Local Arts

The image lingers. Pender Harbour film maker and photographer Dianne Whelan, while camping on Mount Everest last May, remembers the hand - still covered with hair and skin - emerging through the ice of the receding glacier.

Culture was celebrated on the Coast last weekend with a hugely successful Sechelt Arts Festival.

The newly-formed Sunshine Coast Independent Writers Group has blossomed into an active group with many plans. Meet and greet 16 local self-published authors under the big tent at the Festival of the Written Arts at Rockwood in Sechelt from Aug.

The Sunshine Coast Festival of the Written Arts (FOWA) proudly presents Voyageur, the Six String Nation Guitar.

Dazzling vocalist, pianist and songwriter Allison Crowe opens this weekend's Sechelt Festival of the Arts (July 30 to Aug. 7) in an intimate setting at the Sunshine Coast Arts Centre in Sechelt as part of her Rolling Wonder Revue tour.

The Gibsons and Vancouver filmed Charlie St. Cloud, starring Zac Efron, Kim Basinger, Amanda Crew and Ray Liotta, opens today (Friday) on the Sunshine Coast and in various theatres in the Lower Mainland.

On July 28 one of the Coast's most popular musical groups, the Coast String Fiddlers, flew to Scotland for the Aberdeen International Youth Festival, the world's leading festival of arts for youth. The festival, that runs July 28 to Aug.

Kicking off the August long weekend that "raving group of Celtic Gypsy punk rockers from Whitehorse Yukon" makes a return appearance at the Roberts Creek Hall on Saturday, July 31.

Singer, composer and teacher Anna Beaumont is always breaking new ground. You may have heard her sing jazz - she appeared at the 2007 Gibsons Landing Jazz Festival and at other concerts on the Coast.

The exhibition Coastal Lives showing work by Sherry Cooper, Sheila Page and Michaela Cochran opens this week with an artists' reception on Saturday, July 24, at the Gibsons Public Art Gallery (GPAG) from 2 to 4 p.m.