Elliptical Horizon (Reprise)

I had an inspiration to do a picture with an elliptical horizon which turned into the painting 'Elliptical Horizon' which depicted a kangaroo flying a space craft out of a city over highways that were going nowhere. Although that painting left me satisfied with the result, there was no indication of an elliptical horizon, in fact the horizon had been scrubbed out because it did not actually fit well with the final design. To make a long story short I came up with this painting of the same title with 'reprise' in brackets which clearly does have an elliptical horizon, along with a host of other creative objects strewn throughout. Some of the drawing was taken from lab notes (the phrase DNA damage appears on a sign) however I did not feel the work was strong enough to fit in the lab book series. There are a few colour combinations I have discovered over the years that are very useful. In this work, the sky and most of the grey brickwork was done with rose madder (pink) and emerald green (pale green). The emerald green is very opaque (thick, not transparent) and so it lends a lot of weight and density to anything you mix it with, making it a good colour to use when depicting brick. When diluted with water it gives a gentle, granular look that suits skies very well, in this painting a lot of the sky colours were done with emerald green. The rose madder helps to neutralize the green giving a warm grey. Touching the red/green mix with yellow and a bit more red gives you warm browns that can be used (as seen in the character in the foreground and the sign post). PS, Lab book #12, Archi-doodle City (W/E) is complete, however bad weather precludes a decent photo at this time. I am on the market for a good lamp to allow me to take pictures over the dark and depressing winter months. 

Elliptical Horizon (Reprise), watercolour 10 x 11" cold press, Fall 2008 (No. 1434)

Busy Noisy Street, Kyoto, Japan

On a conference in 2006 I visited Kyoto, Japan for a week and did many paintings. This painting was done on a busy street near the house I was staying at. Just a few blocks from here was a massive temple. When they say temple they mean a large area covering several acres, with dozens of little temples connected by gardens and walkways. Yet the thing that inspired me most was this noisy, dirty street, imagine a constant stream of honking cars, buses and little white vans going by. I wanted to capture the extraordinary detail of this scene without spending all day painting. I started with a brief outline of the buildings, followed by the basic colour washes that make up the buildings. When dry, I put the details on top. Notice, to paint the tiles on the roofs, I just put a few squiggles, which provide the illusion of tiles without having to spend time painting every tile. Same thing for the bushes in the front, I just put some scribbles on top that look bush-like, without actually painting every leaf. This type of shortcut is especially important for the beginner painter to learn, as it is always tempting to paint or draw every blade of grass when only a few would be enough to give the required effect. 

Busy Noisy Street, Kyoto, Japan, watercolour 6 x 10" cold press, 2006 (No. 1212)

Inside Out, Outside In

John Lennon once described Paul McCartney's song Hello Goodbye as '3 minutes of meaningless contradictions'. I can't say that "Inside Out Outside In" was inspired by that song, but it certainly could have been. The idea I was having at the time is that some people feel good inside while things around them are going badly, while others feel bad inside while everything around them is going well. Make sense? In the painting, the good feelings are represented by warm colours and interior space, while the bad feelings are represented by the cold colours and tumultuous outdoor space. I would like to write a bit about fixing mistakes (as this painting had more than a few to fix!). I did not like the length of the limbs on the characters, the legs seemed to short originally. to fix that, I put a dark version of the characters colour on the feet to extend the legs. It is easy to put dark colours on top of light colours. More difficult is to remove dark colours. To do so, one must 'lift' paint from the paper. If you use good quality paper (Arches or Windsor newton) this should be no problem. Get a fresh brush with some clean water on it and dab the area you want to lift. Now dry your brush on a paper towel and lift the water off your mistake spot. Keep working it like that, then dab it a bit with your paper towel. This technique can also be used intentionally to create clouds, tree trunks, eyeballs.

