misses here is not the fact that they have missed painting the variations of each season. No, what a painter is agrieved by is that he or she has not painted every day of their lives here. Thus the miracle of arriving in Venice and the drama upon leaving Her. 

There is nothing like it - the ever-evolving shapes and movements, and colours, and sounds of waves crashing over the sands, bringing in, pushing in an incoming tide, imposing itself further and further up upon the shore; ruffling and rolling the grains of coral sand and shell fragments before it. And all the while the ultramarine and cobalt skies dapppled in clouds and sunlight oversee the transformation of the green-blue watercolours of the mother lode. How privileged I am to sit and sketch and render it all - at least today's version of it.  

Not everything in Venice is  a boat, a canal, water. There are also Venetians, young and old. And some allow themselves, as we do, the luxury of a modern version of sharing and camaraderie. During nearly an hour, the total concentration of these two boys allowed me the privilege of rendering them - almost completing a full sketch  before they moved on. I completed the drawing in Ottawa.

Off the north shore of Bermuda last year, i fell in love with this little gem of a boat, swaying on nary noticeable waves, and gently flying its colours proudly. All that was missing was its paper-hat coiffed captain shouting pirate "ho,ho,hos" and "avasts". The stories boats do tell. . .