I am a child of winter. Born in the coldest time typically of the year. I call the northern latitudes home. I have been fortunate to spend the last several years in the East Kootenay region of B.C., and mostly loving it. I love it when it is quiet, and the tourists aren’t all here at once. I love it for the people who call it home, many different walks of life. I love it for the Nature right outside my door. Right now it is winter season. I despise the cold because I have to shovel. I love the cold because it is invigorating. I like to wander in it, and explore the frozen landscape, usually with camera in hand, probably looking like a weirdo, totally into it. I am collecting videos and time-lapse footage for my short digifilms that I have been producing of late. I edit them along side my studio sesshins, painting various projects. It is as way to document my version of the art life, and the appreciation for the landscape in which I live. I find winter is a period of introspection, processing the year gone by. Winter season is a period of darkness, very lowlight on the shortest day. Winter is a moody season. Winter is a pastel season. The early evening sky are always enchanting. Winter is a time for studio painting. In December I started on a new commission and am documenting the stages throughout. I have been fiddling with multi camera set ups. My eye for cinema is both developing, and evolving. I would love a thousand angles in one frame, an homage to Lars von Trier. I settle for a bit less, 2. The idea is to express place and space. I spliced a montage sequence into the mix with footage from 2022. It is an ode and also a good bye. Winter is widely associated as being a symbol of old age and death. I have become familiar with both. Winter is a time of letting go. Shedding layers, an emptying out of the back pack. We can all relate to challenges that life brings. And with that in mind, winter is a time to think of others, to hold them in your heart, even if apart, or even if you don’t speak.

I acknowledge and give honour to the Secwepemc and Ktunaxa, the ancestral peoples of this land. Also thank you to the Columbia Kootenay Cultural Alliance and the Columbia Basin Trust for the support.

And now ‘winterPAINTING’ a short digifilm by Hälts with soundscape ‘I may not make as much in a lifetime as a top CEO makes in a day, but I have one heck of a brush stroke’