Salt Spring Island: Art and Apples in the Lap of Luxury by Various Travel Authors on Creators.com

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Salt Spring Island: Art and Apples in the Lap of Luxury

Sparsely populated Salt Spring Island may have only 10,500 permanent year-round residents, but it has a gargantuan helping of painters, sculptors, potters, woodworkers, performing artists and musicians that make a vacation to this beauty spot seductive. For the last decade, islanders have been throwing a party in September to celebrate the annual apple harvest, along with goodies from more than 200 growers of organic produce, cheese, and wineries. The celebration continues the rest of the year with art festivals, open studio tours, balls, and gourmet safaris.

Nestled in the Strait of Georgia between mainland Vancouver and Vancouver Island (Victoria), at 70 miles long and nine miles wide, Salt Spring is the biggest of the Gulf islands. Blessed with a mild Mediterranean climate year round, it's one of North America's best small arts towns with a plethora of high-quality galleries, gourmet restaurants, unique shops, outstanding fishing and sailing.

With access to the island either by water — private pleasure boat or ferry — or by scheduled floatplane flights, Salt Spring is still an undiscovered paradise for many Americans.

HASTINGS HOUSE IS ART PATRON

Nowhere is the influence of art on landscape more magical than at Hastings House Country House Hotel built in the early 1900s in the style of an 11th century English manor home by a British naval architect. Poised on the tip of tranquil Ganges Harbor, in May 2008 this 22-acre estate became a huge outdoor stage for 11 installations of massive sculptures and land art, some enigmatic, even foreboding and others whimsical. They roam the grounds and meander onto a nearly one-mile-long public forest trail adjoining the hotel.

"When people think of Salt Spring, two things come immediately to mind — food and art," says co-owner Bonny O'Connor. "The idea was that Hastings House would become the first place on the island where people could enjoy outdoor monumental art by well-respected regional, national and international sculptors. While our guests' and visitors' opinions of the various sculptures differ, the Sculpture Trail and Garden has started another dialogue about art and its place in our community."

Take Michael Dennis' The Gatherers, nine towering figures, 5 to 8 feet tall, made from cedar trunks with red capes of salvaged car hoods intended to connect us to our ancestors. "Recently I wished that I had elders at whose feet I might sit for guidance," Dennis writes. "To my dismay I realized that I know no wise elders ... so I decided that I must summon them from within. This gave rise to a series of heads of crushed auto metal. This representation of the human form by pieces of dead cars on pieces of dead building acknowledges that our passage is marked by the debris we leave behind."

One of the most engaging pieces on the public trail is Rewind/Fast Forward. A playfully ironic twist on the way we interpret archeological digs and what future archeologists might hypothesize about our own culture from the artifacts we leave behind, it consists of a cataloged dig of the Hastings House dump. Created by Illtyd Perkins and Nicholas Hunt, the digs contain liquor, wine and older medicine bottles, pottery and porcelain shards, a brazier, and ginger pot. But it's the fabricated commentary posted at the dig by trumped-up expert Elder Chen Xng-brown that makes it so much fun. After studying the terrain, the trial pits and the artifacts, he concludes that the upper pit includes objects dating from1930-50 OC (Old Count), while the other contains items of a "ceremonial nature, though their purpose is at this point unclear, probably originating from the Aesthetic-Decadent period, circa 2000-2020 OC."

Not merely ornamental, the sculptures and land art were chosen "because they are original and engage our intellect," says Cathie Duthie and Nicholas Hunt, owners of the Salt Spring Woodworks Gallery, the Sculpture Trail curators.

"Like the painter Edouard Manet, we believe that the role of art is to shock the bourgeois."

ART TO BUY/DIE FOR

German-born textile artist and designer Ulrieke Benner opened her art-to-wear studio in 2001. Using merino wool, cashmere, alpaca and silk so thin "you can breathe through the fibers," she dyes and felts wool in a wet rolling process to create stunning, ethereal fabrics for scarves, wraps, custom clothing, jewelry and wall art. Trained in Germany, and Boston, her wearable art has been exhibited in the Philadelphia Museum of Art and shows in Tokyo, Canada and Europe.

"My specialty is creating really fine lightweight loose-weave garments with flow and signature openings in made-to-order colors and designs," she says.

SIT ON IT

Luke Hart-Weller has a pretty small carbon footprint, even for a woodworking artist. Rather than destroy trees to create his magical furniture, lamps, gates and collages, he roams the beaches and forests within 10 miles of his home to forage for suitable split cedar and driftwood "with a series of worm holes that only the ocean and sea could create." His work is characterized by a "strong fondness for curves, blended with a Japanese, Appalachian and Pacific Northwest influence," much of it constructed with hand, rather than power tools.

EAT IT

Edible art is the only description for the pies and other apple-based products dished up at the Apple Festival every autumn. Famous for the 350 varieties organically grown on the island since 1860, earning it the title of Organic Gardening Capital of Canada, this folksy event kicks off a variety of festivities including tours to organic cheese and bread makers, apple farms, wineries and artists' studios.

The aroma inside Fulford Hall, where apple festival vendors sell a stupefying variety of products, smells just like Grandma's kitchen. The Pie Ladies sell more than a dozen types of home-baked apple pies; 89-year-old Mary Mollet, represented by her granddaughter, hawks her cookbook “An Apple A Day,” a collection of 565 recipes collected over 50 years and self-published in two volumes; Amarah Gabriel displays her apple paintings, and Joanne and Rob Burns of Chocolate Beach devastate your diet completely with sweets, some of which contain dried apples.

The date of the festival varies annually, dictated by climatological vagaries that influence the harvesting of the apples.

IF YOU GO

Hastings House Country House Hotel, www.hastingshouse.com; 1-800-661-9255; 160 Upper Ganges Road, Salt Spring Island B.C. ,Canada, V8K 2S2

Voted "Top Canadian Resort" in 2006 by a Zagat International Hotel, Resorts and Spa survey, recipient of the AAA Four Diamond Award in 2006 and the 2006 Sante Magazine Restaurant Wine Award for "Hotel/Resort Fine Dining, this luxurious property features gourmet dining, spa services, crab catching packages and more.

Art to Buy/Die For: Ulrieke Benner, www.ulriekebenner.com; 250-537-1723; 142 Richard Flack Road, Salt Spring Island, B.C., V8K 1N4.

Salt Spring Woodworks, a gallery of fine furniture and outdoor sculpture, www.saltspringwoodworks.com; 250-537-9606; 125 Churchill Road, Salt Spring Island, B.C. V8K 2R3.

Copperwood Gallery, www.copperwoodgallery.com; 250-653-9112.

Apple Festival; www.saltspringmarket.com/apples; Harry Burton at 250-653-2007; burtonh@saltspring.com.

More information at Salt Spring Tourism, www.saltspringtourism.com; 866-216-2936; 121 Ganges Road, Salt Spring Island, B.C., V8K 2T1.

Sheila Sobell and Richard N. Every are freelance travel writers. To read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.