Night rink Trenholme park

 

After getting the LUFA Farms vegetables I tried to make a painting of the skating rink in the middle of Trenholme Park. I did a night scene here once before, albeit not at night, in Light for Ghosts, back in 2022. If you follow my blog, you know that I have been just about everywhere in Montreal, to the point where I have to think about what I painted there, and how I painted it. In this take, I composed the scene with trees in the foreground up on the hill where I was standing, looking down on the rink, which is lit up by the flood lights above (unseen). Lights in windows in the background add some more depth. A few people were skating around the rink. There are lots of amber lights there, you see some orange glow in the foreground from one of them. I had to complete the background houses and tree details at home after the painting had a chance to dry.

Night rink Trenholme park, watercolour 5 x 7" cold press, January 2025

 

Test 

 

Tree in deep s*** on campus

 

Here is a painting of a tree in deep s*** on campus... the unredacted word is snow. What did you think I meant? Its a rated G blog after all. Hoping to catch some daylight I got out around lunch hour and made a quick painting of one of the trees and some snow-covered benches along with the facade of the Science Pavilion in the background. With just my bike pack (no shoulder bag) I had to sit in a bench and it was cold for sure, usually I stand up when painting. With some extremely cold weather on the horizon, like, -30 range with the windchill, its going to get a lot tougher to paint but that wont stop me. I can paint in sun, dark, rain, wind, and even deep s*** apparently.

Tree in deep snow on campus, watercolour 5 x 7" cold press, January 2025

Quest Variables

Quest text adventures is a software package that allows people with no coding knowledge, like me, to write text adventure games. One thing I learned was how to set variables. Like, if you want a bunch of bananas to have a specific number of bananas, then you can eat them one at a time, this can be done with variables. You set up the game with a random number of bananas in the bunch, call it bananas.count = 12. Then, when the player issues a command to eat a banana, the code says bananas.count -1 which now changes the attribute to 11 bananas. When banana.count = 0 a message is printed 'there are no more bananas'. I will try to figure out how to put scripts into the blog just for fun, maybe there is a way to do it in HTML. 

The painting is an abstraction of the whole idea of random variables, you see a table with various objects floating around on a table. It was also a palette cleanser; the other day I dropped my palette and it hit the asphalt, which caused it to break into pieces finally. I have a backup so its not a big deal. Now I just need to use up the leftover paint on the broken palette.
 

Quest Variables, watercolour 9 x 12" watercolour paper, February 2025

A few more scenes from the canal on a snowy day

With the sun starting to go down, I made a few more paintings, this one shows the canal looking west with a prominent tree and the iconic black railing fence in the foreground. For the sky I used the hatching technique like Monet used to do in oil paints. The main reason is to avoid a big, wet wash that will never dry, and it gives a neat effect too. The west wind was blasting down the canal, but my extensive winter gear kept me warm.

Tree near canal with shadows, watercolour 5 x 7" cold press, January 2025

 

On the way back I saw the moon over the green car bridge at Ville st. Pierre. I got the sky and most of the scene done on location, then had to finish the moon, bridge, and my initials at home once it dried. Usually I try to finish paintings on location but in the winter sometimes its not possible. The salt proportion was perfect today, the paint didn't freeze up, and things were drying well enough. For once, I am starting to think that there is more potential with winter painting.

Moon over green bridge, watercolour 6 x 7.5" cold press, January 2025

Train bridge over canal, shadow in snow

Here is another painting of the iconic train bridge over the Lachine Canal, it is just about half-way between NDG and Lachine. This time, I painted it looking east, with the sun behind on the the left slightly. At this time of year, the sun sets almost exactly parallel with the canal, so you get neat effects. Here, my shadow was extending into the scene which you see in the bottom right. I was standing next to my bike painting. It was a complex scene with all sorts of weird angles from the canal going left to right and the bridge which is perpendicular. In the old days, this bridge could rotate, hence the concrete pillars, you see one in the background, and the other one is just beside me. When they closed the canal down, they welded this thing in place so it can no longer rotate. To do the sky, I used phthalo green blue shade (PG7), blended upwards with phthalo blue sapphire (PB15). Its important to have the Holbein version of phthalo blue because other companies put too much dispersant in the formula and its impossible to control to the extent required for the subtle sky affects you see here. Its one of the few areas where the brand actually matters. Same with yellow ochre, the Da Vinci one is the only one I've found with the correct how angle (a dull dijon mustard). I used the yellow ochre in the little sprigs of grass you see on the other side of the canal.

Train bridge shadow in snow, watercolour 8 x 10" cold press, January 2025

Demo-mall close up studies on a snowy day

Up on Cote st-Luc there is an old strip-mall with some apartments on top that fell into disrepair during the pandemic and never really recovered. All but the laundry mat are out of business and the top floor is blocked off now. With demolition signs on the windows and doors, its clearly going to be reinvented into condos, hopefully with some shops on the ground floor. In the meantime, I've been trying to get some good paintings of the scene before its gone, this one shows the east entrance on a snowy day. Its a lot closer to what my vision was when I first attempted the scene last week. 

Demo-mall east entrance, watercolour 6 x 7.5" cold press, January 2025

 

The last shop, on the west side, bore no information about its former identity. I checked google map street view which has a time rewind feature... as far back as 2007 this was an internet cafe, then it changed hands a few times as a bakery, then a used clothes store, until finally being abandoned in 2020 along with most of the other businesses. It was probably a casualty of the pandemic, but from the looks of it, the mall's days were numbered anyways. Painting this one was tough, the design and composition had all kinds of angles and overlaps, then it was a moist puddle of paint and I had to bring it home to do the window frame, chair, and graffiti overlays. It worked out better than I expected, I like how the interior chair gives an eerie sense of emptiness, and the graffiti overlap tells the story of abandonment. A touch of snow completes the effect.

Chair inside graffiti, watercolour 6 x 7.5" cold press, January 2025

 

This was once the entrance to a generic 7 Days Dépanneur, then briefly became Marché Mar before closing in 2020. It has been spray painted haphazardly in yellow paint. The snow was really coming down at this point and the painting got muddled up. I will try and do this scene again with better weather, at least I got a sense of all the strange angles. Instead of flat front, each store had a shallow, angled entrance point that created a slight overhang. I hope when they rebuild this thing they keep the stores, they seemed like essential shops for the neighborhood. Don't forget, people in Montreal still like to walk-and-shop where possible since using a car can be cumbersome.

Old dépanneur door snow fall, watercolour 5 x 7" cold press, January 2025

Birch tree snowy park

At the end (or beginning depending on your viewpoint) of Terrebonne street, there is a small sliver of a perk called Place Guillaume-Couture. It is a good place to set up and paint urban scenes in the relative peace of a park. Of course, it is surrounded by traffic on all sides so its not exactly quiet. The challenge here was to paint the birch tree against a mostly white snowy background. Using subtle variations of grey and some textured overlays, I created the birch tree in successive layers. Funny enough, it was the 68 Stations of the Montreal Metro that taught me how to see and paint grey properly, given the large amount of concrete in the metro structures. If you look closely at the tree bark, the grey is tinted orange on the left, and blue on the right.  It had to be darker than the snow, and lighter than the black elements. Completing the scene is a picnic table, other trees and snow-covered cars. Its like Tom Thomson paints in the city.

Birch tree snowy park, watercolour 5 x 7" cold press, January 2025