Wednesday, June 12, 2019

HOWSER SPIRE PAINTED BY ROBERT GENN



ROBERT GENN (1936-2014)
Howser Spire (3,412 m - 11,194 ft) 
Canada (British Columbia) 

In Alpenglow in the Bugaboos, private collection 

The mountain 
Howser Spire (3,412 m-11,194 ft) or Howser Spire Massif, is a group of three distinct granite peaks, and the highest mountain of the Canadian Bugaboo Spires. The mountain is located at the southwest corner of the Vowell Glacier, within the Bugaboo mountain range in the Purcell Mountains, a subrange of British Columbia's Columbia Mountains, The highest of the three spires is the North Tower at (3,412 m -11,194 ft), the Central Tower the lowest, and the South Tower being slightly lower than the North at 3,292 m (10,801 ft).
Howser Spire is named after the town of Howser on Duncan Lake and Howser Creek.
The first ascent of the North Tower was made in August, 1916 by Conrad Kain, Albert MacCarthy, E. MacCarthy, J. Vincent and Henry Frind.[
The Beckey-Chouinard / West Buttress route is recognized in the historic climbing text Fifty Classic Climbs of North America and considered a classic around the world.

The painter
Robert Douglas Genn was a Canadian artist, who has gained recognition for his style, which is in the tradition of Canadian landscape painting. Born in Victoria, British Columbia, Genn has often been compared with members of the 1920s Canadian Group of Seven. In 1961, he met Lawren Harris who was a neighbour in Point Grey, Vancouver. Genn had problems with painting skies, and Harris's advice was to turn the picture upside-down: "Paint down from the trees to the clouds at the bottom of the picture to get the perspective right." Genn said this was "valuable advice", which enabled him "to control the gradation, and work up into the trees in a more abstract manner."
His work is in corporate and public collections, including Air Canada, Bank Of Montreal, Canadian General Insurance, Canadian Airlines, Canadian Utilities, The Churchill Corporation, Expo '86, Esso Resources, First City - California II, Highfield Oil & Gas, Molson Brewery Ltd., Montreal Trust, Shell Resources, University of Alberta, Westgate Chevrolet, Glenbow Museum and Government of Belgium.
He ran the Painter's Keys website, a worldwide artists' community, with his staff and volunteers. The web site sends out an erudite free twice-weekly newsletter, which is sent to 135,000 artists in over 100 countries, and claims the largest collection of art quotes online with over 5,382 authors quoted.
In 2005, Genn campaigned against the Chinese website, arch-world.com, which was selling thousands of high-resolution images of around 2,800 artists' work illegally, without permission. After failing to gain support from the Canadian government or the African embassy in Ottawa, Genn used his web site to enlist subscribers' support to email objections to the arch-world, resulting within days in over 1,000 online complaints from artists, dealers and politicians to the company and governments. This stimulated a diplomatic protest letter to the Chinese Ministry of Commerce, Trading and Law Department from the Canadian Embassy in Beijing. Genn credited the campaign with the subsequent removal of images by 800 Canadian artists from arch-world, although many works were reinstated on arch-world soon after.
Genn has been a member of the Board of Directors at Emily Carr College of Art & Design.

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2019 - Wandering Vertexes...
by Francis Rousseau