Totem inspired

This is a small abstract painting inspired by indigenous totems, just inspired though, not meant to be a copy or something! Another artist was recently criticized for copying the indigenous art style so much so that it could have passed off for the real thing. I've copied impressionist art before but that was all for practice and learning, rather than to commercialize it in some way.

In this work I wanted to create this feeling of the walls closing in around the totem, which was done with the two tree trunk like shapes flanking the totem. The colour scheme is a cool triad of orange-yellow, purple-red, and a turquoise.

To create texture using watercolour start with a wet in wet technique, two tones or just drop some clear water in the wash while it is drying. That will create a blotted look, kind of a starburst effect or like dropping coffee on a carpet would look. When it is dry, use dry brush technique... this is where you keep the paint fairly dry on the brush and drag it across the paper surface, holding the brush on an angle. It works best with cold press or rough press paper because it is bumpy and pulls the paint off in a scratchy way. I used this to create the textured side panels. In doing so, it makes the totem seem smooth by comparison.

5 x 7" cold press watercolour. Dec. 2017

Sky Emotes

Hi, silly, really? This is how we talk now using emotes on the smart phones. LOL. In the painting, the emotes are projected onto the clouds like some kind of modern 'bat symbol'. Below is the city of Montreal.

To create the luminous glow, I started with the three colours yellow red and green and let it dry. Then I overlayed with the cloud effects and the city on the bottom. Originally the painting was going to be in the other direction, that is, what is the purple building were to be the sky, and the buildings would be the white space. I just saw the paining upside down had a more interesting composition, and the emotes would be in the sky. Seemed fitting IMHO.

5 x 7" cold press Watercolour, Nov 2017

Museum Mutant

This was a mixed media painting I did way back in high school art class taught by Mr. Clarke. The project was to put together two different art styles into one painting. In the middle portion is an arrangement of characters done in watercolour media. The image of the characters was derived from a renaissance era  oil painting but the exact painting escapes my memory. Surrounding them is a group of seven painting which was also originally done in oil, but here it was painted with a tempera or gauche paint using a lot of water as if watercolour. I remember finishing this painting very quickly in class, and people gathered around to look at the work. In retrospect, the idea of fusing styles would continue in my work up until now 25 years later. Wow, 25 years since high school, time flies.

Mixed media. 1992 (1993?) 22 x 30" (?)

Vendome, Montreal/NDG, Quebec

Here is a rare painting of Vendome, rare only in that there is probably not too many paintings out there of a busy metro station at the edge of Montreal. The paper I used was different than usual, it was from a pad of paper given to me as a gift. It was different than the usual rag paper I use which is typically 140lb press cold press. This paper was flat on top and lower absorbance so the colours flowed around a lot and it was more difficult to build up the layers. I remember too that there was plenty of wind that day and the page kept blowing around. Lately I have been wanting to paint more of the local neighborhood here in NDG. After having gone through all of my old paintings of London and other places in Ontario it inspired me a bit to do a few more local landscapes.

11 x14" Watercolour. July 2017

Oka Beach, and Cap St. Jean Park, Quebec

 Recently we took a vacation week and visited some local places, such as Oka Beach on the north shore of Lac Des Deux Montagnes. It was a surprisingly long beach with brilliant golden brown sand, seemingly endless we walked on it for an hour. There were lots of people there, kids and adults and families swimming and having fun in the sun. We settled on the quieter parts of the beach where I made these two paintings.

   
The other painting here is from Cap St. Jean Park, there are really cool walking trails and picnic areas, as well as a historic house to look at. In the top of the Cap is an organic farm, and a sugar shack. The painting is looking east, towards Pierrefonds. The colour of the water was much different, around the Cap it was deep fast flowing, while near Oka Beach it was shallow and not moving as much. As a result the colour of the water was much different, in Oka Beach it was a purple-orange hue tinted by the sandy bottom, while at Cap it was a cooler lilac colour. It had been awhile since I painted watercolours on location. 5 x 7" Watercolour Aug 2017

Sympa Para Lympha Hema

Science and art combined into one creation! This painting was meant to provoke thought on how the body integrates various systems including the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system, the lymphatic system, and the cardiovascular system. Can stress alter an immune response? This work was done in several steps, beginning with the purple fibers (sympa) and then the red-orange fibers (para), followed by the blue-green (lymph), and finally the pinkish tracts (hema). Lastly I put in the background which is a three layer glaze. The background is a soft fleshy colour. I wanted the work to have an anatomical feel, like you were inside an organ of the body. At the same time channeling Jackson Pollock the great American abstract painter. It is also similar in some ways to "Love and Fear", an old painting I did in 1998 which depicted a being inside of a lymph node. 

