Downtown St. Denis, Ile de la Reunion

Most of the paintings I did on Ile de la Reunion were intended to show the relationship between the urbanity and the natural landscape, with the exception of this one. I searched the downtown for an hour trying to find a scene that would show the green-topped mountain and the emerald-coloured Indian Ocean, but when you're down town all you see are these kind of run-down looking white plaster buildings. Everything has a thin layer of moss on it due to the humid tropical climate, the streets all smell a little oily from the diesel cars, the sidewalks are narrow and crowded, and it is hot, really hot. Finally I found this scene with the sign for a Chinese food store, powerlines, and an array of yellow and red tones. There is no nature in this painting, just the building, but it really captured the swelterin chaos of the place, it is very reminiscent of a painting I did in Kyoto, Japan posted Nov 20 2008 on my blog.

Making a painting is kind of like being on a roller coaster. You get the idea for the painting and then feel a little nervous... is it the right scene, can I do it, will the sun come around too fast, will the store owner kick me off their front step? Then you just start it, sort of like getting on the roller coaster, where the first part hauls you up this giant ramp, with that ticking sound as the roller coaster car moves up the tracks a sharp angle. Then at the top you look down the other side with terror and it lets you go and scream and it pulls you all over the place, and then just like that it's done. I forget what my point was with the analogy, but basically, when you are in the middle of making a painting everything is twisting and turning and you're not quite sure what comes next. I remember this one being just that, I was convinced that it was going to be a disaster until I put the brush down, and presto, it worked out. Time to take the ride again!

5x7" watercolour, August 2011

The Roland Garros, Ile de la Reunion

The Roland Garros is a restaurant in St. Denis, right near the waterfront of the Indian Ocean. From the patio, the waves can be heard crashing against the rocky shore. You can also hear the cars and trucks going by, but with the sun and fresh air you hardly care about it. In the distance is the old volcanic mountain that is populated by houses, if you zoom in there are some little houses depicted on the mountain crest just over the roof. What inspired me was the way that the natural environment was encroaching on the restaurant, it was as if the building was swimming in a sea of jungle foliage.

When composing a picture, 'balance' is always a crucial element. Balance of course is an optical illusion because everything in a painting is flat and has no weight, but your brain is always finding ways to estimate the volume and mass of an object. In the Roland Garros painting the restaurant is dominating the bottom left of the picture, this is a very heavy visual 'weight' that would normally create an imbalance.  To offset this imbalance, I created a strong element on the right of the painting: the towering tree, and the distant mountain behind the tree. Creating an illusion of distance is a great way to balance the other 'heavy elements', the old chinese masters used it all the time, in fact they often kept half of their paintings completely blank, which suggested a blinding, distant horizon.

7.5x11" cold press watercolour, July 2011.

St. Denis, view from la Montagne

On ile de la Reunion there is an old, long silent volcanic caldera called la montagne where many people live. These is also a winding road up the side of la Montagne that takes a stomach turning 10-12 minutes to ascend. At the bottom right of this painting I suggested the curve of the road... if you could be there, you would see this little road with tiny little cars on it. I was sitting in a little view point where visitors could park and look at the great view of St. Denis, the main city on the island. The wind was very strong at this moment, and the shadow from the rest of the mountain behind me, was starting to fall over St. Denis, if you look at the bottom half of the painting and squint your eyes you will see the shadow of the mountain.

There are a lot of elements of a painting that need to come together for success, including colour, technique, the idea, and most importantly, the composition. This painting is a good example of a classic "S" composition... forget for a second that you are looking at an island and an ocean, then look at the coast line, it forms an S shape going from top right to bottom left. This type of composition really allows the eye to move up and down and side to side. Controlling where the viewers eye will wander is the basis of good composition. This is also an example of how to 'suggest' detail....it looks like there is a city there, but when you examine it carefully there are no defined buildings or houses. The trick is to keep the detail level similar in the whole painting, if some things are really detailed then the viewer thinks everything should be detailed, but in this painting everything is a little fuzzy, so the viewer is more prepared to accept the 'suggestion' of a city.

Watercolour, 10x11" cold press August 2011

Sunny Day (Back Alley) Le Plateau, Montreal

The Plateau has many wonderful scenes, for example the view down Laurier, the cafes on St. Denis, and the Cathedral on St. Viateur, but the alley off St. Guthbert is probably not considered to be one of them. It is only a few steps from the famous Schwartz's, just off St. Laurent Street, I won't mention what the sidewalk smelled like though. I had actually walked around for about half an hour looking for a decent scene to paint, it was a a beautiful sunny day in September, when this alley caught my eye. Something about the way the sunlight reflected off the dumpster really inspired me.



