Gabor Gasztonyi Photo
Mariken Van Nimwegen, originally from the Netherlands, has lived in Vancouver, British Columbia since 1977. She worked for the Vancouver Sun newspaper for twenty-five years as an editorial illustrator and graphic designer. From 1990 to 1991, in the pre-digital days of the paper, she wrote and illustrated a column called “Culture Seen” that described the cultures and religions of Vancouver’s immigrant communities from all over the world.
She attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Rotterdam, Holland, has a BA in Anthropology from UBC, and a Masters’ in Liberal Studies from SFU. She’s traveled six continents and continues to discover the world’s most amazing nooks and crannies, preferably on foot. Wherever possible, she draws and writes a journal about these experiences – by hand, so far, until this idea came to be of producing some stories and illustrations in blog-form, to be shared more widely.
She lives in a fully restored 1910 heritage house with its quiet little garden, her ‘pride-and-joy’ in East Vancouver. It’s a great, private habitat, not only for smelling the roses outside and doing nothing at all, but also for writing, studying, reading (primarily non-fiction, the World of Ideas), and ‘wining and dining’ with people of course!
Mariken loves both Nature with its pure silence and Jazz with its loud exuberance, so she ranges freely in the mountains as well as in the Big City clubs and concert halls, dressed alternatively in hiking gear or ‘thirties and ‘forties vintage clothes as the case may be.
True to form, you can expect to find some equally wide-ranging themes in this blog, because they often, but not always overlap. What draws most stories together, the most common thread that unites them, is the art of drawing.