Polar Bear Goodness: a New Polar Bear Art Website & Art Blog at ChristineMontague.com

In case you are new to this art blog Camera & Canvas, I am a visual artist who, until recently, created representational art i.e. realism oil paintings of figurative landscapes, commissioned portraiture, giant cat paintings, canoes, lakes& more. After the polar bears were put on the animals "of concern" list, I painted the polar bear painting With the Northern Lights in tribute. I continued to have polar bears on the brain when shortly after that I created CRAM, a Polar Bear World for The Sketchbook Project. Increasingly, I found myself thinking about polar bear art, polar bear graphic novels,polar bear vacations...,you get the picture, all the while continuing with my portraiture practice & creating other representational art.

Fantasy sketch by Christine Monatgue www.ChristineMontague.com

One Big, Giant, Scary, Polar Bear Step Forward

Onward into a polar bear world of my own! Polar bear art, polar bear blog, and yes, and trips to Cape Dorset, Nunavut, the Canadian arctic, to Churchill, Manitoba, Canada, polar bear capital of the world, followed (but not at the same time!).

If you love art, polar bears, or think about climate change, I hope you will enjoy (or find some solace in)

My website ChristineMontague.com is all about my POLAR BEAR ART.

Myart blog? I hope you will visit www.christinemontague.com/blog

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One thing is certain, in my part of the realm...Here there be polar bears. I hope that here there be you, too.

Somehow, I forgot I did this oil painting. A gift to my son on his 18th birthday, it hangs in our house in the dining room - a room we rarely use (isn't a dining room table for folding laundry?). It shows him climbing, carefree, at about the age of four, on the War Memorial, located near the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. He is painted realistically, and static, while the figures on the statue are more "ghostly" and moving.

On the eve of Remembrance Day, I though I would share it with you. With all the gut wrenching news in the Toronto Star recently about Canadian War soldiers injured in Afghanistan, and some pretty heart-rending reporting on CBC radio as well, an image of youth, hope and peace can never hurt.

Note: One day, when I was working in this oil painting, a visitor to my studio mentioned her (great?) uncle had been one of the models for one the figures in this monument to peace.