Painting silhouettes is quite difficult especially when using watercolour. In this example there are three major silhouettes, the building on the right with the windows, the building on the left, and the dumpster in the foreground. I used a similar technique for all three, involving a procedure called glazing. To do this, I first put down a layer of cool blue/brown, then when it was dry, overlayed with orangey brown tones. I varied the intensity of the second layer for the three silhouettes, the left was a pale orange, the right was a heavy brick-red, and the dumpster was a lively transparent reddish-orange. I wanted to do it this way to make the dumpster stand out the most, and the right side to really hold your attention on the alley. The left brick structure was there to hold the composition, and to provide a neutral backdrop for the dumpster.

watercolour 5x8" cold press paper, Sept. 2011

St. Denis, ile de la Reunion, view from the Hospital

The plane came while I was painting this one, it was heading for the Roland Garros airport west of the city. The skyline is St. Denis the biggest city on the island inhabited by about 150,000 people and nestled up against the Indian Ocean. I remember having difficulty with this one because the weather kept changing, it was overcast then sunny then raining a bit, then partly cloudy. I think the painting reflects that turbulent weather, you can also see the sun beams piercing the clouds and shimmering off the ocean.



I rarely use this format of paper on location, in fact this is probably the first time (after thousands of location paitnings) that I remember trying it. The dimension is very short and wide, I thought it would help give the sense of this never-ending city skyline completely surrounded by the indian ocean. In retrospect it worked okay although I wish I had more space to paint the clouds and sky which I had to compress into the small gap between the ocean and the top of the paper. Choosing the right format of paper is important though, usually I go with a 5x7 rectangle, and before I start I try to imagine what the scene would look like on either a horizontal or vertical format. In general I do the natural landscapes on a horizontal, while many of my city-scapes or vertical to better portray the buildings.

Watercolour Cold press paper, 6x15" 2011 August

Have a Ball, Washington DC, USA

Recently I was in Washington DC for a conference, near the hotel there was a little sculpture of the Amercian flag wrapped around a globe, not sure what the symbolism was supposed to mean but it made for an interesting painting subject. Normally I do not like to paint pictures of 'other people's art', for example, as seen here, a sculpture that somebody else designed. But in this case the sculpture was only part of the larger landscape, I liked the way the red of the flowers near the sidewalk played against the reds of the flag, and thought the fence line was interesting enough to carry the painting and make the sculpture an accessory rather than the main focus.

On occasion I have had to paint spheres, they most commonly appear in lamp bulbs, but similar types of shapes are found on cathedral domes, or in this case, globe shaped sculptures. There is going to be one small area of the sphere that is reflecting maximum light, you should decide where that is and make sure to leave it totally white (blank paper, as there is no white in watercolour). Around the white dot I then do a gentle fade from pale orange, blending it into the shadow part. Usually that never quite looks right so I puton a third layer or even fourth layer to get the shadow looking right. At the bottom of the sphere in this case, there is some yellow reflected up from the grass which I made with a few drops of lemon yellow and a touch of virdian (a deep green). Overall it is a high level of difficulty to paint a sphere, and in this case there was the overlapping flag elements, which I put on last. Then I wrestled with the thing for awhile, lifting paint here and adding shadows there. Fortunately it turned out okay in the end.

watercolour 5x7" cold press 2011

Petite-Ile, La Reunion

In the south there is an area called Petite-Ile, the water is very rugged so the beach there is not safe to swim at, in fact they had a sign saying that you could die here... citing shark attacks and rough water as the main potential dangers. The sand was cool too, it was a mixture of white coral and black volcanic rock, I took a small sample for the collection. This scene was up on the embankment, looking towards the south. The rain was just about to come on, so the clouds thick and the scene kind of grey, yet still warm feeling.

I have always tried to emulate Monet's technique that he used in his materpiece 'Field of Poppies' which of course was an oil painting. He placed thin layers of sky-blue on the field to give the feeling of the light from the sky reflecting off the grass. The same type of effect was needed in this painting, but it is impossible to put light blue on top of anything when you are doing watercolours, so instead I started by painting a purply/blue field, then waited for it to nearly dry, then on top layered on the greens and organges of the grass. Finally, I put on top some suggestion of grass texture, the details not too much, and a little palm tree effect too near the foreground. In homage to Monet, I also left in the little peach-red flowers on the shrub. Incidentally, I once copies the "Field of Poppies' using acrylic, it is the long lost Monet sketch that will one day be discovered and sold for millions, as long as nobody notices that Monet used oils that is....

Watercolour, 5x7" cold press, 2011