THOR FROHN-NIELSEN has been tinkering with mechanics since he started dismantling anything that he could find in his childhood home. “I’ve wanted to know what makes things work since I was four when I first took apart my parents’ wind-up alarm clocks,” he says.
His career, however, followed an academic path and Thor spent his professional life as a passionate professor of Canadian and British History at Surrey’s Kwantlen Polytechnic University. In his free time, he pursued his love of mechanics.
“My job sometimes interfered with my main hobby,” laughs Thor, citing the cycles of his academic year (grading papers) that slowed down his Ocean Park home garage time. “I do the electrical, mechanical, body work, brakes and everything on my car(s). I always like to learn new skills,” says the autodidactic mechanic.
Now retired, Thor dedicates his at-home time to the mechanical workings of his current project: a 1972 Italian Lancia Fulvia 1600, the winning model of the 1972 World Rally Championship, which he had shipped from a small town south of Rome two years ago. “I drove it in the BC interior’s Spring Thaw Rally last year,” he says. His wife, Deborah Forbes, navigated. “Rallying is a better fit for me than racing.”
Thor’s unquenching mechanical curiosity took him on a gruelling 1,000+ km motorcycle road trip on the gravel Dempster Highway from Dawson City, crossing the Arctic Circle and ending at the Arctic Ocean in Tuktoyaktuk, NWT last summer. “I did that trip and then sold my gear,” he says. “I feel more at home in the Lancia,” whose every interior working he is intimately familiar with.
DOUG McMILLAN has been curious about the underpinnings of art since he first visited the Mendel Gallery in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan as a child.
“I’ve always wondered how artists plan out their paintings, and how the colours end up as they do,” says the former elementary school teacher, who has visited galleries worldwide for his entire life. “My interest in making art grew out of seeing so many different styles.”
Six months after he retired six years ago, Doug took lessons in applying paint to paper at Barclay Manor, an affiliate of the West End Community Centre in Vancouver. “Since then, I travel with a notepad, an ink pen and my travel-sized watercolours and I’ve done “plein air” paintings of the Temple of Poseidon in Athens, the Panama Canal, and images in Cartagena, Colombia.”
Doug and his husband, Ken Cado, both avid travellers, live four months per year in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, and spend summers between their Vancouver residence and their Whidbey Island, Washington home where Doug has an acrylics studio. Since retirement, they plan many of their trips to destinations where Doug can further his studies with painters who inspire his love of learning the craft. “I had my first commission last year,” he says, acknowledging the only way to get better is to keep moving forward.
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