Robert created two illustrations to accompany the short story, “Planning a Future,” by Aritha van Herk. They were published in the winter issue of Canadian Forum, 1990.

The story is about a clever but fretful young woman on vacation on Vancouver Island. The woman watches surfers and other daredevils in the water and reflects how she is afraid to swim due to an accident in her childhood that caused her to nearly drown. The woman thinks about the recent massacre of student nurses in Montreal. She links this to her own experiences with men and wonders why she so often defers to the future rather than fulfilling her own immediate needs. She decides to adopt a braver and more affirmative attitude toward life. To this end, she resolves to take up surfing. As a first step, she asks her husband if he will teach her how to swim.

Robert shows a woman in street clothes swallowed in the vortex of a wave. The online dictionary, Vocabulary.com, defines vortex like this: “Think vortex and picture a tornado or whirlpool swirling around, causing destruction. Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz found out first-hand the meaning of vortex as she and her house whirled around in the funnel cloud of a tornado. In a figurative sense, vortex can be used to tell about something that seems like it is whirling out of control, all consuming, or chaotic. This may include exam week, your relationships, or your life in general.”

Robert’s stylized illustration shows the wave as both threatening and mesmerizing. There are no halftones in the drawing. The woman is defined by soft irregular shadows and smooth highlights on her clothes and hair. She looks almost out of focus before the sharp repeating lines of the wave that curls to such an extremity that it breaks into a scattershot of surf, drawn as a furious crescendo of dots and writhing worm-shaped marks. The wave suggests sexual explosiveness, reflecting the many references to sex in the story.