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May Show at Kizmit Cafe Salt Spring Island, BC

Writer's picture: Susan HaighSusan Haigh

Kizmit cafe is a delightful place with funky spaces , colourful gardens and specialty teas and coffee and delicious food. Down near Ruckle Park at 1431 Beaver Point road it is a destination in itself but can happily be part of an outing to Ruckle Park or any other south end excursion.

'Aeonium Giganteum' at Kismit Cafe

The cafe hosts month long art exhibits and May is the month my paintings of Wild Flowers grace the walls. I chose to do a show of mostly wild flowers, with a few succulents thrown in for good measure, because I love the wild offerings of nature. This spring has been an amazing one for blossoms of all kinds. Many plants are flowering early and the later ones are coming on too, overlapping and creating riots of colour everywhere. I have been so busy working in my garden this month I have not found the time to make an excursion to see the wild flowers although I have been doing paintings of them in my studio. To be honest I did get to Ruckle Park one afternoon but had to really search to find the erythroniums (we used to call them easter lilies) I had seen there previous years. There was a little bit of sea blush to be seen and a few monkey flowers but not a lot. The best wild flower meadow I know of near here is at the ecological reserve on Mt Tzouhalem (near Maple Bay), the setting of my painting 'Camas Mountain'. The best and easiest access to a mountain top wild flower meadow that I know of is at Blackwell Peak in Manning Park. You can drive right up to meadow level and hike off into the mountains for days if that is your fancy. "Mountain Meadow' shows the view from Blackwell Peak before the pine beetle devastated much of the forests around there and turned many of the hillsides from green to brown.

I also have a painting of Douglas Fir flowers which it seems to me, you don't see very often and then one year you might notice , as I did, that a particular big old tree is suddenly covered in these brushlike pink tips. That's the female part and the little orangey cones hanging below the branch are the male part. The flowers don't last long, soon fading once pollinated with the help of the wind and then turn into nondescript brown cones. But at the lush pink stage there was something I just had to paint!

Fir Flowers acrylic on canvas 16" x 20"

There will be an opening for the show on May 6th , 6-8 pm. For more information about Kizmit go to www.facebook.com/KizmitGaleriacafe/

Here are the official particulars about the show. I hope you can make it!

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All rights reserved. All images and text Copyright  Susan Haigh

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