Where We Were

"Where We Were" was drawn from doodles that I did over the course of 2011-2012. In fact, I managed to use all of the doodles from an entire notebook. It was almost an attempt to 'catch up' to the doodles that I have been doing at work (I'm always paying attention). One reason I am generating so many doodles these days (aside from numerous meetings) is that I am actually doodling with the mind that they will become a painting one day. In some ways then, this style of doodleism has gone from something of a convenience to more of an established and thoughtful process. Initially the style was a convenience because well, I did not always have a good idea for a painting when sitting in my studio, whereas when sitting in the middle of a (often dull) meeting my creative juices start to flow. Part of it has to do with claustrophobia that I feel when in a small room full of people, jammed behind a table... by making drawings I can ease the feeling by 'imagining' open spaces. Most of my doodles depict vast horizons and free flowing organic forms... visual escape I guess. You can see a lot of stressful elements in this painting like the angry house in the middle of a fire. 2011-2012 was a personally hard time for me, and while this painting was not intended to convey that emotion, the doodles themselves were produced as a result of that mindset. Knowing this I named the painting "Where We Were" because it shows a state of feeling from the past.
There is also a chicken-shaped apartment building, a motif I have used before (E.g. Chicken #5). I got into painting chicken-shaped buildings at the advice of a man I met at an art gallery who tried to convince me that artists in New York got famous for painting motifs, he mentioned cows as I remember. To be fair though, Monet painted turkeys a few times.

22x30" cold press, May 2013

Lac Delage, Quebec

This was a quick painting I made in the morning of a conference I attended at Lac Delage near Quebec city. It is very reminiscent of a scene from Algonquin park. Done just after dawn, there was a thick layer of mist on the water that I tried to capture.

Green is never green. In this painting the trees and grass are depicted with an array of blues, browns, yellows, oranges and even pinks. All of these colours are tinted with green. A common mistake beginners make is to reach for the green tube of paint as a starting point, resulting in an unnatural feel. Of course impressionist painters such as Mastisse and Van Gogh used pure greens to great effect, but they did it on purpose!

11x7.5" cold press. June 2013

The Conversation

From one of the smallest watercolour paintings I ever did (doodle study-posted today) to one the largest.... this painting is twice the size of a usual large painting that I do! The image is an artistic interpretation of the inside of a cell, not a jail cell, but a living biological cell. The planet-like thing at the top represents the nucleus. The objects all have their own personality. In the original design there was a stark horizon line, but to create the illusion of endless space I covered it up with clouds and objects. There was also a cartoon-like character with a fishing rod in the foreground that did not go with the overall tone so I covered that up too. Gee, an artist is never supposed to reveal their secrets eh!?

I used several interesting techniques in this painting.. the little white dots over the planet-nucleus were created by throwing some salt on the moist wash. The bubble shapes (vacuoles) were created by dropping paint with a plastic pasteur pipette (borrowed from the lab). I also used the pasteur pipette to drop water onto my palette, this helped to create large volumes of paint needed for the big scale. The design was completely original, no prior doodles were used, I just had a general sense of the composition. It was challenging technically and mentally, you really feel the pressure to paint something great on a large scale.

30x44" hot press. April-May 2013

Doodle Study 2

Here is one of the smallest paintings I ever did, only about two square inches. It was for a contest I entered years ago for miniature paintings. While I did not win the contest one of the judges did buy my entry. The style is very much like Salvador Dali, the barren dessert, the prominent oddly shaped object. Perhaps I will do more miniatures some time?

2.5 x 2.5" cold press. 2004

Geraniums in Rust Pot

Here is an eary work I did in 1991 after taking the watercolour lessons. It is a copy of an oil painting from a calendar, rather than a study of live flowers. By copying oil paintings I learned to create very bright and juicy colours. It is easy using oil paints but takes a little more work using watercolour paints. This early work displays many of the qualities that would mark my work...for example strong colours, brilliant light, and colourful shadows. The signature is quite different than it is today... the scribble signature was developed sometime in the early 90's, there is a piece of paper from that era where I was practicing the scrawl signature maybe it will be worth something someday? 

Geraniums in Rust Pot, 9 x 12" hot press. watercolour paper 1991 (No. 0088)

Love Left Leave Lego

Another doodle painting, completed in the midst of painting the big project (which is now hopefully complete... The Conversation), this one depicts an emotionally painful scene using lego and abstract form. It was based on doodles from my notebooks as usual, these ones would have been sometime during 2012. I have in the past depicted emotional subjects, but usually I hid the message in a highly abstracted design. Painting emotional scenes using lego form was a good compromise, where I could tell a story but still keep an artistic buffer in between. Does that make any sense? If you look into this one, you will also see Beatles lyrics from their great album "Help" which I was coincidentally playing as I painted this one. Their tales of love and love lost were fitting.  As for the bird, I don't know what she is all about but hey, art is definitely a journey.

22x15" cold press. April 2013

Swans near Lake, Stratford, Ontario (updated)

Stratford is a famous little town in Ontario Canada where they have a Shakesphere theater, as well as a big swan lake. I did this painting many years ago on a painting trip, the date escapes me, but I do remember watching the Toronto Raptors in the playoffs against Philadelphia which was 2001, so that must have been the year. It is a very small painting. As I remember the swans did not stay in the same place very long, so it was hard to capture this moment.

When "painting white" in watercolour, you actually just leave the paper blank... so the white swan is actually the white paper. In the style I use (old English) there is no white paint! This means that you have to paint around the object you want to depict. Easier said than done. Here, I had to paint the pond first, leaving a swan-shaped gap. The shape was not quite right, so you can see the brush strokes around the swans which I was using to better define their shapes. It is a hard skill indeed, I may have done a better job of it now. Also, in retrospect, I would have softened the edges a little on the swans. Anyways, hindsight is 20-20! 5x5" cold press, 2001 (excerpt)

 This painting was actually a two parter because I was running out of paper on the trip. Here is the full sheet, with the other painting oriented vertical, a nice scene of the sunlit river. They are on the same piece of paper divided by a line. 5x8" cold press, watercolour, 2001