In March of 2017 my wife Joy and I participated in a weekend get-away to the beautiful Painted Boat Resort in the Pender Harbour area of the Sunshine Coast. We were with about 15 other people and we simply languished in good weather, good food and good fun. It was a few days away to help us all forget a particularly cold, wet, unusually lengthy and ugly winter.
Part of what we did was paddle the big Voyageur style canoe belonging to the Gibsons Paddle Club in all the waters surrounding that beautiful resort. One such excursion took us on a three hour journey around Beaver Island. As we made our way leisurely around the island that unusually sunny afternoon we stopped the canoe for no other reason than to enjoy where we were. That’s when the tree leaning out over the point caught my attention. It had to be painted. The photograph came home with me but it took some time for the image to take shape in my artist’s eye.
On one of the evenings at the Painted Boat, after a great bar-b-que supper, someone had called us out to the deck of the suite. It was a full moon lighting the night sky. In a winter of cloud, wind and rain, such a sight wasn’t lost on any of us. Hopefully, that full moon on a clear Pender Harbour night would be a harbinger of things to come. Surely spring and summer couldn’t be far off.
And so it came to me that appropriately I had to paint a full moon if I were going to properly remember our special weekend at Pender Harbour and the Painted Boat Resort. That’s when my daytime photograph of the tree leaning out over the water became a night-time image. Whimsical in nature, I’m sure that image will remind all of us who were there of our great weekend at the Painted Boat Resort and that beautiful “PENDER MOON”.