How Vancouver’s Landscapes Influence My Work

“If you want to be a creative, move somewhere it rains.”

A terrible paraphrase — but the sentiment must hold true for anyone who tries to make art in places like Vancouver.

Thirty days of rain. In a row.

It happens once a year, like clockwork — a steady wall of greyness, the endless bundling up.

The slow transition from loving the snow in the mountains to hating the rain just down the hill.

The quiet battle of life without sunlight.

Vancouver’s landscapes aren’t just beautiful — they’re relentless.

They influence me whether I want them to or not:

• The smoothness of the water.

• The immensity of the mountains.

• The desperate search for color on the greyest days.

I suppose I’m an amateur photographer — but honestly, in Vancouver, all you have to do is point and click.

The beauty and the contradiction are already there, everywhere: water, steel, glass, moss, mountains — nature colliding with human life, all compressed into one frame.

In the summer, we don’t work.

We beach, we drink, and we remember why we live here.

In the fall, we prepare — for the dark.

In the winter, we try to outrun the grey.

We fight off the slow creep of seasonal depression by sliding down frozen rain, hoping not to break our hands on the way down.

And then spring comes.

And we remember what it feels like to live again.