Santa Bárbara Castle, Spain

Alicante is a Spanish city on the coast of the Mediterranean, it is one of the places I visited in the 1998 trip that I have talked about a lot on this blog.... I did somewhere close to 200 paintings on that trip and have been posting them every now and then, at least the good ones! This one was painted shortly before I traveled southward, to Granada where I made several paintings at Alhambra. The name of the castle is the Santa Bárbara Castle, you see it perched atop the mountain. I had walked up the mountain along a winding road and done a few paintings from the top, there is one other painting showing the view from the castle, where the people on the beach look like little ants.

Being able to paint light and shadow is absolutely key when doing landscapes. The shadows are often more difficult for an artist to capture properly, usually due to the use of black paint to depict the shadow. Unless you are are going for a fauvism, cubism, or other highly abstract approach then i would not recommend using black at all. If you look at the building in the lower center of the paining, there are two great examples of how colourful, and 'full of light' a shadow can be. On the left wall, there is a V-shaped highlight of a sunbeam, it is surrounded by a warm sandy shadow.....on the right wall the shadow is a cool purplish shade. So how can shadows on the same building be so different? It is because on the left shadow, the warm sunbeam is spilling light into the shadow. On the right shadow, there is not sub beam nearby, so the shadow is reflecting the sky, and probably the cool Mediterranean sea, which is just behind where I was sitting. So next time you are walking around, just study shadows a bit and you will see that they can be full of light!

5x7"  cold press 1998

Sunset in Valley, Ronda, Spain

Painted just before the sun went down, this scene was in Ronda Spain. It was done during my 1998 trip to France and Spain. There is another painting I did just before this one called Sunset in Ronda that I posted on a previous blog. Here, I am sitting on a tiny ourcrop that is on the edge of a steep cliff that goes down into the valley... I was looking almost straight down into the valley when I painted this. It's funny what I remember about this moment, there were a lot of ants at my feet. I recently took a bunch of photos of my older paintings, so I'll be posting a few of the old ones, including several sunset scenes.

Painting a sunset is by far the hardest landscape scene to do, mostly because it does not last very long... but also because the lack of sun makes the paint dry slowly. The air was very dry in Ronda so the paint must have dried pretty fast, I can tell from the amount of detail I was able to put in. A lot of the technique for this painting believe it or not, came from a painting trip I did in Hamilton Ontario...there were a few key paintings I did there where I discovered the mixtures needed for that purple-blue-green colour that I used here to depict the tree covered mountains in the distance. Also, the back-lit trees in the foreground was a technique I discovered painting in and around Bolton Ontario in the mid 90's. As I look back on my landscape painting, I believe that it started in abut 1995 with studio paintings from photograph, and I did my first landscape on location probably in 1996.

5.5x8" cold press (300lbs), 1998

PS, 300lbs paper is much heavier than what I usually use (140lbs).... it is like thick cardboard made from compressed cotton rag.

Montreal Beach

How often does one visit the beach in Montreal? White sand, blue beach chairs, the smell of the water. It turns out that there actually is a beach, down in the old port area, they filled in a whole section with sand and put some chairs in there. Of course it isn't free to get in. The painting I did on location makes it look like the water is right at the edge of the sand but there is actually a rod iron fence and a 2 meter drop off to reach the water. In the background you can see the Molson Brewery.

The hardest thing to paint with watercolour is water. Ironic. After all these years I still feel completely challenged when trying to depict water. It has different colours, it reflects light, and worst of all it moves. In this painting I started with a sky blue layer, making sure to leave the white highlights.... you do this by dragging your brush sideways across the paper. Then I overlay a more purple-blue, but leaving little slices of the sky blue showing. This makes a wave-illusion because waves are three dimensional and reflect colour differently on each side. Finally I put on the greens and darker blues, in reality these are coming from the silt and deeper water below.When it is dry, I take one of my beat up old brushes and make it moist (not wet) and go over the area a few times really quickly. This makes things a little smooth and glassy. Cheers.

