Festival International de Jazz de Montreal 2011

'Jazz Fest' as it is usually referred to by the anglophones, happens once a year in Montreal, situated in the downtown core in the newly renovated entertainment district. In the painting you see the new light standards, twisting and curling around eachother like cats tails. In the background is Place de arts, decorated with banners and signs. The usual crush of people is depicted in the middle ground, and for the few lucky ones, they are sitting at tables in the foreground, no doubt enjoying some brand named beer that sponsors the event.

There are several signs in the painting, three large posters on top of the place de arts, and a long banner just over the windows of the same building. There is also text printed along the umbrellas in the foreground. When painting landscapes, it is rarely worthhile to try and make the writing that you see on signs and posters actually readable. You're painting a landscape afterall, not an advertisement. At any rate, it is exteremely difficult to try and copy the writing you see, I have tried, and failed many a times. So I just kind of represent the letters as blocks and curves and circles, so you get the sense that there is somehting written there. As a strange fact, I also find it very difficult to write words when I am in the middle of painting a picture...the brain has switched into an abstract mode of colour-shape-line-feeling, and so when I have tried to write something into a painting, it feels like being a child again almost, and I make many spelling errors. There are more than a few obvious spelling errors in the painting titles (which I often write immediately after finishing, or during the making of the work), and some obvious attempts to correct the error (which is really hard in watercolour) can be seen in the titles too.

5x7" cold press, 2011

Red, White, and Blue, USA

 This painting is called Red, White, and Blue becuase I painted it in Washington DC the capital of USA, and also because the scene itself had this profound red white and blue colour scheme. The port-o-let and the sky were blue, the white roof of the device was white, and the letters on the sign on the front of it, as well as the bricks from the houses in the background were red. Seemed fitting. I suppose I have had a history of painting port-o-lets, outhouses, and garbage cans. Ususally when I location I do try and find definitive scenes that give the viewer a sense of where they are, and in some ways, maybe that works with this one too?

Painting shadows in a field of grass is somewhat tricky, I have tried several techniques and it usually ends up looking overworked and too detailed... keep in mind that a patch of grass which is usually at the foreground of the painting, is something that the viewer is unlikely to really notice...in fact you dont really want them to notice it becuase you want them to focus on the center of attention (the port-o-let in this case, oh what a crappy subject matter!?). So in this painting I tried to make the shadow pretty diffuse and undefined... to do that I put down the light yellow-green-brown layer for the entire lawn, going all the way from the bottom edge of the paper stopping just under the middle ground elements. When it was partly dry (on that day it was humid so it took a few minutes...on a dry day it could take only a few seconds) then I put in the dark blue-green shadow colour. To mix the shadow colour I used the same light green mix I used for the lawn, and just added a bit of ultramarine (a warm transparent blue) and cereulean blue (a thick sky-blue). When the shadow was nearly dry, then I put on some 'scratchy' details to suggest grass blades... in places these details just bled around, in others they are more defined.

5x7" cold press, 2011

Insignificant Details

This paiting despite it's name contains a lot of details, some of which I would say are significant. I will not say which details mean what, instead I prefer to let the viewer 'figure it out'. As always though, the relationship between artist and viewer is fraught with ambiguities in interpretation. Maybe it should stay that way, kind of like a Magician who doesn't share the secrets to his tricks, although these days you can go on the internet and find out just about anything including how magicians do their tricks, and apparently now, how Darlington does his watercolours.

With that segway, let's think about how I did this one... the doodleism technique has been in my repertoire for several years now, the first one probably sometime in 2003. As I read some of the old blogs I made an interesting find in how my thinking has changed. Originally to do this technique, I went through my old notes (which are always filled with doodles done during lab meetings and presentation... I swear I was paying attention the whole time though), and from those small doodles I would select the best ones to compose a design. The change somewhere along the way was that I stopped being selective about the doodles and instead forced myself to use every doodle in the book. As matter of design this creates a lot of interesting problems... if you inspect the painting above you will see several different horizon lines and discrepant perspectives, this is me trying to fit together completely different drawings into a single landscape. In the end though I think it makes a very intersting contrast. To give away a small tidbit, I will say that there a number of elements of this design that are physically connected with some degree of intent of meaning. I'll let the critics figure the rest out.

