www.markpenneygallery.com

C’mon down to UKEE DAYS! – Fun for the whole family
Bullhorning, town crier style, in the morning is a tradition that goes way way back, as a kid I can remember being woken up way too early for a lazy summer day.
This year events included a wheel barrow race (replicating the tradition of unloading cargo at Whiskey Dock and hauling it up Main Street hill to the store by wheelbarrow).
The Ucluelet sports day it grew from has been an authentic celebration here for longer than anyone can remember… Last year a very senior lady visiting Ucluelet with her family via the Francais Barkley explained that she grew up in Kildonen ( a fishing village 1/2 way down Alberni inlet from here). She said that her father had brought her here the same way for ‘Ukee sports day’ when she was 11 years old. She had participated in several events, won a ribbon and a pencil. and remarked that she still has the pencil.

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Each year the canoe journeys travel down island to washington. They leave from Ahousaht and join others as they travel for about a week toward thier destination. It’s source of local pride and I have a great deal of respect for those who participate. The west coast dugout canoe is an awe inspiring sight to behold when underway in their traditional waters.

Photographic prints on canvas, a Mark Penney specialty. These Black and White Giclee Prints are gallery wrapped on 2″ custom cedar stretchers.

They are custom sized for the designer decor in this luxury condo rental unit in Victoria BC.

For 2 weeks (July 1st to July 15) Ucluelet and Tofino host a new event; Pacific Rim Summer Festival. Organized by the dynamos over at P.R.A.S (Pacific Rim Arts Society) the event has a list of local events featuring Music and Performance art. In our own Whiskey Dock way, we invited traveling street performers from Quebec to entertain Ucluelet’s Historic Waterfront District. Randy ( an eccentric local ) cranked up the music from his pickup in support of the french speaking duos efforts. The crowd from the Francis Barkley and those milling around in front of the Aquarium seemed to respond to the impromptu display of culture.

Canada Day in Ucluelet is punctuated by fireworks at dusk in the harbour. It draws a crowd down to the Whiskey Dock.

The official ceremonies are conducted at the village green, and followed by live entertainment in the afternoon. This year Elgin with Pacific Rim Arts Society had a table featuring several donated pieces of art to fund raise for the Pacific Rim Summer Festival a week long event with a focus on performence based art and music in the area. Elgin Ambrose, Nigel Brooks Peer and I donated pieces in support of the raffle.

Mark Penney, printmaking in Ucluelet

The first print-job with the new Breathing Color Lyve canvas is complete. I got a profile from tech support ( I didn’t see any Lyve profiles posted online yet). They offer a custom profile service, very impressive although I usually make my own.

I’m impressed with the canvas, the weave looks similar to PremierArt’s water resistant canvas with a smoother gesso finish. The raw canvas is dead flat ( totally matte) before the laminate is applied. The prints come alive as the laminate cures.

These images are custom sized and gallery wrapped for the installation,  stretched on 2″ custom cedar stretchers, and by all accounts; very juicy.

Right next door to Whiskey Landing is the Ucluelet Aquarium. I highly recommend it, especially if you’re traveling with children. It’s full of touch tanks and has an amazing array of local sea life. Dave and the staff there are friendly, knowledgeable and great with children (and tourists).

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edge to edge marathon official site .

This year’s Edge to Edge Marathon was again a success.

I’ve always admired the marathon. Last year Danielle’s efforts really stepped up the profile of the event and this year, I have to admit I was wishing I’d signed up. The runners were well supported, the weather was great, they have a half marathon option and a relay race ( geared toward mere mortals).

Adam participated as a member of the local Coast Guard Team. I’d like to have had a Whiskey Landing team, but I don’t know if I could convince anyone else that it’d be fun.

Thank you to all those who came out and congratulations to those who did run this year.

We’re located at Whiskey Landing, at Ucluelet’s historic Whiskey Dock is at the Government Wharf the bottom of Main St. Getting here is easy, turn off Peninsula Road at the Church (across from the Co-op) look down Main Street hill and you’ll see a beautiful building with a red roof, don’t worry you’l know it when you see it.