5x7" cold press. 2012

Immortal time, Infinite Ideas

I think the prospect of making up the title inspires me more sometimes than anything. I remember one painting, "The Crushing Delicate" I spent a whole week wondering if the title should have "The" or not. For this one, the title was already in the doodles... although it said 'immortal (art) time' in the notebook. I don't really know what the title means but it sounded poetic. In the bottom right there is a lego-scene depicting a funeral, it was based on my memories of a funeral I attended in early 2000's. I think that making an emotionally charged scene out of lego is my way of sharing a feeling but still keeping distance. And lego is just a fun kids toy, making it a sweet irony when emotions are depicted. Speaking of irony, the title "immortal time" is quite the opposite of the theme, a funeral. Hey, I'm just doing the art critic's job right now so I'll stop.

This is a pretty good example of me using similar techniques for landscapes and surrealist styles. I just posted a new painting (Theater Snowdon), where I explained how to paint a cloudy sky. I used the same technique here...laid down a moist wash, than dropped in the sky and cloud-shadows which bleed around and end up looking fuzzy. I used it in the top left behind the hydra-octopus-medussa thing. There is an incredibly small thing I am going to adjust in this painting to improve balance. I'll just not say what it is, so the aforementioned critics can have something to do when they see the original. Of course, there are no actual  critics (that I know of), I just imagine they are there in order to keep myself on my toes. Isn't that the beauty of the internet?

Of note, this is the fifth 22x30 painting I completed this year, most of any year so far.

22x30" cold press. 2012

Theater Snowdon, Montreal

The best scenes to paint are sometimes in surprising locations. Theater  Snowdon is right next to the Decarie expressway, a major submerged highway that connects the north to downtown Montreal. I pass this intersection every day on bike or by bus, and have noticed this scene. Today I headed out and found a good place to sit, on the overpass road sidewalk (I bring a lightweight portable camping chair, an aluminum tripod), looking south onto the Decarie. I liked how the 50's style art deco sign of the theater was dominating the skyline, with the traffic roaring by below. Incidentally I rode past the theater and it looked totally shut down. That's what was cool about the scene... this out of business theater, with it's sign proudly reigning over the land (a noisy highway).

Painting the blue sky and clouds is a staple technique when doing landscapes. I look back on my older works, and see that I have been doing it the same way pretty much the whole time... if it ain't broke. I start by wetting the area where the sky needs to be, then I drop in cereulean  tinted with a bit of rose madder genuine and ultramarine... this mix should be a little purply, it goes at the top of the sky. IF you judge properly the blue should bleed, making cloud shapes. The more wet the background was, the more fuzzy the clouds are. Then you drop in a grey-blue mix... use the sky blue you made and add a little more red and yellow. This becomes the shadows that are at the center of the clouds. If the paper is still wet then the shadow also bleeds, making it fuzzy. You may need to soften the edges here and there because it is really difficult to keep the paper moist, especially outside.

11x7.5" cold press 2012

Attempted Evolution

Many things are attempted and they are not all achieved, in life, in work, in evolution? In this painting a funny potato looking creature stands quizzically in the foreground, wondering when he/she will be able to fly with only a pair of undersized wings. Soaring above are the evolved creatures. The rest of the painting is classic doodleism style, kind of like "Creation's Creations" or maybe the "2010 Solution", the latter of which I have hung on the wall of my studio room for now, kind of a personal favourite.

All of the paintings that are done on 22x30" format are stretched on a wooden rack I made years ago... ten years to be exact. I made the rack for the first 22x30, "The Grapes of Tuscany" which is in my Aunt's collection. On the back of the rack I have recorded each painting that was done, there are 31 titles there, already four this year so I'm on pace to do the most this year (did 5 in 2011). I also recently bought three sheets of oversized paper, they are 44x30 which is double size I have been working on to date. The new paper is 90pound hot press, this means that it is thinner and smoother than the current paper (180 pound cold press) and therefore better for producing detail. Not sure what I'll do with the 44x30" yet, thinking either a massive doodle painting, or a giant landscape, perhaps something totally original...

22x30" cold press. 2012