Inside Out, Outside In, watercolour 15 x 22" cold press, 2007 (No. 1951)

Blue Flames Consuming the Stylized Image of a Woman

A while ago I posted a small study under the name Blue Flames Consuming the Stylized Image of a Woman (posted June 3, 2008), which was the basis for this full sized version. It is not often that I do a larger work based on a small study but on occasion I have done so (eg. Love v. Jealousy-unposted), and in the future I suppose it would be nice to turn some of the smaller works into larger, more detailed paintings. Doing a repeat also gives you the chance to fix things, for example in the Blue Flames study, the woman has flowing purple sideburns which distract from the woman's neckline, in the larger version the shapes of the sideburns remain but are incorporated into the overall abstraction of shapes rather than part of her figure.

In the full sized version the concept remains the same but the technique is more elaborate. People have asked how the flames were painted. It was a combination of wet in wet techniques and dry brush. When the underlying blue is wet, you can drop in the other darker blues and they kind of diffuse around. Once dry you can then put more on top, and use clean water to feather out the edges, making it look like flowing fire. I also lifted paint off with a clean brush. This painting like all others is by no means perfect (the gallery in London would not take it), the paint is overworked (too many layers, too much brushwork makes a dull grey haze in places), and the composition is far from ideal. I love the concept and the colours, so perhaps I will one day try yet another version. Maybe painting is like research....sometimes you have to repeat stuff over and over till you get it right?

Blue Flames Consuming the Stylized Image of a Woman, watercolour 22 x 30" cold press, 2002 (No. 1991)

Mount Tremblant

This painting was done up at Mount Tremblant in the little town they built near the mountain, which seems to be modeled after disney land as everything looks kind of fake and you half expect to see mickey mouse around the corner. At any rate the Beaver Tales were good. As the picture indicates it was fall when we were up there, a nice sunny day when the leaves were really shining with reds and greens. Painting fall colours is always tricky, the temptation is to use strong reds and oranges right from the tube, but this will always look fake (ok, maybe a fake-look would have been accurate given that everything in the town looked like it came out of a tube). The truth about fall colours is that they are all based on green and brown...as a leaf looses its green pigment in the fall it reveals the reds and yellows that were always there, but were masked by the green. To mix these colours on the palette I start with a very light green and add in a bit of red and yellow. For the greener trees I start with a darker, heavier green and just touch it up with some red and yellow. Practice mixing orange and green for awhile and you will get realistic looking colours for fall paintings. 

Mount Tremblant Ugly Fall Colours, 5 x 9" cold press paper, 2008

Still Magestic

Often I find doodles in my notebooks that can stand alone as their own painting. In this example, Still Magestic, a butterfly with stained-glass wings is bolted to the ground, unable to fly away. In the foreground is a poppy field (fitting for the day of this blog post), which was inspired by Monet's masterpiece The Poppyfield Near Argenteuil , a small oil painting I saw at Musee D'Orsay in Paris, and I once made a copy of using acrylic paint (which hangs in my parent's basement). The message of the painting is simple, sometimes we want to fly (or our ideas want to fly) and yet we are tethered by constraints of reality (or our bosses). The sky technique used in this painting is a little tricky but very effective if mastered. I start with a pale yellow/orange layer of paint, and let it get about half dry...which means not to wet, not too dry. Then I drop in the clouds, a micture of ceurelian blue (an opaque sky-blue) with touches of yellow and alzarian crimson (a red). If the initial layer moisture is judged correctly the clouds keep a nice tight form, with fuzzy edges. If the layer was too wet the cloud shapes run into each other, if it is too dry the edges are too hard. See technology@pull for a similar example. 

