First Drawing

I thought this drawing would be interesting to show, it is one of my first drawings (done in 1981, age 5). I clearly remember sitting in the living room in front of the TV, doing the drawing. I used a plastic stencil (which allows you to trace shapes) to draw the TV and the stand. The colour was filled in with pens or crayons. Most of all I remember doing the leaves of the plant. There were no shapes in the stencil that looked like plant, so I used freehand drawing. I remember an excited feeling... the lines were no longer constrained by the stencil and I could make whatever shape I wanted.

The same style is found in my current work; I bring a contrast between controlled lines with freehand form and abstract thinking. By the way, the initials were made a lot later, the interlocking PD design was developed around 1990, but I stopped using initials since then in favor of the unidentifiable scrawl that currently marks my work.

Gibraltar, Spain/UK

I never did finish the story about the paper bought in Spain. After I got back from my trip the paintings were stored in a box and after a few years half of them were starting to turn a little yellow. This was a little concerning because watercolor paper is supposed to be good for 200 years, although I don't know for sure who will be checking. Anyways, it turns out that all of the paintings done post-Granada, where the paper was bought, had the yellow tinge! My guess is that the paper was already approaching 200 years old, like everything seemed to be in Europe.

This painting was done in Gibraltar, or, 'Gib-the dirty little hole' as a friend of mine from the UK described it. Yes, it was somewhat dirty, but the scenery was amazing. The freighter boats can be seen coming into the bay, the hills of Andulsia on the far side shrouded in mist. The painting was a little tricky due to the humidity and failing sun, I let the scene dry completely before overlaying the palm trees. Some of my favorite paintings from the trip came from the Gib, including Monkey Thinking and the Rock of Gibraltar, which I will post soon. 

Gibraltar, Palm Trees, Ships,  watercolour 5 x 7"cold press, 1998 (No. 0927)

Lab Book #4, Finding Space

Lab Book #4, Finding Space, is the first of the Lab Book series, begun in summer 2004. You may wonder what happened to lab books 1-3, the fact is there were just no interesting doodles in those books. I brought this painting to an art festival in London Ontario down by Springbank Park on the Themes River, and an experienced painter looked at it for some time. She liked the energy and the lines, but felt that there was no overall composition to hold the imagery together. The comment gave me the idea to fit all of the doodles in a unified theme, the next paintings in the series were more unified culminating in Lab Book #7, Construction at Site 22, but Lab book #6, Spanky's Fantastic Cathedral is one of my favorites.

The painting technique of all of the 'lab book series' are similar, I start with light outlines in watercolour, flipping through the lab book and picking the best doodles. Then I overlay greyish washes to establish volume and light, and simultaneously apply colour washes. The trick to making this style work is grouping the doodles with similar colours and values...you see most of the colours in the bottom left of the picture are orange and red, while a few inches to the right it goes to more of a blue-green. 

Lab Book #4, Finding Space, 22 x 24" cold press, summer 2004 (No. 1992)

Alhambra, Granada, Spain

This is one of the many paintings done on the Europe trip ten years ago...has it been so long? Most of the paintings from the trip are 5x7 inches, midway through the trip I ran out of watercolour paper and had to by some in Seville. Because I did not speak Spanish I made up a sentence from my translation book that was supposed to say "do you know where an art supply store is?" but it must have said something else because nobody could tell me, or perhaps they did tell me, but their response was in Spanish of course. At any rate, this painting was done in Granada at the famous Alhambra, once built by Muslims to be mecca, is now a well maintained tourist attraction. The scene is part of a central gathering area, they were setting up plastic chairs for an evening event.

It was very hot that day, making the paint dry fast allowing me to create many intricate layers of paint. I started with the outlines and put on the first colour wash, note the shadows are filled with reflected light, yellow from the sun filled walls and blue from the sky. The hardest part was getting the curves right, the whole drawing is freehand, but it seemed to work out ok! 

 

Granada, Alhambra, circular space, watercolour 5 x 7" cold press, 1998 (No, 0195)

Lab Book #5, Making Connections

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is the second painting in the Lab Book series. The lab book paintings are titled based on the actual number on the original lab book (which are still locked up at the Robarts Institute in London Ontario). In Book 5, "Making Connections", bridges criss-cross the picture space, with the doodles making connections across the gaps. In the background more doodles abound, mostly abstract forms and lines. The small numbers indicate the page of the lab book from which the doodle came. There are a few recognizable shapes, including tequila-pigs, my PhD supervisors head seen from the back, and a seashell. You can spend some time looking, click on the picture to expand the view.

