Human Chain

Inspired by Degas and his ballerina series, this painting shows an abstract collection of humanoid forms connected together by flowing and interlocking limbs. I suppose that 'barrel of monkeys' also provided some subliminal input... those were the old toy where you got a plastic barrel of monkeys, they all had curvy arms legs and tails that could be hooked together into chains. There is no other hidden meaning in the painting (that I know of) other than a John Lennon-like message of peace, love, and... monkeys?

One way to create depth in a painting is to control the light/dark contrast. In the foreground, the characters have a high level of contrast, meaning that there are a lot of 'whites' and a lot of 'darks' in the same area. In the background notice how the contrast is much lower, i.e. the characters are mostly gray. In doing this, it creates a sense of atmosphere and distance, and also focuses the viewers attention on the foreground. The other trick is to provide more detail in the foreground than the rest of the picture... look at the floor, you see the shapes of the wood slats at the bottom (foreground) but towards the middle and background this detail is minimal or absent. So those are two good ways to create depth in a painting: higher value contrast and more detail in the foreground.

Human Chain, watercolour 11 x 15" cold press Fall 2012 (No. 3348)

Rosie and her Friends

Rosie (west), Trixie (North), Hot Dog (East) and their owner Avis (South) are playing bridge together. Hot Dog and Avis have their eyes locked trying to read eachother's minds, and Rosie looks on intently. Trixie just wants to go play frisbee in the park. This was a commission I did for a colleague, the three dogs are the dogs that him and his wife have had over the years, and it was his idea to have everybody playing bridge together. My bridge knowledge is rather limited so hopefully the painting is somewhat accurate and lot of fun!

Composition is very important as always, and one key decision is whether to make the paper orientation in portrait mode (i.e. the paper is narrow and tall), or landscape mode (paper wide and short). My first instinct was to go landscape, because I had to fit four people around a table, but then I was inspired to go portrait mode because it brought together all of the characters in a more intimate space. At least part of each character touches another which gives you a nice sense of being around a table playing cards. I think with landscape orientation the characters would have had space between them. As usual I added a lot of warm reds at the bottom to give a sense of depth.

15x11" cold press. 2012

Bajan Colours, Barbados

 This is a painting I did on location in Barbados during a trip I took when I was a graduate student. The word on the boat 'Bajan" is actually the phrase used to describe the local people. Prior to this one, my paintings in Barbados had not captured the light an colour properly, when I showed them to some local people they said that it was not colourful enough! So in this painting I amplified the colours and tried to really bring out the lights and shadows. Notice how the shadow under the boat is charged with green. From then on the work really looked spectacular and captured the essence of the location.

The key to making a painting colourful is to guess what? Use lot's of colour, pure, unmixed paint directly from the tube. Usually I mix my colours a lot, three, four, five different colours in each mix, but in this painting I tried to keep the mixtures simple. The grass looks like a combination of Winsor or lemon yellow (PY175), phthalo green bs (PG7) and french ultramarine (PB29). The water was a similar mix but more blue, and a light-yellow fade. The sky as usual was cereulean blue (PB35), I pretty much use that no matter where I am painting. But the real trick was to open myself up to the surroundings. allow the warmth and the sun to travel through my body and into the painting. Once you can get rid of your per-conceived notions about what something is supposed to look like, and just paint what you see and feel, then you are a landscape painter.


Bajan Boat, Oistins, Barbados, cold press watercolour, 5 x 7"  2001 (No. 1161)

Sir Winston Churchill Pub, Crescent St. Montreal

Sir Winston Churchill was probably never in Montreal but who knows? He does have a pub named after him. This painting was done in the fall, we had an unusually bright and sunny couple of days in mid November, but it was still pretty cold with the biting wind. A couple was eating breakfast on a terrace just behind me and they commented on the painting saying that it was good... it always is a bit of a boost to get nice comments from people.

Painting on location is really unique for an artist, you not only see things in real life but you have the smells and the sounds of a city all around you. These inputs affect the way the painting 'feels'. I've touched on this in past blogs but it is worth repeating as this painting is a great example of it. Trying to paint in the studio from a photograph is very difficult because the temptation is to make everything precise and accurate. On location you paint fast, and you channel the 'energy' of the scene into the work. There are a bunch of sloppy parts in this painting, but it adds energy... like in the building in the background there is a wash-bleed, completely unintentional, and the whole right segment of the painting was done quickly, as were the cars and lamp-post in the foreground. I spent the most effort on the windows and balcony of the pub, because this was the center of attention of the paining. Cheers!

cold press 11x7.5" 2012 

McGraw Hill

It's been a while since my last post...I had a little change of venue with my studio in November of this year. This is one of the paintings I did during that time, it is based purely on a doodle that I must have done some time this year. I confess the title is not very original I took it from the name of a book publisher that I had jotted down on the same note page where the doodle was. I often do this, come up with the painting title based on some of the actual notes (e.g. Immortal Time Infinite Ideas), although usually it is more clever than this. This painting kind of reminds me of an old paitning I did called "Midnight on Chocolate Harbour", it also has a kind of 'Survivor' feel to it... that TV show.

I probably don't talk enough about composition... it is by far the most important thing in any media... oil, acrylic, ink, computer art, or even any genre whether it be painting, sculpting, maybe music even. What is composition? Composition has to do with where the objects in a picture are placed, and how everything fits together.  In this painting there are several objects, the torch, the tree/orbs, the swirling city, the sky.... and I'd like to think they have been tastefully arranged to complement each other, and to create a sense of depth. Imagine all of thise objects were just crammed together or stuck at the bottom of the picture... then it would be ugly. There are more subtle things, maybe rules, I have found work for me...like don't let the edge of any object touch the side of the painting. Notice how there is a little sliver of space between the egg on the bottom right and the edge of the painting which makes it feel more comfortably placed in the picture,

cold press 7.5 x 6" Nov 2012