Ronda Valley

Ronda is a small town in southern Spain I visited ( a decade ago!), the town is built on a deep gorge that offers tremendous panoramic views and sunsets. Here I capture the sense of distance, and also some of the unique southern architecture.
In a few days I made a dozen paintings in this town, it was certainly a wealth of material.

I discovered a mixture of colours in Hamilton Ontario of all places, that is very useful for tree covered mountains. The mixture begins with ceurelian blue and rose madder genuine, and then a dark green and a touch of yellow is added...the cool blue base and opacity of the ceurelian gives that blue 'distance' feel, and the other additives tint it with tree colours.

5x7" cold press. 1998

Molecular Buoancy

Going through some old doodles recently I found a few that would make decent paintings, including this one, and an earlier post called 'Irreversable Modification'. Equally creepy, this painting entitled Molecular Buoancy, depicts an invisible 'ET' type character standing in a cold and desolate forest in the winter. Maybe he is just covered in snow...

I created the shape of the character without any actual lines to define his shape, instead I used the background elements to define his shape. The trees branches end where his head would be, and the bushes in the distance carve out is shoulder and arms. The reflection in the ice give the sense of his legs. To cap off I painted his hands and feet and did a few light washes on his body to give a slight impression of clothing.

5x7" cold press, 2009

Question Landmark

In this small abstract I was going for one simple object set against a stark baron landscape, similar to Bottle Sunset posted a few weeks ago. The background was supposed to be a desert but it looks more like a sea. My favorite aspect of the work is the rich blue colour in the Landmark. The object is backlit by a sunset, but the shadow still retains a luminous quality. I kept the shadows warm and luminous by laying down a bright red wash and covering it with a cool green/blue. Directional brush strokes are commonly used in oil painting, best exemplified by Cezanne, Monet, and the more contemporary Canadian painter Tom Thompson. They were all oil painters, and it is a lot easier to make the brush strokes visible in oil painting as compared to watercolour, however in this work I attempted to create some directional brush work in the foreground grass element. To do this I let the colour wash of the grass dry, and then on top I put on fairly wide brush strokes loaded with colours. The colour of the directional brush stroke varied to match the blue shadows or the warmer light. As you can see, the actual direction of the strokes make a sweeping S turn which helps bring the viewers eye from the foreground into the central Landmark object. 

 Question Landmark, 7.5 x 11" cold press 2009 (No. 1474)

Veggie Time

Here is the last painting I did at the old place on Esplanade, it was actually finished in the new place down in the south Plateau. A mixture of hope and optimism this painting looks forwards (as does the small dog in the bottom left) not backwards, as emphasized by the clock in the sky. The clock is kind of ugly, it was in the Esplanade apartment upon arrival, and it went in the garbage when I left, you can see in the close up that the numbers are replaced with vegtables.

I used a technique here that may be called very wet on wet...(a play on the classic technique name wet on wet). The idea with 'very wet on wet' is to put one layer of paint down (the sky) wait until it is just a little dry, then bombard it with an almost pure water mixture. It works best with staining pigements like Alzarian Crimson or windsor yellow, because these colours have a n attotude and will spread into their neighbor. I did not intend the effect to be so dramatic (look around the clock where I dropped down the wet bomb) but in the end I kind of like it, the clock looks like it is 'emitting' time in some gelatonous physical form.

22x15" cold press, 2009

Brain in a Box

For awhile I have been learning a 3-D animation package called 'Blender' it is a piece of software developed by a now defunct animation studio and now made available to the community for free. The package is quite powerful, allowing the user to model shapes, colours, textures, lights and cameras, not to mention make movies and computer games if you wanted. In this example I modeled a landscape and a box with some random shapes attached to tentacles popping out of the box. I was illustrating the concept that stem cell, a type of cell in your bone marrow, could become different types of other cells...many different things can come from one.

With any medium the basic principles of art still need to apply, to create this 3-D model I used the things I have learned painting landscapes...the sliver of lake, the low clouds, the trees in the distance all come together in one tight composition. I also tried to keep the colours under control, it is easy to make fake, shiny looking colours. Having said that I also wanted the work to look computerized... it kind of added to the feeling of the painting, it is usually good if the viewer senses that it is made by someone, in that way they get to participate in the process that the artist went through.


Brain in a Box, Blender Render, 2009

Irreversible Modification

I was sifting through some of the old notes from undergraduate and found this little doodle of a candycane/frankenstein character. The doodle probably also appeared in some of the earlier doodle paintings (Lab book 1-3) but I haven't taken the time to look for it. In this new take on the design, I placed the character in a dimly lit room, and gave it a red-green colour scheme. The name came from some of the words on the note, the subjetc was chemical equations and the term irreverable modification can describe a particular chemical state. In this case the title suggests a transformation that can not be undone (did frankenstein ever get plastic surgery?).

I usually load up the backgroud with lots of detail and colour, but this time I wanted them character to stand out, and so left the background relatively simple. There is a suggestion of a window and a wall, all done with very light watercolour washes. The idea to keep the background simple comes from traditional chinese painting, they often left the backgrounds all white, accentuating the foreground instead. If composed properly the blank space of the background can be very energetic, even in this small work the shape of the background elements is very interesting to look at with the curves and lines formed by the object itself.

5x7" cold press paper, 2009