Discover Sixty-Five: September 2023

Born to Create?
It is never too late!
- Karma Halleran
Barbara Brown is an artist with whom I
share an affinity to trees.
My mother-In-Law often would ask
me what I would like for my
birthday...
“A tree” I would say.
“But you are surrounded by trees”
she would say...
“But I don’t have that one...”
I would say.
I thought it would be interesting to
speak with Barbara Brown so we could
learn a bit of her story.
syl·​van
Noun
: one that frequents
groves or woods
adjective
: of the forest
D65: Are you a Kootenay Kid?
And if not, where did you grow up?
BB: I was born in Saskatchewan, and my
family moved to Ottawa when I was 9.
I never did feel that Ontario was home
though. We did a lot of family road trips
all across Canada, and on our first one
to BC I fell in love and couldn’t wait until I
was grown up enough to move west.
D65: How did you end up in the
Slocan Valley?
BB: At 17 I left home, headed to Vancouver
Island, and was based mainly there
for the next 13 years. I went to university
in Victoria, getting a degree in Geography
and then worked for the BC Government
in natural resource management/
land-use planning. In the early 80s when
the bottom fell out of the BC economy
and the civil service was cut in half, my
job was one of those cuts.
D65: When did you become an artist?
Did you study art formally?
BB: I hadn’t been really happy with the
gov’t work anyway and I decided to go
back to school to pursue my real
passion: art.
After 2 wonderful years of Fine Art
schooling at Malaspina College in
Nanaimo I knew I wanted to make a go
of it as an artist. I felt I needed to move to
Toronto for a few years to learn the ropes
of the commercial art world. There I took
night courses in studio management and
graphic design/paste-up, while doing
illustration work during the day.
3 years later, in 1988, I took a trip back
West to Vancouver Island for my sister’s
wedding. A good friend had recently
moved to Nelson, so I included a visit
there – I had never been. She showed me
‘round the West Kootenays, taking me on
the loop through Kaslo, New Denver and
the Slocan Valley. The night I returned to
Toronto I told my newly found husband
— who was a city boy born and bred
but with a real longing for country living
— all about Nelson and the Valley; and
immediately upon awakening the next
morning he sat up and said “let’s move to
the Kootenays”! I had been feeling like a
fish out of water in the big Ontario metropolis
too, so, within 3 months of that
decision we arrived in the West Kootenays,
December 1st 1988. We found a
place to rent on the Kosiancic farm in the
Slocan Valley, where we lived for 7 years
until we bought an adjacent acreage of
raw land from them, and proceeded to
develop this property where we still are
now 28 years later.
Of course the challenge moving here was
how to make a living as a self-employed
“The Nelson and other area maps paid the bills for years” BB
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September 2023, Discover Sixty-Five