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Breathing Color unleashes a brand new Lyve Canvas. ” in May 2009 under the bold mantra “Go Live with Lyve”, this canvas is unmistakably in a class of its own. Lyve delivers a quantum leap in dmax, color gamut and overall print quality, and promises to forever change fine art by expanding the standard perceptions of what is possible. With critical archival certification, Lyve was designed for the discerning artist or photographer whose aim is to be the best in their field.” … and it comes with an Archival Quality Certificate.

Bill Atkinson has been using their flagship product for some time, and nobody makes better prints than Bill does.

Huu-Mees Ma-as or Cedar House Gallery is our next door neighbor, and I’ve recently built a wordpress based website for them. www.nativeartcedarhouse.com.

I do recommend this gallery while visiting Whiskey Landing and I highly recommend them online also. artists represented include; Patrick Amos, Mark Mickey, Cliff George, Stan Thompson. They have a great selection of contemporary and traditional Native Art, carvings, jewlry, knitted goods and basketry.

I had been tasked with barkleyadventurestation.com‘s recent update and remodel.

The site had a respectable amount of content an a functioning design. The main issues stemmed from table layout / authoring techniques that have become outdated. ( don’t get me wrong here – it was probably fine when it was first published) It’s an unfortunate fact that most people use google as their search engine – so optimization for google and other search engines, is a must. Google doen’t seem to like these techniques, sometimes missinterpreting the importance of content, or disregards it all together.

So I started out by remaking the existing site (more or less) in clean HTML and CSS.  SEO’d somewhat. I made a sitemap, a robot.txt made redirects for all the missing pages.

The site got a PR 3 (Pangerank of 3) after a couple of weeks of the updates going live. Placement in results had improved somewhat, traffic increased dramatically.

It seemed that a more aggresssive strategy would be required to rank well with the presence of other online competitors. We’d done everything well – but still geting outranked handily. A big advantage was identified with a blog formatted site (regular updated posts, SEO, compelling content, better client interaction) and I soon installed the blog site.

I cleaned up the main site and stripped it down to business functions, the rest was converted to blog format. In that format, the same SEO principals apply; relavant keywords in the titles, descriptions, body. Alt tags for images. WordPress plug ins are great for this.

The blog is showing a PR2 and traffic is stabalizing into a less erratic pattern. We’ve added a listing on google maps and added a test video on youtube. The site is gaining on it’s competitors,  I think it’s the best Salmon Fishing Charter in Ucluelet website yet. I’m working on Skipper Dave to do a podcast project; somewhere between a good flyfishing show and Deadliest Catch; If you think you might want to sponsor it – lemme know.

We support our local art scene, so this year Mark Penney Gallery participated in Pacific Rim Art Society‘s Random Acts of Art week. 1st we chalked up the parking lot at Whiskey Landing with a fish mural, a bit of a nod toward the aquarium, and our local fishermen.
Then at, Elgin’s suggestion, we made a sculpture out of found objects (garbage) at the south end of Florencia Bay. The sculpture and chalk drawings appeared on the P.R.A.S. website and in their online photo album.

Welcome to the gallery website;
It’s new… and like Whiskey Landing itself, it’s under construction.

I’m proud to represent a selection of Artists in the gallery, who work in a variety of mediums, price ranges, scale and genre.

Most of these Artists live within a short distance from the gallery in Ucluelet .

Each of our talented artists is respected for their integrity as artists, and some are quite well known. (I’ll be adding info on individual artists, soon). Many of our artists are known to do commissioned works, some have reproductions available also.
We ship world-wide; many of our visitors are on vacation, we gladly arrange for shipment to your home, office or to your gifts’ recipient.

If you have questions or comments please call me: Mark Penney (250) 726-2012  / (250) 726 7200 or drop by the gallery, have a look around at Ucluelet’s ‘Whiskey Dock’.