profile Charles van Sandwyk Finds Peace in the Eye of the Storm Inwood The show also offers visitors a chance to buy van Sandwyk's new book. Pocket Guide to the Little People. It's a subject that the 31 -year-old van Sandwyk has painstakingly developed over the years. The resulting scenes of leaf-clad autumns elves and fairy lamplighters hearken back to the Victorian era of children's books. "The fairies are all drawn from life," he says, straight-faced, after being asked where he gets his inspiration. "I get them to pose. I draw them. Who needs inspiration? "In order to see them in the first place, you have to be inspired from childhood. All this stuff is really designed for my appreciation, which is for other grown-ups who like to remember what it was like to be children." Van Sandwyk's whimsical approach to art goes back to the days when he first started selling his work as a teenager growing up in Deep Cove. "Painting has been my passion from day one," he says. "I did some drawing for The Hohbit because I loved that book when I was 14." He fell in love with J.R.R. Tolkien's world, painting scenes of Hobbiton, Bilbo Baggins, Frodo, and Gandalf. "I developed my loved for painting because there were no pictures of those guys," he says. Van Sandwyk still has some of the original watercolours and, even though they're artistically naive, you can still see the emerging skill of a young hand. In fact, says van Sandwyk, he'd love to illustrate The Hobbit. for the book's 60th anniversary next year. "For many years, and even to this day, I wanted that to be my next big project, to illustrate that," he says. A visit to his Deep Cove cottage is like stepping back in time to a gentler age. In many ways, van Sandwyk's home is a metaphor for the art he produces. With its hardwood floors and river rock fireplace, it is full of solid, well-made furniture. Tiffany lamps, and old rugs. On the walls are van Sandwyk's paint- by Damian The vicious cyclone tore down on the tiny Fijian island paradise, packing lethal 280 kilometre-an-hour winds. "The coconut trees were dancing around like can-can girls," says North Vancouver artist Charles van Sandwyk. "Two of my neighbour Joe's windows blew out. We went out and found them and it was like being in the middle of a blender. "It was by far the scariest thing I've ever been in." Sitting in van Sandwyk's cozy. Deep Cove cottage, it's hard to imagine the violent storm that flattened his grassroofed studio last winter and soaked some of his watercolours beyond repair. Worse still, it destroyed homes and killed two people on the string of islands that the artist thinks of as home. "It made everything seem a little more precious." he says of the daylong ordeal. The fury of the storm inspired him to paint a new series of pictures that capture the small, peaceful moments in life. Van Sandwyk fans will get a chance to see that work at the Seymour Art Gallery in a show of 90 paintings and etchings called Life is Art. Three quarters of the show is new work and the rest is a retrospective look at van Sandwyk's career, with paintings from private collections.'The present gallery sits in the same spot as the old Earth Sea Gallery where van Sandwyk held his first one-man show at the age of 17. "In the new work, there's a whole theme of cherishing the moment and the time that we have," van Sandwyk says. "There's a bit of an earth series that's happening." He points to a series of paintings - there's a stately tiger, a rhinoceros looking at a shooting star, a monkey holding a human skull, a winking owl, strutting cockerels, a leopard, and a spiny lobster. Van Sandwyk continues using animals to represent the human condition as he finds that, in painting, animals can express emotions with a charisma that the human element cannot match. Charies van Sandwyk ings of animals, birds, and fishes, which often exhibit human personalities -- not to mention tailcoats, hats, and eyeglasses. The pictures exude a kind of old-world charm which seems reflected in the aartist's speech and his way of thinking. Indeed, van Sandwyk credits turn-of-the-century British children's book illustrator, Arthur Rackham. and to a lesser extent Beatrix Potter, with inspiring him. Van Sandwyk was bom in South Africa and, although he moved to Deep Cove with his family when he was II, he still bears a trace of his South African accent. He divides his year between his beloved Fiji and North Vancouver but admits his last two trips to the South Seas have been unpleasantly eventful. In 1995, his face was badly scarred when the taxi he was riding in crashed, hurling him through the windshield. His left eye was sliced by broken glass and he feared he might lose the sight in it. He has survived, suffering only a slight astigmatism. Then, on his last visit, came the terrifying cyclone. "I had 22 coconut trees snap, right in the middle," he shrugs. "My tin-roof house was okay. Part of