22x30" cold press. 2011

Washington DC Duke Ellington Bridge, USA

This could have been a picture from my Spain collection from 1998, however it is a recent painting done on location in Washington DC. The bridge is decorated with bronze pillars topped by eagles, and the rest of it is made from a kind of brownish stone. There was a cherry tree perhaps, blossoming in the foreground, and in the background some red tile roof houses that belong in the Mediterranean. 

Maybe the most exciting thing about painting on location is the sort of 'energy' the final painting has... careful inspection of this painting reveals a whole bunch of what you would call mistakes... I wont say what specifically, (ok, the perspective is a little off on the bridge arches, and the bridge was obviously a lot straighter in places.... but that is not the point...) when I look at this painting I can almost feel the humidity, sense the cool breeze and the hot sun, hear the cars on the bridge... I hope the viewer also gets this kind of energy. Doing things quick, and letting the paint 'do what it wants' is one way to get these effects, but the danger is you are working on the fine line of creating a disaster or a masterpiece... I guess that's what being an artist means after all.In a practical sense though, when I do studio work where you have more time, I do try and recapitulate some of the spontaneous elemts of the location work. I think doing the two types of painting (studio and location) can really help you grow.

5x7" cold press, 2011.

Land Escape

Landscapes can be so much fun to paint when you are making them up in your head. I tried to draw on landscape motifs from things I have painted on location, to the left most is a classic beach scene with white sand and turquoise water, on the right top, you see rugged Canadian shield reminiscent of the work I did in Algonquin park years ago. In the middle of the painting there is a visual transition from the two types of landscapes, with the flying character sort of torn between the two (or is she tearing them?). The feathers of the character are woven into the landscapes, is she escaping, or being held back?

This painting was based almost entirely on doodles from my lab notes, but instead of following them to a tee, I introduced some visual elements that were necessary to convey the tension that the flying character was feeling. Firstly, the pine tree in the top right is dissolving into the sky and streaking into the form of the flying character, and the loopy lines on the foreground are flowing into the tail feathers making it look she is either trying to tear away, or the land is holding her back... I intended the message to have an ambiguity. As for the two characters in the bottom right, not sure what they are doing, but they look like they would also want to be on the beach....

22x15" cold press, 2011

Scene on the Seine, France

In Paris this spring I had the chance to paint late in the afternoon and the sun was rapidly going down so I headed to the Seine river, this scene would be looking onto the tip Ile St. Louis where a bunch of people were catching the last of the sun and in the backdrop would be Ile de la Cite, if the painting extended up and to the right a bit, you would see Notre Dame Cathedral. I took a bunch of pictures too, maybe one day I c an expand it into a larger work... the idea of putting Notre Dame cathedral in this small painting was rather daunting and the time was short.

Painting the water in the Seine was indeed an interesting challenge and quite the opposite to painting the Indian ocean or carribean sea, here the water is muddy and choppy, the buildings shadow a lot of it, and the boats going by constantly create a lot of waves. I tried to capture it best by laying down rather thick brushstrokes in a Monet-like fashion, or maybe like Tom Thomson in 'Jack Pine' where he used interlocking brush strokes to create the illusion of a sunset reflecting on the water. Here I use the technique to create the illusion of brown sludge reflecting off the water, mixed with highlights from the blue sky and white foam of the waves.

5x6" cold press, 2011

Colorado Park, La Reunion

This painting was done on a mountain-on-top-of-the-mountain, in Colorado Park, just when you think you have gone as far up as you can go, there is a long winding road leading to this park. When you get out to walk, there is yet another grassy hill that you continue walking up until you reach a gazebo over looking the  west and east side views of the mountain. The view shows the west bank of a large gorge that runs down the side of the mountain, at the bottom of the gorge is a torrent river, the river is not seen in the picture, but it would be just about where my signature ends in the bottom right. The city depicted is St. Denis, and the sea and beach can be just barely seen... the misty clouds were creating a real fog that came and went as I painted.

Depicting a city on this scale can be quite challenge, the size of this paper is only 5x7 inches, so you don't have a lot of space to paint every little window. I concentrated on keeping the egg-shell white and soft red colours very prominent, these were the colours of most of the houses, and then I put in a but of detail to suggest windows, you have to zoom in to catch them. The trees between the houses provided a dark contrast to make the off whites stand out. To maintain the illusion of distance, I kept the colour saturation (brightness) high in the foreground (edge of the mountain on left), and kept the colour saturation low in the city and water, including lots of blue there to give the atmosphere some depth, a classic trick invented by Da Vinci.

5x7" cold press, 2011