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

Domaine de L'Orangerie, Seychelles

Somehow I forgot to post this painting, I did it in Feburary 2011 on a trip to the Seychelles, on the island of La Digue at a fancy resort called Domaine de L'Orangerie. This view was right from the back porch of the house. It was really in the middle of a jungle, there were these giant bats flying around the top of the mountain in the distance, and all kinds of wild plants. The flowers look bigger than they really were, they were actually part of the manicured garded behind the guest house.

I talked a lot about how to create the illusion of distance, and this is a good example of how to use blue to create that illusion. The mountain in the back was begun as a nearly pure layer of blue... when it was about half dry, I added in the light green of the trees, and then when that was about half dry I added in the darker grey of the shadows. Meanwhile, I worked on the foreground flowers, making sure to not let the colours blend into the wet background. It takes a bit of practice to get the timing right... if you spend too much time on the foreground than the blue dries and you are basically screwed. Practice makes perfect.

Domaine de L'Orangerie, Seychelles Mountain, Bats Flowers, 5.5x7.5" cold press 2011 (No. 1277)

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

des légumes frais, St. Joseph St. Montreal

This painting was done on the same corner as an older painting I posted in 2008 called Biere et Vin Froid, St. Joseph St., if you put the two together it would be like a panorama. The corner store depicted is a family run business, amazing such a thing still exists in this day and age of big box stores. On the right is Parc Ave, just above the tree line you see the bookstore building, I featured it in another recent painting with all the orange traffic signs. Maybe I should do a larger panorama painting some time in the studio, it's a lot of work but I am starting to find my inspiration again for landscape painting. 

Landscape painting in the city has always been difficult, the sight lines are often blocked by buildings or cars (when you sit down parked cars or trucks can really get in the way), and the sun can easily be blocked by sky scrapers. I have found too that the subject matter can be a little hard to get excited about, painting the facade of a condo is more of an architectural challenge rather than a purely artistic one. In this painting, I was attracted to the primary colours, the yellow umbrella, and the sharp crayon-colours of the vegtables. It was also cool how this store had an apartment on top, so you kind of get this feeling of the plateau... a residential and commercial mosaic. 

 5x7" cold press. 2012

 

Sun Life, Downtown Montreal

This scene was done downtown at the corner of McGill College and Maisonneuve Boulevard looking south, the main building featured in the background is the Sun Life Building, and the foreground structure is Place Montreal Trust. Sandwiched in the middle is the Rogers building. I had to use google map and the streetview feature to figure out where I was exactly. I walked around for awhile to find this scene, most of the downtown is rather generic, this scene however seemed to have some distinctiveness... each layer is from a different generation of architecture: the Sun Life, from the old classic stone days (with a baroque theme), the Rogers building -ugly brown concrete from the 60's or 70's, and the Place Montreal Trust-all modern with a pre-fab look. I also liked the two flags on top of the Sun life building.

I don't often paint in the city because the sight lines are bad and the sun is often obscured by the buildings. In this case the sun was reflecting off another building windows, so I had some decent light to paint in. Also, the background building was lit up directly by the sun, which created the perfect focal point... the mid- and fore-ground structures were in shadow which gave a nice 'frame'. Usually the background is not the focal point, but in this case it works well. You really get the feeling of being downtown and seeing something spectacular hiding between the skyscrapers.

5x7.5" cold press 2012. 

Pont des Arts (Institut de France), Paris, France

Pont des Arts is a famous bridge in France, on one side you have the Institut de France (seen in the painting), and on the other side you have le Louvre. I guess it is silly to call this bridge famous, aren't they all famous in Paris? This one is noted for 'love locks' that's when people bring a pad lock, put their initials on it and a heart, and attach it to the bridge. If you really squint at the bridge in the painting you will see the locks... just kidding.

There is an old adage for artists, paint what you see, not what you think.... this is good advice for a landscape painter (but not so much for a surrealist abstract painter). In this painting, the Seine river is depicted as I SAW it... green, muddy, choppy, somewhat disgusting looking water. If I had painted what I THOUGHT, I may have made the river blue...  isn't water blue? So when I paint, I really try to shed any pre-conceived notions about what things should be, and I just paint what I see. It is interesting to compare the similarities between this painting (done in 1998) and a recent painting called "Scene on the Seine", the water looks remarkably similar.

