"THE SMELT FISHERS OF BURRARD INLET"
Every spring the southern shores of Burrard Inlet play host to a choreographed international water ballet. Standing waist-deep in the blue-gray sea against a muted backdrop of misted coastal mountains, men and women who have immigrated to our city from a dozen countries sway in a lovely dance--twisting, turning, lifting and pulling at their nets as they fish for tiny migrating smelt.
Strollers along the beach may notice them, but only those who stop to study this annual rite can appreciate the coordinated grace of whole families laying out nets, shouldering top lines with one hand as they walk deeper into the water, playing out the nets behind them through delicately extended fingers. Then they wade back to shore, there to contemplate the still sea and discuss what is taking place beneath its surface. Languages of southern Europe mix with tonal Asian dialects all along the beach until the fishers return to the water, drawing their nets in a harvest dance that is the obverse of the one they had just performed.
When I first studied this rite at length last spring I was powerfully drawn to the scene's grace, in all senses of that word: not only the grace of the figures in movement, their dark upper bodies reflected in the mottled water as green, red and blue patches; not only the grace of witnessing a peaceful multiethnic community engaged in this age-old quiet harvest; but the grace of being favoured by fate to live along a metropolitan Inlet that is a fragilely balanced world of sea, nature and commerce, of people, mountains, sky and clouds--all so achingly vulnerable as they just try to get along. I chose the delicate medium of watercolour to replicate this ephemeral vulnerability and temporal grace.