Le Parapluie Rouge

 

Technology is always a mixed blessing. Recently I got a smart phone, a google product called android... within minutes of turning it on, I found an image of one of my paintings displayed in the phone's gallery database. I soon realized that the blog I am writing is a google product too, and the phone had automatically synchronized all of my blog pictures. So with a a few swipes of the finger on the touch screen I can bring up a 4x3 panel of thumbnails showing the 230+ images from the blog. What's more I'm able to insert a painting onto my phone's wallpaper (background). having done so, I realized that my paintings are just not composed properly for display on a cell phone, so I created this painting (Le Parapluie Rouge, hopefully you don't need a translator for that one... though I had to use the internet to figure out of it was masculine or feminine).

This painting was composed specifically to be a cell phone wall paper, more precise brushstrokes, better detail, and a horizontal arrangement for when you scroll back and forth along your app screen. The only downside is that the mostly white background makes for lousy contrast, I'll have to try and make a nighttime scene next time. The style of this one is completely based on my painting "The Twenty Ten Solution.", each doodle has it's own space, and the background is there to create depth. The doodles used were from notebooks completed just at the end of my stay at McGill, and overlapping with my new beginning at Concordia. I mention 230 paintings on the blog, but the total collection is probably more in the 2000 range, mostly small format landscapes, the rest larger abstracts and doodleism paintings.

Le Parapluie Rouge, 5 x 15" cold press. 2012 (No. 1486)

London Rhino Party

London Ontario was home for a decade, I painted a lot outdoors when I was there, summer, fall, winter, there are over 200 paintings from that time. This one was done downtown outside of the art gallery Museum London, in the heat of the summer when the grass was dry and the cicadas buzzing. I was interested in the reflections on the metal surface of the Rhinocerous sculpture, it reminds me a lot of the famous Chicago landmark "Cloud Gate" a giant shiny bean shaped thing in Millennium park (although it probably did not exist at the time I painted this one). Note the green grass reflection on the underbelly, and the blue sky and clouds reflected on the side of the beast.

I used a common trick to make the reflections really sparkle...juxtaposition of light and dark...look on top of the Rhino's back, there is a thin sliver of 'sun reflection' which is actually white paper showing through, and just on top of that, there is the dark green from the vines from the the building in the background. I selected this sitting location specifically to have this arrangement of foreground and background. Choosing where to site is half the battle! By juxtaposing the dark against the light, it makes the light look even brighter. The impressionists used this trick all the time to create luminous cloth, candles, and other eye-popping highlights. To make this work though, you need to use the trick sparingly... in this painting there is only one spot where I juxtapose the white and dark... the rhinos back. All other parts of the painting have a lower contrast, which makes the key point (the sun reflection) the highest contrast part of the painting, and thus enhances the illusion further.

5x8" cold press. 2002 (?)

Car Seat Anyone? (Vanishing Landscapes)

I've been inspired and learned a lot from many artists including the classics like Monet, Degas, da vinci (oil painters), and then some more contemporary artists like Steve Hanks, Jon Joy, and a local (Montreal) painter named Starkey (all watercolour painters). This painting was inspired by Andrew Wyeth, a watercolour painter, of note, he did a famous painting called Christina's World, where a woman in a pink dress was crawling across a hayfield, with farmhouses in the background. My painting was done from a photo taken along highway 50 (a road connecting Toronto to the suburb of Bolton where I grew up). I really liked the concept of the degrading status of farms and farm land, which are being replaced by suburbs and factories (as this barn eventually was). I'm not sure what the old carseat stands for, but if Christina (the crawling woman from Wyeths painting) were around maybe she would take a seat.... that just gave me an idea for a new painting.

Painting from photo is a very common activity for an artist, the advantage is that you have lots of time to make the painting, and you can avoid the embarrassment/discomfort of being on location.  The pitfall is that photos do not capture very well the shadows, often turning them to flat black (which is definitely NOT the case...shadows are filled with reflected light from the sky and surroundings). Also, the photo has so much detail in it, a lot of artists fall in the trap of trying to capture all of the detail... every wire, fence post, blade of grass....in this painting I used knowledge of location (outdoor) painting to keep it looking real... the shadows and grass are pale and filled with blue light, and the detail has been minimized in the less important places... study the hay field, and you see a bunch of controlled backwashes and brief lines to suggest grass, without painting every blade. Having said that, if you inspect Christina's World by Wyeth... he painted every blade, in watercolour that's tough. As they say, rules are made to be broken.

This is part of the Vanishing Landscapes series which captured disappearing farmland in the Caledon area. 

5x7" cold press. 199?*

*note: I have a bad habit of not dating my paintings, so can only estimate on the older collection, this was probably done between 1996 and 1999.

Wiki God

On the subject of religion I know little, but through my paintings I have often tried to explore the theme, recent attempts were "Creation's Creations" and ..
In wiki god I tackle the idea of a man-made god...coming from the sky is a mechanical device that is creating, (or spraypainting?) the landscape. The landscape is a broken, bipolar contradiction in terms... stormy on the left and serene on the right.

The broken landscape theme is one I have used in many paintings... here you can see that the horizon is a little lower on the left, not quite joining up with the horizon on the right hand side. This idea was a product of the doodleism style, my notes often contained miniature landscapes which I would paste together into larger scenes. In this case I decided to do it on purpose, to make some kind of statement... I'll leave it to the critics.

Cold press, 5x7" 2012