 Preparing a layout for my 10' piece of wall at the upcoming Art in the City Show at the West End Community Centre, May 2-4. ...and, this is what it looked like.  March 30, 2025  I started the Vanishing BC project on this website in 2000 and put up very small, low-res jpegs of the travel sketches and photos – many people, including us living on the farm, still had dial-up connections, so loading a page took a long time. Since then, computer screens have become higher-res and data speeds have increased enormously. I've gone back through and replaced those old images with higher-resolution ones – actually, the original scans from Friesen Press in 2005. March 25, 2025  I have donated a large folio of book illustrations, mostly watercolours from Vancouver Remembered and the 2012 Vanishing Vancouver, to the City of Vancouver Archives, along with some money to help with their digitization. It will be good to have them kept and made available in perpetuity to interested people. The sketch above is of the Avalon Dairy on Wales Street in East Van, as it was in 2013 before the property was redeveloped. March 6, 2025 Back from a month away with a few days in Fiji en route, the balance in Sydney visiting family. I've put a brief blog post on my Travel Page, as per usual.  January 19, 2025 Getting ready to go back to Australia to see family and friends, which has made me revisit my "Ozblog" from 2006–8 when we lived there. I took it down a few years ago but have decided to put it back up.  January 4, 2025 A new project with Paul Buhle, who engaged me with The Bund a couple of years ago: a graphic 'comic book' history of Surrealism... Stay tuned. Update, April 2025: it looks like this project is dead. My attitude toward some of the Surrealist leaders (mainly poets, all male) does not gibe with "academic orthodoxy," which caused the publisher to bail out. Stay tuned....  December 20, 2024  November 23, 2024 Sometimes you wait a long time for information about a place, such as this one – the long-demolished Gillespie House in Fairview, a web page I last updated in 2005.  November 15, 2024 Here's the video of the lecture:  October 6, 2024 An interesting cold case murder from more than
90 years ago in, of all places,
the little railway town of North Bend, added to my page
of correspondence and reminiscences.
September 8, 2024I've been drawing a few cartoons on the Vancouver political scene for the zines Spacing and City Hall Watch. It's something of a throwback to my cartooning days of 45 years ago.  August 18, 2024  August 11, 2024 I never posted this interview about SurvivingVancouver from a few months ago with Gloria Macarenko on CBC's On The Coast program.  August 10, 2024  "Moose Island and Dying Forest," a diptych I painted about 20 years ago in the Cariboo and had completely forgotten. It's in the collection of Island Mountain Arts in Wells, which narrowly escaped the wild fire that almost took out Barkerville a couple of weeks ago, and is in their upcoming exhibition. Ironic, eh? We first noticed the forests beginning to die from pine beetles about 40 years ago when we had a cabin in the mountains near Princeton. Now the province is on fire. July 19, 2024 Our recent trip through Québec, focusing on Montréal, added to my travel page.  July 4, 2024  The German edition of The Bund is now published. June 9, 2024  Michael Dupuis' historical novel about the enormous Halifax explosion in 1917, with illustrations by me, is now published by Friesen Books. June 2, 2024 The first addition to my "Van Ordinaire" project page since 2008, by which time I'd pretty well given up the idea of getting a VW bus/van – this book just published in the States and available on Amazon. Although not in a VW Kombi Van (as they're called in Australia), Christine and I did spend three months in a campervan in Australia in 2009.  May 26, 2024  And, on June 7th at 7 pm, I'll speaking at the RJ Haney Museum in Salmon Arm, BC – they are having an exhibition based around the experiences of Japanese-Canadian families in the Shuswap during the Second World War years, and subsequently. This is a history that was a big part of the Vanishing BC project, found here on this site, and leading to my graphic novel Toshiko ....  ...and here's a photo of that very successful event and beautiful exhibition. April 16, 2024  A review of my new book in the Vancouver Sun. April 11, 2024 It's been a busy month. Here's a talk I gave at the Vancouver Club on April 7th to the Incorporation Day Luncheon crowd of 170 people. It's on the history of the City – focusing in on the Vancouver Club and its neighbourhood in what is now downtown Vancouver. A YouTube video by Elwin Xie.  March 23, 2024 Launch and Gallery Show for "Surviving Vancouver" at the Petley Jones Gallery, 2245 Granville Street April 6th, 1 - 4:30 pm!  March 3, 2024 Updated April 11th: here's the video of the talk on YouTube   An upcoming lecture: register for the free tickets at the Alcuin Society website. ***** And a small pleasure: seeing the cover of 35-year-old Toronto the Way It Was on a CBC newscast on a totally unrelated subject.  