The artists of Victoria's Fairfield neighbourhood opened their doors on the weekend, inviting the knowing and the nosy into their workplaces.
At 34 private homes, the drop sheet was pulled aside for the 11th annual tour of artists' studios. You could snoop about the workshops of painters and potters, sculptors and silversmiths, photographers and even a puppeteer.
The weather was hazy for much of the weekend, the sky a greyish brown, the cloud cover muting the beauty even of the ornamental plum blossoms.
Such days do not exist in the landscapes of Barbara Weaver-Bosson.
Her Fairfield is perpetually bright, the sky a crystalline azure and the sea a shimmering sheet of aquamarine. The neighbourhood's heritage houses are mustard yellows and confectionery pinks. It is an unapologetically sunny view of a city that spends too many months under a grey blanket.
One day in 1980, not long after moving to the city, she experienced a revelation while walking her dog with her husband. They stood atop the outcropping known as Moss Rocks, looking out on a sparkling Juan de Fuca Strait and the snow-capped Olympic mountain range beyond. The air smelled fresh. From overhead, she looked into cultivated backyards, smiled at the children playing. She remembers it as a scene of perfection.
"It gave me chills," she said. "The neighbourhood welcomed me in that moment.
"My clarity became enhanced. I got this overwhelming feeling of – I guess it was joy. This is where I live, this is where my life is, this is where I'm going to paint. It was a crystal-clear message to me."
Since then, she has been creating paintings she describes as the Neighbourhood Series, a collection familiar to residents and tourists, as well as untold thousands who have received her popular greeting cards in the mail.
The first, an impressionistic vision, sold immediately. She now wishes she had kept it as a marker of a pivotal moment in her life.
"I can still visit that painting," she said. "I think it still lives in Victoria. I think I know where it is."
On the weekend, she opened five rooms of her bungalow to the public. She had on display a work in progress. It depicts a tugboat chugging beneath the Blue Bridge, which is lifted to allow passage of a larger vessel. The acrylic painting shows Old Town and the green copper-domed Legislature in the distance.
She shares the home with her husband, Victor Bosson, a digital artist whose illustrations for Laura Langston's children's book The Fox's Kettle earned a Governor-General's Award nomination in 1998.
"He works in the front of the house and I work beside him," she said. "He's a pretty clean guy, so he doesn't spill his pixels all over the place," she quipped, adding that she moves to another part of the house where she can "get a little sloppy" when she reaches the painting stages of a work.
They met at the Alberta College of Art in her hometown of Calgary. She moved to the British Columbia capital in the mid-1970s. Soon after arriving, she celebrated her first solo exhibition, at Emily Carr's family home.
In 1993, she began releasing cards and limited-edition prints of her work, a commercial endeavour that has helped popularize her optimistic vision of the city.
"An artist makes a painting and it goes into one home and not many people get to enjoy the artwork," she said.
Her more detailed works involve hilltop evocations of the neighbourhoods clustered beneath Moss Rocks, or Anderson Hill, or the observation post at Walbran Park in nearby Oak Bay. She considers these studies, with their bird's-eye view of backyards hidden from the street, to be as detailed and complicated as novels, every patch of lawn revealing a snippet of a tale, always sunny in her retelling.
Special to The Globe and Mail