I'll briefly explain how to paint the dome, it is a little technical though.... Start with a layer of pale yellow with a slight touch of warm red (rose madder, or a red lake, or frnch vermillion), make the layer into the shape of the dome. Wait for it to completely dry. Next you need to make the wedge shaped panels on the dome... on the top they are reflecting the blue from the sky, and on the bottom they are showing their natural colour, a rich velvety cool blue. To make this effect do a two-tone wash. Two-tone washes are extremely useful so I'll explain how....  mix a medium-heavy blue using cereulean, a touch of french ultramarine, a touch of rose madder, then paint the wedges on the dome, leaving gaps between them for the golden yellow to show. Now, go back to the paint you mixed on the pallette and make it darker, you do that by putting in a little bit of alzarian crimson (a dark red), and vermillion green (a dark green),  alternatively, daub in some paynes gray.... if you're on a budget mix french ultramarine and burnt sienna. Then load your brush and add a little of the darker version to the bottom of each wedge while it is still wet/moist. If the dark mix is too watery you get a backwash... the trick is feeling out the right amount of moisture on your brush which takes a lot of practice, and working fast because if the first wash dries it won't look smooth.

5x7" cold press. 1998

Toledo Cathedral, Spain

Another painting from the '98 Spain collection, this one was done in Toledo, no, not Toledo in Ohio, but the one about 70km South of Madrid. I had long since forgotten the name of the cathedral, but thanks to the internet I confirm that this is "Toledo Cathedral", funny but that is what I would have guessed in the first place. It was a truly spectacular cathedral... I considered not painting it due to the extreme detail, but in the end I figured what the heck. Never a bad idea to strech yourself.

It was obviously hot at the time (looking at the way the wash in the sky dried), and that is always good when you want to capture a lot of detail because the paint dries fast. If it is cool and humid, the paint dries slow and detailed brush strokes will bleed, thus becoming fuzzy. You can tell I'm writing grants as I feel compelled to use words like 'thus'. The strategy in this case was to 'represent' the detail rather than try to actually capture it all... the statues are just amorphous blobs, but in the end you get a similar visual effect as in real life. What I did get right-on was the colour of the brick, and the warmpth of the shadows. Look how the shadow under the front door is practically orange, this is due to the hot sun reflecting off the ground.

5x7" hot press. 1998

The Crushing Delicate

Inspired by a single, simple thought, yet presented in an abstract, obtuse manner. While you are thinking about what that means, I'll confess that I have been writing a lot of grants these days, those are the things scientists have to write to beg for what little $ the government (especially this one) has set aside for research. A grant is a little like an abstract painting in that sense, simple, yet obtuse...? The difference is that a grant is intended for money, and art is, well, ok, intended for money. Fortunately I've been able to pursue art without pressure for profits, probably how I was able to develop this off-the wall style of doodleism, a kind of surrealism-cubist hybrid style.

I want to talk about taking chances, with your art... in this painting I was convinced that I wanted the background to be a calm, blue sky with fluffy white clouds, but then I decided halfway through to go for a blazing orange sunset.... it looked awful, and I tried to cover it with this dark brown, meanwhile putting in the tangled octopus-like tendrils in the foreground... and it looked even worse. It was a mess... so I pulled out my hogs-hair... a big, thick round brush good for removing rust off a pipe... and proceeded to scrub the entire area... to my amazement it worked... the area I am talking about is the top right area just above the horizon, it ended up looking like a kind of misty twilight. The moral of the story is sometimes you just go for it and make damage control as you go.

The painting is about something very powerful that is never-the-less delicate. The theme reminds me of 'The Juggler', an old painting I did of a clown with a porcelain head juggling hammers (or was it 'The juggling act'?) I struggled with the name of this one, it was either going to be "Crushing Delicate" or "The Crushing Delicate", I decided midway that if it was spectacular enough then I would go with latter. In a lot of ways this painting is a turning point, it's a great combination of the variations of doodleism developed in the last few years, and it balances careful execution with wild- nearly uncontained technique.