February 19, 2024 The latest sketchbook trip, to Mexico in January, added to the long list of trips on my travel page.  February 13, 2024 I posted a couple of comments about the Kruger homestead near Penticton, part of the Vanishing British Columbia section of this website.  December 13, 2023 I've been doing a new style – an evolution – of the brush-ink "chiaroscuro" paintings, adding colour to them like colour woodblock prints. It predates The Bund's artwork, but doing so many of them to illustrate that book got me engaged with their strong colour contrasts and bright light. It's a new link from my Art Index page.  December 8, 2023 An interview with me in the "BC Booklook" web publication of BC Bookworld magazine about doing the artwork for The Bund.  December 3, 2023 Doing a few watercolours in the neighbourhood this year as autumn fades away.   November 22, 2023 A new home for one of the oils:  November 12, 2023 A "four seasons" set of hand-coloured woodcuts going into a show at Petley-Jones Gallery later this month.  November 10, 2023 Douglas Todd in the Vancouver Sun on Shaughnessy....  October 22, 2023 The sketchbook of our recent trip to Holland and northern France, added to my travel page.  October 18, 2023 Reviews coming in for The Bund. And a talk at the San Francisco Jewish Community Library on Sunday October 22nd. October 10, 2023  Updated September 14, 2023  "The Bund" is printed and in bookstores. As I'm just the illustrator, I've linked it from my Projects Page rather than my Books Page, with a bit of a blurb about my part in it. Updated September 8, 2023   Two ink sketches from summers past in a show at Petley Jones Gallery for the next couple of weeks. Updated August 28, 2023  Sketchbook stuff from trips to Mayne Island in 2021 and 2023, added to my travel page. Updated August 23, 2023 Updates on two of the former Japanese-Canadian houses on Mayne Island.   Updated August 6, 2023  Summer chugging along in the neighbourhood ... Updated June 9, 2023 My current project, a book to be published next spring...  It's about "surviving" in two senses: the first as an adjective, the things that have survived, and the second as a verb (okay, a gerund), as in how you survive. More to come here and on the Facebook page as it develops. Updated April 2, 2023  Article about me in Inspired Magazine, available as a story online. Updated March 3, 2023 New Zealand and Australia sketchbook posted from the recent trip here ...  ... and a little more about the success of The Rooming House.  Updated January 9, 2023 A page of "small works" for a group show at Petley Jones Gallery, Vancouver  Updated December 29, 2022 I've put up my "sort of travel diary" for 2022 on my travel page – not an inspiring year leading to inspiring artwork, perhaps. But this image of the Kruger Homestead near Penticton has been added to the Vanishing BC pages in the hope that a local historian can fill in the details of its past. Updated December 18, 2022  Best of the season to all readers! And ... I've finished the illustrations for The Jewish Labor Bund, a comic book-graphic novel about the secular-humanist Jewish movement of the early 20th century in Poland, Ukraine and Russia, and how it fought against Russian aggression and anti-Semitism. It will be published in 2023 by Between the Lines in Toronto and distributed internationally. I'm not the author – she is Sharon Rudahl of San Francisco. Here are a couple of the page spreads...   Updated November 16, 2022 Taking a break on the Bund book (see below), between Chapters 5 & 6, and doing a little website housekeeping, including getting ready for Christmas. If you're interested in a trouble-free Christmas gift (before December 10th, please), go to the Rooming House page or the Here & Gone page for directions on getting signed copies mailed to you.  This also works for my graphic novels. See the books page for details. Updated October 18, 2022 And now for something completely different... An illustration job – a book on the Jewish Bund in Poland, Ukraine and Russia in the early 20th century. Deadline early in 2023....  And the talk below is posted onto YouTube. Updated September 18, 2022 I'll be giving this talk – the sort of non-fiction underpinning of The Rooming House, to the Vancouver Historical Society on September 22nd at the Museum of Vancouver, 7 pm.  Updated August 19, 2022 Review by Valerie Green in the British Columbia Review  Updated July 25, 2022 We keep bouncing back and forth between #7 and #9 on the BC Book Bestseller List, back to #11 on July 25th, but on the list for two months!  and... The True North Country Comics podcast with John Swiminer. Click to go to the YouTube site:  Updated June 24, 2022 An interview on Global Morning with Jennifer Palma about The Rooming House:  Four weeks on the BC Bestseller list as of June 18th! And, a profile in the Vancouver Guardian:  continue to more blogs.... |
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Michael Kluckner is a Vancouver-based artist and writer.
Artwork and text © 2000-2023