The circumstance: a boy was born in a home in the Interlake. It was quickly discovered that the infant could not digest the cow’s milk that was given to him after his mother’s milk had dried. Wise women advised the mother to feed her baby boy goats’ milk—and so, a nanny goat became another addition to the family.

Soon, a male goat was added to the family and they went on to raise goats and children. The little boy grew up with goat playmates.

There are magical ways of bringing unexpected images to the fore, like Leonardo Da Vinci’s doodles of the reflections of trees, of people against whitewashed walls.  Inspired by brass rubbings, I place a sheet of paper on a table where the crumbs have not been wiped clean. I rely on this method whenever I have a creator’s ‘block’.

After the first successful conjuring of images, I spent many winter days and evenings producing the Goat boy stories. It is an open-ended process--there is no limit to the surprising leads that I may find when I pull the black charcoal over the sheet covering the crumbs.

The Black Crow White Crow drawings were created after the sighting of two crows, one white one black, on Christmas Eve 2009 along highway #8 near the Teulon junction. That January a two-storey ice shack appeared on the ice at Winnipeg Beach. Fancy that. Ice fishing and all that happens around it makes for an ‘ice fishing culture’ on our rivers and lakes.