Bottle Sunset

Here is the first painting I did in the new apartment down in the south Plateau Montreal, of course it was not a location painting but something from my imagination. Maybe it is a depiction of what the Plateau was 200 years ago, a stark desert populated by yellow-green bottle/lamps. The concept behind this painting was to keep it simple, to concentrate on one object only making the composition on colour scheme as powerful as possible.

The outline as usual is done with the watercolour paint, this time I used a fairly potent yellow (windsor or the like). The potent yellow paints have a lot of "attitude", they are quite pushy. What I mean by that, is that the yellow pigements are so powerful that they will repel other paints and push their way into other colour washes. I use this to my advantage when creating luminous effects, for example in the sky I surrounded the sun by a pale yellow wash that kind of ran into the darker portion of the sky. Also, the yellow outline of the bottle 'repelled' the sandy brown of the background creating a nice textured effect that looks like reflecting sunslight (examine the left side of the bottle). Each type of pigment has it's own personality that you will learn after time, and use to your advantage.

5x7" cold press , 2009