Night on the town, NDG lights

Down on Sherbrooke and Decarie boulevard there is a PFK fast food restaurant, that stands for Poulet Frit Kentucky, or Kentucky Fried Chicken in English. Actually, the chain is not allowed to use Kentucky anymore due to copyright infringement with the state of Kentucky, for real. At any rate, the STM bus went by, that stands for Society de Transport Montreal, which really completed the scene. All colours are represented here, with plenty of red, blue, green and yellow interspersed with dark purple, orange, white, black and brown. In the midst of painting, a cop car drove up and stopped nearby, they looked over at me for a few moments and I kept painting, hoping that it was okay to paint watercolours in the PFK parking lot at night. Needless to say it was fine, they pulled over someone who drove through a red light. 

PFK STM bus, watercolour 6 x 7.5" cold press, October 2025

Standing in the same spot, I made a painting of the gas station across the street. It was familiar because I have painted the autoshop across from our condo so many times at night that I knew what to do. It still took some time to complete this one due to the amount of detail. A large throw-up (graffiti art) was on the side of a condo, which I changed to my inititals and date PJD25. Since the cops were around, I felt pretty safe, and I got to do graffiti (in my paintings) and get away with it! 

Gas station Sherbrooke x Decarie, watercolour 6 x 7.5" cold press, October 2025

 

To the left and off in the distance you see the Turcot highway interchange, and in the foreground are some of the shrubberies lining the concrete wall of the bridge that spans Decarie expressway. The bridge runs along st Jacques, but I like to call it Oscar Peterson bridge because he deserves to have a bridge named after him, and the bridge itself looks like a piano when viewed from the side. Of course, he was a famous black Canadian pianist. Doing these paintings is tough, I put together a page on night painting, it covers technical things and shows some neat night paintings from over the years. Today I made a few adjustments... I brough fresh cut paper (not the backs of old paintings) so that the paint would absorb properly. I squeezed out fresh indo blue (PB60), pyrol orange (PO73) and carbon black (PBk6) to make it easier to make the paint concentrated. Usually I let the paint dry on the palette but then its harder to use at night. The adjustments seemed to work, especially in the first painting of the blog which I actually did last chronologically on the night. 

Today was nearly complete darkenss, with only about 1.5% illumination according to a website called timeanddate.com that I have been consulting lately to optimize painting the moon or sunset. About a week from now will start to have a strong moon again leading to a Nov. 5 full moon.  

Turcot Oscar Peterson bridge, watercolour 6 x 7.5" cold press, October 2025