22x30" cold press  2012

View from Mont Royal, St. Lawrence River, Montreal

Surely this painting was inspired by the Island of Paradise... Ile de la Reunion. Volatile and passionate, the island served up some of the best landscapes I've ever seen. But alas, this is a much different island, Montreal. I was sitting up at one of the tourist stop-offs up on Mont Royal. Indeed, buses of tourists were stopping to take pictures. In the distance you see St. Lawrence River, with trees and buildings of downtown Montreal filling the middle-ground.

The river was highly reflective on this day, with the sun very bright. To capture this effect, I started by laying down the sky, almost all the way down the painting. Because it was so hot, I was able to let this wash get completely dry (don't try to do this when it's cloudy because the wash will take like half an hour to dry and you can't put anything on top). When dry, I put in the distant mountains using a combination of purple and blue and light green. The rest of the painting is hard to describe... just tried not to force too much detail... and tried to channel the energy of the island..both of them.

6.5x9" cold press, 2012  

"A Little Tacky" Place Jacques Cartier, Montreal

Summer is always a fun time to paint, the sun makes the paint dry fast, and illuminates the scenes with light and colour. This scene is down at Place Jacques Cartier in the old port, old Montreal. It is a touristy area to say the least, the main gathering area being this little stretch of cobblestone road depicted in the painting. Restaurants and colourful awnings line the street, artists and musicians set up shop in the middle. I was drawn to the complementary colour scheme made from the minty green copper roof juxtaposed with the fire-engine red awnings. I almost didn't paint this scene because it was a little tacky, but hey, that's old Montreal.

As the tourists looked on, they must have wondered what I had been smoking, because here was this all-blue version of a landscape. I began the shapes with blue... straight french ultramarine in some cases, in other places a paler grey/blue made from a dab of ultramarine mixed with cerulean (a thick sky blue) and a bit of rose madder. If they had come back in 20 minutes they would have seen the magic of watercolour; once the blue layers were dry I overlayed transparent warm washes... thin browns, reds, and yellow-orange. The combination of the blue wash and the warm wash gives that heavy, warm feeling of the sunlit brick and roof. I had never tried this before to make that emerald green on the central roof (the focal point)... Learn something new every day. I adapted this technique from an article by Steve Hanks, he described a method to paint human skin by layering warm washes on top of cold blue/purple.

7.5 x 11" cold press. July 2012

Alhambra, Granada, Spain

It was a long time ago, in a land far, far away. Granada Spain to be more precise, a major tourist destination in southern Spain that I visited in 1998. I stayed in Granada a few days, painting mostly monuments and interesting architecture, and drinking their aptly named beer, the Alhambra. As you can guess by the architecture the Alhambra was built by moors a long time ago when they controlled most of the south. The pointy/circle arch, and the pastel colours were quite unique.

Painting shadows, I've written about it so many times in my blog but it is just so important when doing landscapes. In reality shadows are filled with colour and light, both the colours from the object itself, and the colours reflected from nearby objects, and from the sky, all combine. Focusing on the shadow below the eave of the main building, you see that the pinkish colour of the wall is represented, as is the faint blue of the sky. The shadow below that, the one that slices across the front of the building has additional peach colouration that comes from the structure on the right. There are a number of ways to capture this effect... it was so long ago so it is difficult to say how I did it, but it looks like I established the colour of the entire wall first, let it dry, and then put a blue/brown wash on top. That's definately the easiest way to do it. I also used the technique of overlaying dark highlights on the shadow, look at the brick pattern above the main door, it provides a dark contrast that makes the shadow look very light and airy.

Another point to make is that this painting is maybe not technically the best, parts are crooked, the washes and edges are messy.... but who cares? When I look at this painting I distinctly remember the FEEL I had that day (even if I can't remember how I painted the shadows), and I hope the viewer gets the same sense. 