22 x 15" cold press, watercolour, June 2017

The 20/10 solution in frame with LED lighting

This is a new frame that we got, it was Cilei's idea to hang some of my paintings in the hallway of our condo. Every month or so I have been changing the painting to keep it fresh. The painting here is  "The 2010 Solution" a turning point work that I did in 2010 after being dissatisfied with the recent doodleisim results. In this work there is more use of 3 dimensional space and free-flowing watercolour technique. The name is also a nod to the Seven Percent Solution a Sherlock Holmes book by Nicholas Meyer, the solution in that book referring to the heroin which Sherlock Holmes was addicted to. In my painting the drug of choice is alcohol as you can see in the well stocked bar sitting in the midst of a dream-like landscape. The lighting is a simple music-stand light that I got off Amazon, it has two strengths and uses led lights. Only problem is that I painted most all of these paintings under the old fashioned incandescence light bulbs that had a soft amber glow. Led light is a ghostly pale blue which puts off the intended colour. I hope in the future should people wish to hang my works they can find soft amber lighting to preserve the yellow that was intended to be there. On my blog every photo in the last few years I have yellow-enhanced to represent on the computer screen what it really looks like when viewed live, under proper lighting. Since real painting lights run in the hundreds of dollars, I will just stick with this for now!

20/10 solution, 22x 30" cold press, watercolour 2010

Lemon Sunset #5

This is the fifth version of Lemon Sunset, painted not long after our trip to São Paulo Brazil. Many of the elements were inspired by São Paulo, like the big condominium buildings across the landscape and the rolling green South American hills. Happy people are living in bunkers buried under sand. I did a painting a long time ago called Chicken #5 which kind of started the whole motif of giant chicken-shaped living quarters. This was in part from advice of a customer who was shopping at an art gallery that I volunteered at. He suggested that an artist, in order to be famous, had to develop a catchy motif that would be unique and original. As an example he mentioned chickens, off the top of his head rather than in a serious way. I gave it a try, Chicken #5 painted in Bolton at my parents house was posted in a blog on Monday July 7, 2008. Now, I wonder, has this idea of an apocalyptic future full of poultry-themed apartments and happy stick-figures living in yellow submarines become my original motif?

watercolour 22x 15" cold press. 2017

Le Jardin du Luxembourg, France

The parks in Paris are really something to behold, you can walk all day in them and always see new things and be amazed. In this park there are metal chairs all over the place that you can pick up and move around, so people can sit together in groups or just on their own. That came in pretty handy for a painter like me because I had a decent chair to sit in for a change. I used to bring a little tripod stool to sit on but over the years stopped doing that because of the airport security, so I would have to find somewhere to sit on location. The year for this painting  I am not totally sure about, I'd have to check the other paintings from this time, I would guess it was my third trip to Paris in 2010. The other time I went were 1998, and 2007.

5 x8 " cold press, watercolour, ~2010

Still Life, Red Peppers

This is one of the first still life paintings I ever did, albeit with some help from the teacher who I remember was Sue Coleman. She brought in various object to each class and we all tried to make a painting of them. There is a technique in the cloth where small drops of water were added to create shapes. From the look of it, the teacher did that part because it took me years to really master and control that technique. The paper was rather thin, an acid-free rag paper in a spiral note book made by Bienfang premiere collection. Thinking of mom today, it was her and my late grandmother who bought all of the art supplies for me early on the hobby. I just scanned this today, part of several bags and portfolios full of old paintings that bring back memories. 

