Pacific Northwest Coastal Art, Painted from the Water Line

Some coastlines are painted from the beach. The British Columbia coast has mostly been painted from the deck of a boat. Quarter Master Design has been part of that tradition since the late 1990s — the watercolours and acrylics of the working coast, the wildlife of the Inside Passage, the village scenes of Haida Gwaii and the mainland inlets, and the small, stubborn art forms that grew up around them: the five-by-seven art card, the open edition print, the species chart pinned above a galley table.

Quarter Master Design opened as a working artist's print gallery, organized into coastal galleries, Vietnam-era military art, and original paintings. The artist behind Quarter Master Design painted these waters from Nanaimo, British Columbia, and the rooms still stand the way that wheelhouse view built them — the same galleries, in the same order — now filled with essays instead of order forms. Think of the site as the gallery grown into a field guide.

The Coastal Galleries

The heart of the collection has always been the coast itself. Our working coast gallery looks at the boats — gillnetters at anchor in Smith Sound, tugs shouldering log booms down Johnstone Strait, pilot boats slipping out past the breakwater. The wildlife pages follow the painters who made eagles, orcas, and grizzlies their lifelong subjects, while the village and heritage gallery considers the most delicate subject on the coast: the settlements, canneries, and First Nations village sites that anchor its human history.

And because the coast has always mixed art with usefulness, we devote a full page to the species chart — that peculiar Northwest hybrid of natural-history illustration and wall art that tells you, at a glance, the difference between a quillback and a copper rockfish.

The Vietnam Rooms

The original site carried a second, quieter collection: paintings and drawings from the Vietnam era, made decades after the fact by hands that remembered. Our combat art pages trace that tradition — from official combat artist programs to the private sketchbooks veterans carried home — and the Pointman pages look at how early veteran websites used art to hold memory together.

For Collectors

If you are starting a collection, begin with our collector's guide to art cards and edition prints, which explains sizes, edition types, and what "frameable" actually means, then read the case for originals. Neither page sells anything; both will make you a sharper buyer wherever you find the work you love.

Why This Coast Keeps Calling Painters

The BC coast is roughly 25,000 kilometres of islands, inlets, and weather. Its light changes by the quarter hour. Painters who work it tend to stay with it for life, the way Emily Carr did, returning again and again to the same cedar shorelines until the subject and the painter were hard to tell apart. The Royal BC Museum holds thousands of works and photographs from this tradition, and a day in its galleries is the best single introduction to the coast's visual history we know.

We add new essays slowly and keep the old ones honest. Start in whichever room suits your weather, and if the site sends you to a gallery, a museum, or a charter dock somewhere up the Inside Passage, it has done its job.

How to Use This Site

Each room of the old gallery is now an essay, and each essay stands alone — but they reward reading in order, the way the original visitor clicked through them: coast first, then the war rooms, then the practical pages. The named-landscape essays on Bute Inlet and the Skeena go deepest into single places, and the guestbook page remembers the era when every site like this one kept a visitors' book by the door. Nothing here is for sale, and nothing asks for your email. The coast is the pitch.