Thrice Fishing

Lawren Harris-inspired, this painting depicts a creepy blob perched upon a floating iceberg, it's three talons deploy fishing lines into the icy arctic waters. The drawing, nearly in it's entriety, was from a note book doodle made at a conference - where things get really boring for a lot of hours and you get a lot of doodling done. I decided beforehand to take a page out of the Group of Seven's play book... in this case Lawren Harris... who was famous for painting ice bergs, he made them look like big marshmellows or sugar coated muffins. I also borrowed the yellow lighting scheme he often used. You may notice that the sky contains swirling clouds that were inspired by Edvard Munch, and Van Gogh. I like the idea of fusing styles, and it makes the creepy blob even creepier... what it is doing in a Lawren Harris painting???

Accidents happen when you paint, especially watercolour. The three fishing lines were in fact a horrible accident, I was putting in the dark shadows underneath the blob and decided foolishly to tilt the paper to blot off some of the excess paint, as I did so, the heavy wash spilled down the paper in three thin lines. If you look carefully you see the impression of the three lines in the margin below the painting, I had to scrub hard to erase them because the pigment was payne's grey, notoriously dark and a staining pigment. I knew that it would be impossible to remove the lines from the iceberg, so I decided instead to just leave it there, and then just say that the creepy-blob was fishing... which just made it even more creepy.

Another note: I used the technique for painting human skin to make the creature... start by painting it in blue, let it dry, then overlay with peach and warm red washes.

22x15" cold press, 2011

What's in a Line? (Snake-thing)

Picture your garden hose coming alive, standing up, and then asking to join the barbeque party...that's pretty much the image depicted in this small painting. The painting is really quite abstract but a few details here and there make it look somewhat realistic. If I removed the eyeball, the trees, the lanterns and the grass texture,  you might think it was a pure abstract.


The snake-thing really looks eerie and out of place in this picture, which is good because that is what I was intending. One way I achieved this was through the use of complementary colours...or rather, the lack thereof. Most of the painting is purple-yellow complementary (a classic pairing), with a small component of blue-orange (look at the sky, and the little fleck of orange to the bottom right). However, the snake thing is green, and there is no red in this painting to complement it... by having half a complement (isn't that an oxymoron), the snake-thing looks especially out of place...I discovered this trick by accident, but once you know it, you can use it intentionally in future paintings.

7.5x10 cold press, 2011