Still Majestic, watercolour 10 x 15" cold press, 2008 (No. 1391)

The Juggler

Here is painting dating back to when I really began painting in the surrealism style after a long period of painting landscapes and florals. The story behind this painting is how one can go through emotionally difficult things, and no matter how hard they are we keep going, and also keep trying. In the painting, the audience looks on as a clown with a porcelain (glass) head is juggling hammers. On the stage lies shattered remains from past performances, and behind the curtain is a shelf of new glass heads. There is also a platform with soft bean-bags. (but the clown thinks that juggling hammers is way more impressive?) The juggler contains rich, luminous reds that were achieved through optical mixing techniques. To do this, the entire work was first done using only blue paint, and when that dried, several layers of reds were applied on top. Now when one looks at the painting, the reflected light has to pass through both layers of paint which optically mixes to become a shimmering, luminous magenta. Had the red and blue been mixed on the palette, it would instead produce a dull, flat looking purple. 

The Juggler, watercolour 11 x 14" hot press, 2001 (No. 1334)

Lab Book #11: The Legendary Isle of Sixe

The lab Book series has progressed from relatively flat (2D) imagery in Lab Book 4, Finding Space, towards more of a 3D illusion as seen in the latest addition lab Book 11, The legendary Isle of Sixe. In the foreground there are trees and beasts and sharp colour contrasts, the middle to backgrounds are populated with buildings and totems and rolling hills that fade to blue in th distance. At the top of the picture are the treetops, alive with birds and primates, which also draw your eye back down to the foreground completing the illusion of depth. Creating depth in a picture can be done in several ways. One way is to make colours are always brighter in the foreground, as seen in this work there are many bright primary reds yellows and blues, while in the distance (the top of the painting) these colours are less intense. In some cases I put very bright colours in the distance (find the eye on the coast near the top right of the picture) just to make things pop out and surprise you. I also used the birds tail in the treetops as a contrast element: the tail has one very bright red feather that makes the surrounding blue look very dull, which makes the depth illusion all the better. 

Lab Book #11: The Legendary Isle of Sixe, watercolour 22 x 30" cold press paper, 2008 (No. 1999)

Lab Book#13: Catching Rays

This painting was not originally intended to be a in the Lab Book series, however the entire composition came from the doodles I made on a (long and often dull) science conference I attended in Nagoya Japan, 2006. I felt that it could be included it in the series at number 13, which also avoids the problem of having to paint a #13, which would be terribly unlucky. For those following the series, I will be posting Lab Book#11 The Legendary Isle of Sixe shortly, which was completed last month. I am currently working on Lab Book #12, Archi-doodle City (W/E). which is done on two pieces of paper 15x30inch intended to be displayed beside each other. I used a bit of a different technique on this one, the colourful wash that makes the sunset was applied first, and the doodle details were overlayed after it had dried. The same was done for the ocean. To make the multi-colour sunset wash was a bit tricky. Each colour in the sunset must be of equal value (by value we mean the level of lightness/darkness), and the consistency of the water must be nearly identical or else they wash each other out. Most of all, the timing has so be carefully measured, so that each colour can be just moist enough to blend into the next colour. It takes a bit of getting used to, but the results are very satisfying. 

Lab Book#13: Catching Rays, watercolour 11 x 16 cold press, 2007 (No. 1773)

Totems

Here is a small abstract (surrealism) done a number of years ago when I was painting in the basement apartment in London Ontario called Bayfield Hall. On the horizon stands a giant staute (totem) of two people connected like Siamese twins, while in the middle and foreground stands oddly shaped green structures. Is the object on the left of the painting a rearing cobra? To complete the illusion of size, small trees are placed around the totems to give the viewer a sense of scale. An important concept when designing a painting in any style is 'negative space'. Now why should anything negative be good for a painting? The negative space refers to the area around your center of interest. In this case the blue sky provides the negative space, surrounding the totems. Making the negative space into interesting shapes is a very powerful way to give your designs (compositions) lots of energy. Look at the actual shapes that the blue sky makes. Those shapes are curvy, angled, flowing...interesting to look at. Imagine the totems were just straight poles, the sky would be a bunch of boring rectangles. So try to think about the space around your objects and make it as interesting as possible. 

Totems, watercolour 6 x 11" cold press paper. 2001 (No. 1583)