Page Forty-Five |

Wee Sketch |. By Maradret A, Williams and Phillis Kirupairich

WE will never forget our one and only attempt at sketching last
summer. Why we chose the main entrance to the wharf we could
never quite explain, but we had wandered high and low to find a “good
place” and if we hadn’t decided in desperation to stop there and then, we
would have been looking for it yet.

The Empress of Canada was in port and we chose her as a subject.
The day was perfect and the reflections in the calm water, the blue haze
of North Vancouver and the crates of freight on the wharf thrilled us
with their possibilities. But we had reckoned without the passers-by,
though we don’t say it was entirely their fault that the sketches weren’t
a success. Neither of us had sketched for a long time and only one of
us in water-color, the medium we had chosen for this effort. We had
just settled ourselves with all our many materials around us and begun
seriously to sketch the ship when the people began to arrive, and each
one that came felt called upon to make some comment. We were not
hardened to crowds and as time went on we laughed more and more, and
in the end nearly had hysterics. After each remark we would look at
each other and simply roar with laughter.

Our first critic was a sailor. ‘““You’ve got the wrong,” he said,
using a technical word we had never heard before. Would he please point
it out, as we didn’t understand what he meant? He planted a grubby
finger on the wet sketch: “You're wrong here, you’ve made the boat
look as if it was bent in the middle.’ It was quite true.

The remarks came thick and fast and varied from, “Painting pic-
tures?” to “You should see the picture of the Leviathan my brother has
over his mantlepiece at home!’’ Even the Captain had a say and told
us not to be too hard on his ship. But the crowning blow, which left us
quite helpless, fell when two ladies looked at our work and, as they moved
away, one said in a crushing voice, “Oh, they’re only amateurs!”

“What is that scratchy-looking thing over there?”
“Oh, that’s what they call an itching.”