5x7" cold press. 1998

Habitat 67

Down in Parc Jean-Drapeau you can see back on to the main island of Montreal. In this scene the Pont de la Concorde can be seen on the right with downtown Montreal in the background, and on the left is Habitat 67, the bizarre condo complex they built back in 1967, now they sell them for like 10 million each. The building is full of gaps and layered condos, so the white square in the middle is just sky. In the foreground the St. Lawrence river rolls by, rapids reflect the brilliant sun.

The scene here was backlit by a strong sun, that means the sun is behind the scene (as opposed to beside it). This presents a few problems, mostly the sun is in your face and on your skin, so you had better have some sun protection. I seldom sit in the sun to do a painting, usually I try to find shade, but this scene was only open at a small point where they had installed a park bench and cleared some of the shrub in front. I like painting backlit scenes, the challenge is to capture the colours in the shadows.. the bridge has this rich minty green, the buildings are deep grape and mocha, the trees a mixture of kiwi, melon, melon, and zucchini.... ok I feel hungry now. Another pointer... to get the shimmering light-effect on the water.... fill your brush with some dark blue, not too wet, and drag the brush sideways (makes a scraping sound), practice this and you can build texture on water... brick, trees you name it.

7.5 x 11" cold press, 2012

More Realistic Growth?

Another day another doodleism painting. Actually it took more than a day to finish it, that is probably the most common question I get... how long does it take? I always wondered what that question meant, how long does it take to do the painting, or how long does it take to learn to do the painting? I suppose the answers to those questions are, a) about 3 hours of painting time, and b) 23 years, and counting (!). I'll post a few more from 1989 when I started with the watercolour. Anyways, back to this painting, I am using doodles that span into my new position at Concordia, yes, even though I teach now I still find time to doodle, just not during class. The landscape element in the middle is a scene out the window of the room where I paint. The title refers to the element on the right, a cubism-like hand growing like a plant until it looks more like a real hand. Originally this was two doodles, one a geometric pattern that morphed into fire, and the other, a blob-hand that became a hyper realistic hand. These two doodles were fused in the painting.

Stylistically this painting builds on "The Paper Chase (No more outlines)" a doodleism painting I finished recently, the main concept is that there are no outlines used to establish the shapes. The other technical element was the quality of the finish... I went over all the edges and blemishes to produce the highest quality image I could.... mainly because, yes I admit it, I have been posting my own paintings as the background to my cell phone, and now I see the work magnified... I noticed that "Addictive Puzzle" has a puzzle piece that is not painted, it is just an outline- incidentally Addictive Puzzle turns out to be one of the "Fan Favorites"based on times viewed. My point is, that now I have to make art that stands up to the scrutiny of a highly magnified cell phone image. Oh, the technology! The technology!

22x 15" cold press 2012

PS you may wonder about the dimensions of the paintings... the full sheet is 22x30 inch, so when you cut it half it is 22x15"... when you cut that in half it is 11 x 15", and then 11x7.5", which explains most of my dimensions used. You can also cut it all into twelve  5x7" with six 5x8" which I use for landscapes often when travelling.

Avenue du Parc- Avenue d'orange?

What defines a landscape, a building, a mountain, a lake, how about construction? Usually I try to find defining scenes...  when in Paris, I painted the Eiffel Tower, ok maybe that example is a little cliche, but you get the point. As I walked around my neighbourhood, it became obvious that the defining feature of Montreal was the construction, in this case on ave du Parc which they have been digging up and repaving for over a year now. The added attraction was the challenge of capturing the fluorescent orange....

That's my cue to explain how to paint fluorescent orange with watercolours. You may be tempted to go out and buy orange paint and then put it on straight, but this has two problems, one there is really no orange paint in most watercolour brands, and two, it would turn out looking flat and brown. Instead, try a glazing technique. I've talked about this in past blogs, mostly in the abstract paintings, in this landscape I used glazing to make the bright orange. To do it, I start by putting down a layer of bright yellow (permanent lemon) in the shape of the signs and other orange elements. Once completely dry I then overlay with a layer of a transparent red like a thin wash of vermillion lake. When I got home, the orange wasn't orange enough, so I put on a third layer of thin vermillion lake, and voila!

