Victoria Sketchbook Robert Amos I remember the first time I drove into Victoria. The view from the hilltop at Royal Oak brought me up short. There was the city spread below me. Sunlight sparkled on the waters of the Strait of Juan de Fuca, and beyond was a curtain of cobalt blue: the mountains of the Olympic Peninsula. I knew I was going to stay. Robert Amos has devoted twenty-five years to painting and writing about British Columbia's capital city. Victoria Sketchbook is his tribute, in words and images, to this city by the sea. With a technique that perfectly matches his subject, Amos sets down his favorite views in sparkling watercolors.

As the art columnist for the Victoria Times Colonist, Amos is also full of sharp opinions and quirky insights into life in Victoria, past and present. His writing embraces the contradictions of this most unusual of provincial capitals - tourist mecca, retirement haven and bustling island mini-metropolis. Robert Amos, elected to membership in the Royal Canadian Academy of the Arts in 1996, has previously published two collections of his paintings, Victoria (Orca, 1990) and Victoria: Another View (Orca, 1993), and has illustrated a children's picturebook, No Such Thing As Far Away (Orca, 1994), set in the city's Chinatown.