Remotely Controlled

Remotely Controlled is another doodleism painting taken out of notebooks from around 2010. I have been trying to catch up to my notes, but now it is 2012 and I am still working on the 2010 and 2011 notes! Lately I have been putting less doodles in the paintings, and using the background elements more... for example here the water is done using classic wet in wet wash techniques. I think the painting gets more energy this way. I'm not sure this painting has a particular meeting, it is remiscent of "Stubborn Nature Revealing Herself" which was Lab book #8 I believe. The guy with the key in the front right must know...

I used a lot of paynes grey and sepia in this one to create the heavy outlines and the inky black sky. Ironically, the ink coming from the flying squid is not black. I once read that you should stay away from these kind of dark colours in a watercolour, beacause is messes up your palette, and also, the impressionists rarely used black in their paintings until later on in the movement, in the neo-impressionism phase. I also noticed that the Canadian watercolour association states that paintings should only make mimimal use of 'body colour' ...in otherwords, no heavy darks, instead a watercolour should be thin, tranparent, and colourful. Of course the best rule of all: rules are made to be broken.

Cold press, 11x15", fall 2011

Notre Dame Cathedral, France

This painting echos the very first post I made on this blog. In this version, done more recently in Paris, I am sitting outside of the left wall of Notre Dame Cathedral looking at the apse. In the forground you see the fence and the garden that surrounds the back of the cathedral; the first time I painted Notre Dame I was sitting in the same park but looking straight on the apse. In the side-view, I was better able to capture the elegant flying buttresses, and some of the detailing on the spires and windows.

It is quite difficult to capture a lot of detail on a small piece of paper, especially when it is cool and overcast weather conditions. In this case I started by putting down the brick colour, a sort of warm grey. As it was drying I worked on the fence line at the bottom, adding the green vines before the fence. I then waited for the brown shape of the cathedral to dry, as parts of it dried I put the details on top using simple outlines with a darker grey colour. I then laid down the shadows and finally the sky, which is just a mixture of pale yellows reds and blues that are barely visible. You can see where I misjudged the wetness, one of the spires on the right bled into the sky. Instead of trying to fix the problem, I just left it, it kind of makes it look like there is a bit of fog or something.

7.5 x 11" cold press, fall 2012

Parc Luxembourg, Paris, France

This painting was done in Paris at the parc luxembourg, a famous park where people go to sit in the sun and enjoy the summer air. Unfortunately it was fall and overcast when I was there, and there was a bitterly cold wind. The good news is that it was easy to find a chair (they have hundreds of metal chairs all over the park, not even chained down, so people can put them where they want). I tried to capture the essence of the scene, there is this big circular stone fence going around a central reflecting pool that has a statue in the middle, and on the fence there were flower pots filled with red yellow and orange arrangements.

I borrowed a few tricks from my "doodleism" style, namely the strong outlines which you can see surrounding the foreground flowerpots and for the Eiffel tower. The tree trunks also stand out quite a bit, more so than they did in reality. I did this mainly for a techincal reason... when you paint in the bitter cold when the sun is going down, and it is overcast, the watercolours do not dry fast enough. What tends to happen is that the definitions of your shapes tend to get lost. So I tried starting with the heavy outline (with paynes grey), which I think really helped keep the shapes in the foreground. I also like the mixture of styles, some parts of the painting just kind of fade into the background creating a good sense of depth.

11x7.5" cold pressed, watercolour, fall 2011