Avenue du Parc- Avenue d'orange? 11 x 7.5" cold press, watercolour, 2012 (No. 1918)

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

The 2010 Solution

Surprising, but I never posted this painting, probably because I finished it in January, winter of 2010... it is always difficult to get a quality photo in the winter, it kind of went forgotten in my portfolio until today. It is bright and sunny, so much in fact that I had to reduce the exposure on the camera to get the colours right. At the beginning of the last decade (2000) I painted a pivotal abstract painting, in fact one of the first since 'Art vs. Science' 1995... that began a string of abstract paintings, one a month, for the years 2000, 2001, onwards. When 2010 was approaching I wanted to create a painting that also represented some kind of turning point or beginning perhaps. The answer? 'The 2010 Solution'.

I did not shy away from a Dali-like surrealist landscape on this one. I also kept a lot of open spaces, most of the painting is done in thin coloured washes. Some areas are more detailed, like the bar, and the funny creature smoking, as well as the neural-network/rooted thing on the right of the smoker. Instead of creating a wall of doodles, I tried to feature each doodle more prominently, each has it's own space and time to exist in. In retrospect (it is mid 2012 as I write this), this painting helped to open up the style... let it breath. Together, with the just finished "The Paper Chase (No More Outline)", I am pretty excited about where the style is going to go next.

22x30" cold press, 2010

The Paper Chase (No More Outlines)

Following 'Creative but Can't Escape', this painting develops the concept of working without outlines...basically there aren't very many at all except in the papers that are under the foot-shaped lamp in the middle, and a few others here and there. The subject matter of the painting is very organic, abstract twisting hands and feet, multiple skylines, strange plants populate the landscape. Yet all the elements are connected...that concept, of connecting elements, is inspired by Inuit art that I saw when my family took some trips around Ontario... Norval Morrisseau was one of the most famous ones.

 Still based on notebook doodles, in 'The paper |chase' I established the elements using flat washes instead of starting with a painted outline. I had to control the washes very carefully to avoid overlaps... where two washes touch they either create a blur (if they are both wet), a backwash (if one is wet and the other is half dry), or a dark line, if one is totally dry. The dark lines create the impression of an outline even though I did not put one. In some cases I left these dark lines to create definition, in other cases I erased them using a moist brush (not my good ones). By not using outlines, I found that I concentrated more on the quality of the washes, because that is all I had to define the shapes. It also took a lit longer than normal... but it also helped keep up my inspiration since each element was almost immediately established as opposed to making outlines where you have to finish the drawings in steps.

22x30" cold press 2012

Fertile Idea

Are all ideas fertile? I guess this one was. The character in the middle is spewing fire from his forehead into the sky... otherwise the sky is raining fire down onto his poor head, either way it sounds hot. Anyways, the doodles I used to make this painting came mostly from a conference that I attended down in Texas. Conferences make the best opportunities for doodles...long lectures, relative anonymity in the crowd, a pen and paper handy...

I've probably covered this in a past blog, but it is worth reviewing, that is, using white, or 'blank paper'. This term is kind of illogical, because if a paper is blank, then how can you use it... if you put paint on it then it's not blank anymore. While you are thinking about that, I'll reiterate that I do not use white paint for my watercolours... white paint does exist but it is more like a heavy acrylic or guache, and most watercolour painters (including myself) consider this to be not really watercolour. A similar case can be made for black paint, it is too heavy and dark and does not belong in watercolour. Of course rules are made to be broken, see 'Birdman' where I use chinese black ink... however it must be called mixed-media as opposed to watercolour. Anyways, there are several areas that are just the blank paper in this painting... mostly along the diagonal axis of the composition. I made the blank sections seem connected, so it looks like a sort of river of white going across the page, that helps the viewers eye move across the page. I also like how the white background makes the doodles stand out. The first Doodleism painting I did that featured a lot of blank paper showing was "The 2010 Solution."

22x30" cold press, 2012

Creative, but Can't Escape

On occasion a painting says something about itself, about the technique. Here, the elements of the painting, the mountain, the buildings, the foliage, even the horizon, follows a grid pattern. The branches of the plants snake along the path of the grid, the flowers and fruit are placed on corners. I did this quite intentionally... the idea came from one of my notebook doodles, it was a reflection on the doodleism style, which involves a careful outline that is then coloured in. Here, the raw, wild nature (inspired greatly by memories of Ile de la Reunion...see St. Denis, view from la Montagne) is constrained by an artificial grid. I am making a statement on the past paintings I have done in the doodleism style... that doodleism is basically glorified paint-by-numbers.