9 x 12" watercolour, hot press. 1989

Montreal Summer (Summer Scene)

Will summer ever REALLY be here? This painting was made years ago shortly after I moved to Montreal, or moved back to Montreal to be more precise. There were a few things that struck me about Montreal summer aside from the surprising heat and humidity: the crowds of people at the Jazz Festival, at Mont Royale Tam tam festival, the sidewalk sales, and the bustling old port. And to get there, everyone crams onto the metro system and buses. The painting shows these aspects in an abstract surrealism, at the bottom the crowds and the metro cars, in the middle a staircase leading up to the events: top left the Jazz Fest complete with an acrobatic busker, and top right the tam tam fest with pungent aromas wafting in the air. In the center top portion there is a depiction of Lac Mephremagog which is a small town in the Eastern Townships where Montrealers and tourists go to visit, and in the side left middle region there is a little stone archway with a person cross-country skiing in the winter. The cross in the top is the famous cross on top of the mountain, my dad and I went skiing around it once. On the back of my painting rack I named this one 'Summer Scene', I actually took it off the rack before it was ever named or signed because I didn't think that it was finished enough, but wanted to move on to the next painting. So this year I named and signed it with the help of Cilei, we decided to frame it and hang it up in the condo.


22 x 30" cold press watercolour, 2006

New Paint

Recently I removed some of the more toxic paints from my collection of tubes in order to be better for the environment. To replace the blue I got  version of phthalo blue (yellow shade) and quinacridone scarlet (cherry red). They are very transparent and easy to mix together to produce a range of lilacs and purples. With lemon yellow I was able to make various tints and blends. The painting here is a trial of the various colours in washes and layers, along with some ultramarine blue for comparison.

5x 7" cold press, April 2017

The Funeral of Sky Blue

After doing some reading I realized that there were several pigments that contained somewhat toxic ingredients. A few I knew of already, such as cobalt blue and aureolin yellow, and I had stopped using the a long time ago, but there were a few others that I was not aware of including cerulean blue. This version of blue is ideal for painting the sky because it is the exact hue of a sunny-day blue sky. Look in the middle of the painting for a good example. Virtually every outdoor painting I have done has contained cerulean blue, so it was a difficult decision to give it up.  To replace it, I got phthalo blue which it pretty close if you mix with some ultramarine and keep it a thin wash. So I had this tiny bit of cerulean blue left on my palette and decided to memorialize it in this painting called The Funeral of Sky Blue, although it could have been called the retirement of sky blue since other people are probably still using it (some pigments have been outright banned, and more may follow especially in Europe the cadmium colours are under scrutiny). If you are a painter and concerned, search 'the color of art pigment database' and there is an excellent source that tells you the names and alternate names of all pigments. It is easier to use the colour code, for cerulean blue it was PB35 (which I put on the head of the tombstone!). I also learned that one of my other favorite colours alizarin crimson has a suspect lightfastness, that is, the quality of the paint that makes is last in direct sunlight. Alizarin will almost dissapear if kept in direct sunlight for 3 years I read somewhere. I inspected my old paintings and they look fine although they have been in portfolios all this time so kept out of light. Luckily replacing alizarin was easier, I am now using the quinacridones (e.g. PR209) which are low toxic and high lightfast.  Notice the sky does not have any blue in it, which provides another meaning for this painting (global warming). There is another detail, a portrait of Sky Blue when alive is seen in the flower arrangement, it is a square of sky blue. By the way, my other pigment tubes are attending the funeral in the painting.

11 x 15 ' cold press watercolour. 2017

End Products...

There were four paintings all in the same style and in the same location in my collection, and this one was labelled 2014, so I think all four were done around the same time. More recently I started to put the date on each painting so that I could remember when they were done. After over 25 years of painting there is quite a pile of them, and the doodle style, I've been doing that style now since around 2004 or a bit earlier. Time really flies, it feels like yesterday I was sitting in London Ontario painting the vast 'Construction at Site 22" in fact I can almost remember every brush stroke of that painting. The painting in this post, well, I honestly do not remember painting it, which is odd because for 99% of the work I have done there is a clear memory, but then again I was going through an issue at this time that may have affected me. It's a neat painting though, and recently I have been trying to redo it on a larger scale with a bit more... planning!

15x 22" cold press, watercolour. 2014

Winter Scene London Ontario, Canada (post #400!)

