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