 Like graph paper, a precisely measured grid was created with paint and a ruler. I then overlaid the colour washes, relying on the colouration of the ile de la reunion paitings. This painting represents a bit of a turning point in the doodleism style (even though it itself is not really an example of it).... at this point I was rather tired of the 'paint by numbers' feel of the doodleism style, it was increasingly difficult to stay inspired throughout a whole painting. The title says it all... 'Creative, but can't Escape'.. means 'my creative ideas are stuck in a bunch of outlines, screaming to get free!.'. The next doodleism painting, nearly done, is a direct answer to this problem. I should also note that we moved recently to a new place in the plateau, each time I have moved my art has taken a turn.

22x15" cold press, 2012

Lab Book #7; Construction at Site 22

This painting was posted a few years ago on my blog, but I recently had the thought of taking a better image of it with my new high pixel camera. The quality of the image is better, if you click on the picture you can see a blow-up. It is also interesting to write again about an old but good painting, one which I feel is a 'pivotal' painting, in other words, one that changed the way I painted or set me on a new course. I suppose what this work gave me was an added confidence, I did not know in advance if the massive amount of detail would end up looking any good. I'll let the viewers be the judge, but for me this is one of the most engrossing paintings I have, because of it's size I can not put in my portfolio, so it has been sitting in view on the laundry cupboard for years now, and I still can look at it and find things I had not seen before.

I am currently working on a painting that is tentatively called "Creative but Can't Escape" , it is based upon a linear grid on the background, and all of the elements of the landscape follow the grid pattern. The point I want to make with that one is that this doodleism method, which has really held my interest for the last 8 years and counting, had this inherent limitation. By constructing a work from pre-fabricated doodles, there is not really that much room to be that creative when I make the design.... but the contrary is to start with no pre-drawings, and then you get 'white page fright' which is never good. Anyways, I don't know yet if "Creative but Can't Escape" will be a pivotal painting or not, but I am trying in a way to use the art to explore the art.

Lab Book #7; Construction at Site 22, 2004,  ~50x30"

Another Thursday

Picture this, you're walking down a boardwalk, say in Vancouver, and suddenly an Orca jumps out of the water. Just another Thursday? On top of that the water, beach and sky is a kaleidoscope of colours and shapes. Maybe it's just another Thursday for the Beatles... by the way, the date in the top right is not the date the painting was done, but the date of the doodle I used for that section. It says 7 10 11 which is October 11 2007, I use this order of year month day to keep my laboratory records consistent. In retrospect I found out that Japanese also use year month day.

Reflecting on this style which I coined doodleism, I often think it is inspired by Salvador Dali. Dali created dream like landscape and populated them with abstract objects and characters. For Dali, the landscape was the cake, and abstract forms was the icing on top. My style is a bit different in it's conception... I use a bunch of abstract shapes and characters to create the landscape. That would be kind of like making a whole caking out of icing, and then putting some cake filling on top. I do not remember when exactly I painted this, but the date of the doodles on it, late 2007, suggets that I would have done it some time in 2008.

11x15" cold press, 2008

Opéra de Paris Garnier, Paris, France

Paris has a number of amazing landmarks, this one is the Opera building on the right bank near the big shopping centers (printemps and la fayette). The front view has tons of statues and gilded angels on the roof with all these romanesque pillars and detailing. I took on a less demanding viewpoint, this is looking at the side of the building, focusing on just one of the gold statues. What grabbed my attention was how this sparkiling gold statue stood out against the grey overcast weather.

