The Dolphin House Bimini

The Dolphin House in Alice Town, Bimini is the life’s work of its creator, Ashley Saunders. Every stone, shell, bottle, tile, and piece of driftwood that adorns this remarkable home and museum were collected by Saunders on the beaches of Bimini.

That is, except for the thousands of gifts brought to the house in its twenty-five years of operation – by visitors who also wanted to be a part of this continuing art project.

A young French girl on holiday merely searched through her purse for a trinket to add to the wall in Saunder’s Mermaid Room. Her bejeweled lipstick container is now a part of the Mermaid’s vanity.

Others plan their gifts more carefully and try to add a missing piece to Saunders’ existing collections of wall art; he now has a complete set of all U.S. license plates and is hoping to collect plates from every country in the world.

Some visitors, however, leave only words. Saunders keeps a notebook handy for his foreign guests to write down the word or phase that means “Welcome” in their language. He later copies these phrases (there are literally hundreds) onto sign boards and displays them throughout the house.

Everyone who enters the Dolphin House hopes that the house will never be completed: that the magic will never end.

New Delphi Monkeys

In the heart of New Delphi, cars, taxis, bicycles, and motorbikes zoom by like a video on fast forward. In the background the monkeys move slowly, almost in another dimension. They comb the sidewalk for trash containing small bits of uneaten food.

I study their movements and sketch their gestures. They have chosen the Tunisian Embassy as their home. It’s on a slightly quieter street, lined with wide-branched lookout trees that might have served their ancestors well. But now, the danger from humans is not a concern. They go about their business like ladies in a marketplace, selecting their meals from an array of brightly-colored fast food wrappers, and only occasionally looking up to check my position.

I know not to offer them food in exchange for their portrait. So, I wait until my presence goes almost unobserved.

As the sun goes down I finish my picture as the last spots of light seep through the trees. The sketch is complete, and the monkeys disappear over the embassy wall.

McMichael Canadian Art Collection, Ontario

The McMicheal Museum Gallery is a rustic showcase for the early twentieth-century painters known as The Group of Seven. The Seven devoted their art to exploring the rugged characteristics of the Canadian landscape. The McMicheal pays homage to their vision with its floor-to-ceiling narrow windows at the end of each gallery, which look out onto a babbling brook and wooded area.

A.J. Casson, perhaps my favorite of the fabulous Seven, takes us into a world of voluptuous trees, whose form and motion are created by flat shades of olive hues, and framed by ominous darks. Unlike the impressionist, whose colors compete to bring sunlight into a space, Casson allows his colors to be subdued – it is a forest with minimal light, sullen and introspective.

Casson died at the age of ninety-four, and is buried alongside other Group members in the cemetery on the McMichael grounds.