The picture design began with the outlines of the bridges in the background. The doodle outlines were then overlaid. All outlines were done in faint watercolour, I rarely use pencil because it shows through in the final work. The colour of the objects were worked up slowly, and the secondary washes were applied to the bridges to give them depth. Finally the shadows were applied to give the illusion of a light source. 

Lab Book #5, Making Connections, watercolour 22 x 30" cold press, 2004 (No. 1993)

Cosmetic Makeup

The concept for Cosmetic Makeup is to explore the interactions that occur between people. The faces of the two people have fairly blank expressions that do not betray their personality. Instead, the images behind the faces tell the story of their personalities. The man is careful and grounded and earthy, the woman is adventurous and high-flying and liquidy. Hidden rune symbols also indicate these character traits, the symbols for home, harvest and community appear above the mans head and the energy, adventure and motion symbols appear above the woman's head.

The contrasts and complements of the two personalities are echoed in the compositional design. The faces separated by space, are still locked in together like puzzle pieces. The man is near the bottom of the picture and his imagry occupies almost half the edge of the painting while the woman is near the top and her imagery only touches a small portion of the base of the painting.

The sky was done in a number of steps. First a light red wash was put down. Then, rubber masking fluid was applied in spatters for the stars. Over the course of a week I applied three transparent glaze layers, red (alzarian), blue (ultramarine), and green (viridian), keeping the paper (which was stapled to a heavy wood frame) tilted so the colour saturation was highest near the top of the picture. Then the latex mask was peeled off with an eraser revealing the light pink stars and moon. Each star was finsihed with a ring of light red, green or blue to make them shimmer. The moon was filled with a deep purple. 

Cosmetic Makeup, watercolour 22 x 30" cold press, 2008 (No. 2015)

Midnight on Chocolate Harbour

After finishing my Ph.D. I spent a number of months in London Ontario acting as a starving artist. Although I did not starve, making art sales was very difficult at first. Working at a gallery at the Garden Market downtown, I would spend hours painting pictures. This work was done in 2004, on the back of another painting that I had folded in half and was about to throw away when I decided to make the most of the paper. The scene is a city on the side of a hill in a harbour, the point of view apparently from a park. Sailboats can be seen on the water front with a twilight backdrop.

The work took 8 hours to complete. I built up the outlines first and then filled in the colour. The sky was a glaze layering of red and green.The yellow windows were added last, they are just white paper with a thin layer of pale yellow, probably lemon yellow or a touch of Winsor yellow. I used to use aureolin yellow, a nice pale colour, but it is toxic so I try to cut down on it. Although the work did not sell at the gallery it did sell recently to a colleague at the hospital, who now resides in the UK. 

 

Midnight on Chocolate Harbour, watercolour 20 x 11", cold press watercolour paper (Creased down the middle), 2004 (No. 3351)

View from Mount Royal, Montreal, Quebec, Canada

In 1996 I visited Montreal in the middle of the winter mostly to enjoy the new years celebrations but also to attempt outdoor landscape painting in the freezing temperatures. This painting was done on the lookout point on top of Mount Royal, several tourists are taking in the vista, you can see the south shore across the St. Lawrence River spanned by the Champlain Bridge. In the middle ground is downtown Montreal.

The trick to painting watercolour in the winter is to put a lot of salt in the water to prevent it from freezing, the other trick is to prevent yourself from freezing, which may involve many extra layers. Most of all you paint fast when it is that cold. The winter paintings I have done all have a quick 'snapshot' feel to them. Also, upon closer inspection, you may see the ice crystals that formed during the painting which left their mark in the finished work. The paint dries very slowly in these conditions, so the colour washes are all separated by blank paper. 

 View from Chalet, Winter Mount Royal, 5 x 7" cold press watercolour, 1997 (No. 1060)

Antler

Part of an exploration on new techniques, this painting was done without really using a paintbrush, instead using a number of objects to put down the paint. The circle on the top was done by placing a cup down and surrounding it with yellow paint, then letting it all dry. The red strip was done by putting clean water down in a strip with a foam applicator and then dropping in the pure colour, and the antler shape was done by soaking a foam antler (from a St. Patricks day party) with water and pressing it down, and then floating the green in. The colour scheme was my favorite part...the cool temperature green was the perfect foil for the warms in the background. This was done some time late in 2005. It is 11x15 ".