Painting a gold effect is rather challenging...a lot of it has to do with the surroundings. I started by painting the sky, being careful that the shape of the statue was preserved. At this point the statue was just blank paper surrounded by the sky. Of note, I did not make an outline for the statue, because it would have lessened the sparkling effect. Technically this is called a negative shape, because you are painting the space around an object before the object is even there, it takes a bit of practice. Then I needed to let the sky dry, so I worked on the other elements, the brick, the eagle on the pillar, and the background building. When the sky was mostly dry I started building up the staue with thin layers of nearly pure yellow, followed by layers of amber, and finally some darker browns for shadow. I used each layer to try and make the shapes and contours of the statue, the goal was to have something with volume, but that also sparkled. In several spots the white paper shines through. By placing a golden object against a grey background, the gold really pops out and looks real.

7.5x11" cold press, Jan 2012

Ga Ga Science Fair

This painting was based on drawing I made during a science conference, many of the presentations focused on transgenic mouse experiments, where the mice have been engineered to express special genes, or have certain genes "knocked out" (deleted). These kind of studies are very important and are supposed to teach us a lot about how humans work. The impression I had was when watching some of the presentations was that the experiments were quite 'flashy' but did not teach us very much, kind of like a movie that has a lot of special effects but not too much in the way of plot (Avatar?). To extend the analogy further, I likened the situation to a certain pop star (lady gaga) who seems to rely mostly on style and presentation rather than vocals and tunes. It's like they try to distract you with a lot of glitz and glam to cover the lack of content. It's a harsh commentary to draw this comparison to scientists. If you study the work you will see that many of the elements support the above-mentioned theme.

How do you grow as an artist? I suppose it doesn't matter as long as you do grow. I have gone through several phases, always trying to push technical and inspirational boundaries to the maximum. I feel like the doodle style is quite well advanced, it is actually somewhat 'easy' for me to produce such a painting by now, which means that I have to keep pushing until I don't feel comfortable anymore. The next frontier I want to push is that of the narrative. In other words, to tell a story with the art.

22x15" cold press. Dec 2011/Jan 2012

Place Furstenberg, Paris, France

Another from Paris, the rain had mostly stopped by now but the sun was rapidly going down. I just caught it as the tops of the buldings were illuminated by the dying light. Hockney made a famous montage of paintings in the same square (Place Furstenberg which is actually more of a circle), I was sitting in about the same spot as he must have, but off to the left a bit... I cut out the central trees for simplicity. There is also the Delacroix museum, it is just off to the left of this scene... indeed a lot of historical and artistic value in this place, it certainly has a lot of 'energy' the first time we stumbled into the area we knew it was a cool place but were unaware of it's significance. You can find it in the St-Germain des Pres area.

I don't often use a purple-yellow colour scheme. These two colours are naturally complentary, so they kind of feel like they belong together. You see the pairing in many easter-themed work. In nature it is a bit rare. I unintentionally stumbled into the colour scheme here, maybe it was instinct. To see it, look at the window on the bottom right, it is being lit from inside from an artifical lighting,  quite yellow, while the road is a deep purple. The buildings are all yellow tones while the sky is a lilica purple.

11x7.5" cold press watercolour, Jan 2012.

Pont Neuf, Rive Gauche, Paris, France

On a recent trip to Paris I had the opportunity to paint in the rain. Actually I found a clever place to sit under a causeway, just at the end of Pont Neuf (the ninth bridge) on Rive Gauche (the left bank). In the distance you can see the famous luxury department store that closed recently called La Samaritaine, while on the right you see some of the classic Parisian condominiums that are bordering right on the river Seine. In the foreground you see a lamp post. It is not very exciting, yet the lamp post was kind of what inspired me to do the painting, it just had that sort of rainy-day feeling that defined the experience. I threw in the flag after the fact to add a splash of colour.

I used to use exclusively Windsor Newton paints, not because of any loyalty to great Britain where they are manufactured, but because that is what mt mom bought me all those years ago when she was helping launch my hobby. Sennelier is a brand sold in France out of the famous Ecole des Beaux-Arts, and a few little outlets, including one that was literally just down the street from where I did this painting. In fact, we bought a bunch of Sennelier paints on sale for 40% off, they were like 3 euro (~5$)  per tube! The same thing in Canada is more like 15-20$. In the painting I used many of the new pigments, which were fantastic. Especially the French Vermilion (apt for the occasion), which I used in the flag.

Watercolour, 11x7.5", Jan 2012

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