Arts & Life

The event may be young, but it is already learning from the past.

Without a single grape vine in sight, Prince George is becoming a wine magnet.

Like a train whistle in her head, calling across the fields and forests of time, came the letter R to Laura Chandler. RrrrrrrrrrrRrrrrrrrr. It was a blaring call emanating out of her family lineage and out of her city's history.

The key was handed over on Thursday afternoon, and already the new artist-in-residence at Studio 2880 had customer interest in her paintings.

This year's regional summer art tour is, as the kids say, totally sick. When the kids say it, it counterintuitively means "exceptionally good" but in this case, sick also means what author Susan Sontag intended. That is, it also means literally sick.

Lower Mainland musician Bob Westfall brings his combination of golden country and modern folk to Prince George this week. Westfall has been performing his way through the Cariboo and arrives for a solo concert at Cafe Voltaire on Friday night.

Pocket Theatre's cast of Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike has departed for Mainstage. They perform today. But they aren't the only Prince George talent at the annual Theatre B.C. provincial drama festival.

More than 350 people had their attention fixed on the ring of easels, the loud mood music pulsed, and the colours splattered. Three heats of B.C.'s best speed-painters went head to head last weekend at the trendy Red Room Ultra Bar in Vancouver.

The letter Q has an odd relationship with Dakelh. The sound it makes is there in the phonetic speaking of this region's 10,000-year-old language, but the writing of that language is much younger.

Williams Lake Stampede The premier rodeo in northern B.C., now and historically, the Williams Lake Stampede is a bucking' and rockin' good time.