EMILY CARR U GETS SCULPTURE OF ITS EPONYMOUS ARTIST
Foundation also donates E.J. Hughes painting worth nearly $2 million
PICTURE PERFECT: At Emily Carr University of Art + Design’s stillnew campus this week, Canaccord Genuity Group founder Peter Brown donated E.J. Hughes’s 1948 painting, Coastal Boats Near Sidney, B.C. Reportedly now worth $1.8 million, the 122-by-92-cm work came from Brown and wife Joanne’s foundation. So did a Joe Fafard sculpture of another late B.C. artist, Emily Carr, her pet monkey Woo and a horse and dog. It stands temporarily beside the office of the soon-to-retire varsity president, Ron Burnett. Brown himself stood fairly comfortably following a six-vertebrae operation by local spine surgeon Marcel Dvorak. With the family’s Belmont Avenue home sold for a reported $31.1 million and its artworks disbursing, Brown confided to major collector philanthropist Michael Audain that surrendering the Hughes painting was “probably the only one that gave me collector’s remorse.” At least it survived. On Christmas Day in 1988, fire razed late neighbour Edgar Kaiser Jr.’s house and destroyed his art collection, although Brown helped push Kaiser’s Lamborghini to safety.
BRANCHING OUT: Emily Carr University’s move to the east-of-Main “Flats” had several private art galleries, including Jennifer Winsor’s, follow suit. Now, after 16 bricks-and-mortar years, she’ll close its doors “and do event shows — I hate the term pop-up — in Toronto and L.A., and Taiwan and Beijing next year.” London, Vancouver and other locales may entail collaborations with other galleries. Such an enterprise needs contracted artists, of course, not to mention a 16-year client roster.
OUR MEN IN HAVANA: After surveying Cuba’s capital city recently, Steve Thorp and Reuben Major are renovating Commercial Drive’s same-name landmark restaurant for a possible mid-month reopening. The two are partners with others in the Dunlevy-at-Alexander Settlement Building that incorporates Belgard Kitchen, Fresh Tap Winery and Postmark Brewing. The 107-seat Havana is that multiunit concern’s first venue outside Railtown. Two more are being negotiated and a further two envisaged. Havana’s $500,000 revamp adds Cuban colours and subtracts some internal walls. But the 60-seat theatre will remain, as will a wall signed by hundreds of patrons, many of whom pleaded for its survival. Perhaps the joint’s future customers will include Corinne Lea, who co-founded Havana in 1996 and is currently campaigning to save West Broadway-off-Commercial’s Rio Theatre from extinction.
THE NELSON TOUCH: For Maritime Museum visitors, that term would signify the sailingera British admiral’s tactic of dividing and conquering an enemy fleet. Recently, though, it entailed Nelson, B.C.-raised Aline Daigle and Anna Katarina entertaining attendees at the Kits Point museum. At least, Daigle’s violin may have been made in 1805, when the oneeyed, one-armed admiral was killed while winning the Battle of Trafalgar. Stage-named Rumour Mill, Daigle and Katarina played the title song and others from their soon-releasing 10-song Daylight’s Free album. They and their band should reprise them at The Penny (three blocks south of Havana) April 28.
RIP: Ever-cheerful architect entrepreneur Geoffrey Lau’s recent death reminded some of a characteristic gesture. When three children’s charities benefited from an auction of celebrity-donated watches — from Mel Gibson, Barbra Streisand and suchlike — the philanthropic Lau bought enough to cover wife and Chinese opera company founder Sandra from wrist to elbow.
SPARKLE TIME: “Auto show boasts fast and flashy rides,” The Vancouver Sun headlined an article by New Car Dealers Association of B.C. president and CEO Blair Qualey. Flashier still, Qualey’s visible-from-space sequined jacket auctioned for $800 during a show-opening gala that benefited Special Olympics B.C. and the association’s foundation. The event’s nine dealership awards for clean-energy vehicle sales included two for Dueck Downtown. Arm-twisting wasn’t required, though, as Dueck Auto Group owner Moray Keith said: “We sell every (battery powered) Chevrolet Bolt we can get our hands on.”
OVER THE WATER: Vancouver Island, not the Okanagan, was B.C. commercial winemaking ’s birthplace when Herb Anscomb urged Saanich loganberry farmers to ferment 1921’s surplus crops. As Conservative party leader for a period during the 1941-1952 coalition government, Anscomb introduced something harder to swallow: a three per cent provincial sales tax. By the 1980s, genuine viticulture was practised by producers like Blue Grouse, Rathjen Cellars and Vigneti Zanatta. Recently, 17 Vancouver Island and Gulf Islands wine, cider, mead and gin producers — from Averill Creek to Zanatta — presented their wares at Granville Island’s Edible Canada restaurant. Still, despite Vancouver Island’s Green voters sustaining a second B.C. coalition government, no one there replicates Portugal’s vinho verde or “green wine.” Mike Rathjen may do so if test rows of appropriate Alvarino grapes successfully ripen at his 10-hectare Saanich vineyard. Closest to vinho verde, meanwhile, are the 2,000-ayear cases of Damasco that Jim Moody and wife Loretta Zanatta produce at Cowichan Valley’s Vigneti Zanatta, albeit from Muscat and Ortega grapes with hints of Auxerrois and Madeleine Sylvaner.
DOWN PARRYSCOPE: If only comic-opera geniuses Gilbert and Sullivan had survived to recreate their opportunistic but militarily naive “very model of a modern major-general” as one who would propose withdrawing troops from fighting war criminal terrorists and have them repel neighbour nation civilians. malcolmparry@shaw.ca 604-929-8456