Winter is a difficult time to paint watercolours outdoors. When on location at -10 Celsius (that is 14 F!) the paint freezes, the palette freezes, and you butt freezes. Alcohol helps a bit, at least with your butt, but the main solution is to add salt to the water. Even so, the paint will dry with ice crystals leaving a frozen effect in the finished work which you can see if you click on the picture to zoom in. The paint handles more like a crayon than watercolour, and it is nearly impossible to make more than one layer or control the edges properly. Having said all that I love the way these paintings turn out, you really FEEL the cold when you look at this work. I even abbreviated my usual signature here as  P.D probably because I was cold as **** having sat in my little camping chair for 20 minutes in freezing temperature. One little secret, most of the entire bottom half of this painting is just blank paper which produces the brilliant snow effect, and saves a bit of time.

Also cool, this is post number 400 for my blog!

5 x 7" watercolour, really cold press, (No. 455) 1996-1997

Ile de la Réunion wish we were there now.

Here is another painting from the Ile de la Réunion in the Indian Ocean, done atop the old volcanic mountain on the North side of the island. This seemed to be a cafe or restaurant, I was just walking around that day looking for a place to paint and came across the scene.What grabbed my attention was the contrast in yellows and greens, and of course the spectacular ocean view.

Painting water is tricky using watercolours, which is a constant source of irony to me. At Réunion I really worked on getting the brilliant colours of the water right- towards the horizon the colour is more purplish, and then near the coast it seems more emerald green or deep blue. The middle tends to be a deep ultramarine. The sparkling waves are down by quickly dragging the brush across sideways. The other feature of this work is the sun-drenched appearance. The sun is like lemon drops rained down on everything. The umbrella in the foreground is four layers of paint to create the prismatic effect of yellow and shadowed yellow. While you would not know this by looking at the painting, I knew when it was completed that the colours were nearly exactly correct compared to the actual scene. Especially the amazing coral-peach tone of the building.

6 x8 " cold press water colour. 2011

Art Gallery Underground

Art galleries are tucked away in alleys, hidden on corners behind a cul du sac, and in the Montreal underground! In this imaginary landscape there is an art gallery under the highways and roads and ever-present no parking sign that one finds in the city. In the background a futuristic dream condo where only purple cartoon characters can live. And no, I wasn't smoking or drinking anything while painting this. Well I may have been sipping some of that Brazilian tea we got from friends down south, what is in that stuff anyways?

Speaking of inspiration, these paintings are mostly based on doodles done while at work or away at conferences. The composition is put together when I sit down and start painting, same with the colour scheme. This year (2017) I decided to pause for awhile with the doodle approach and go with totally original designs and compositions. The difference is that I draw inspiration from my thought and feeling of the moment, rather than from thoughts and feelings from whenever doodles are made, which can often be 1 year or more in the past. I posted one result (Sympathetic Fire) and a new one is about half done now, it is not completed yet; it goes slower when waiting for inspiration to hit. I also pulled out my suitcase full of old paintings and will take a few scans of those to do blogs.

15 x 11" cold press Watercolour. 2016 (November?)

Ile de la Réunion, interior valley

A while ago I visited this small island in the middle of the Indian Ocean called Ile de la Réunion off the coast of Madagascar located near Mauritious island. After a long and winding narrow road that snaked through the old volcanic mountains, you come upon a hidden valley only known to local farmers and informed residents of the island. The specialties of the region include breathtaking scenery, flavored rum, and a certain kind of smoke-able green leaf with spiky leaves that grows well in the tropical climate. Needless to say all of these things made for quite the experience which hopefully gets conveyed in the painting. The actual scene was a little less exciting than I wanted, so in the painting I used artistic license to amp up the colour scheme and play with the cloud cover a bit to make it look like a storm was brewing. The point of these adjustments was to infuse the painting with what I was feeling, not necessarily what I was seeing. Artists sometimes forget this aspect of landscape painting especially when painting from a source photograph rather than on location. I chose to emphasize the purple-yellow complements, and created scale using a small house in the foreground.

8 x 10" cold press, 2011

Sympathetic Fire

Some say fire has no sympathy, but then again there is a fire burning inside of us every day. Food becomes power and heat through chemical reactions, the nervous system passes kinetic energy from brain to body, and blood pumps constantly. Studying and teaching physiology has taught me many of the details of how it all works, and I pass the knowledge along to students. In this painting I tried to convey the message of inner fire and organic energy using abstract shapes and flowing structures. Hopefully I pass along some ideas to the art fans out there.

While this is only a small painting, there was considerable detail and technique that went into it. The drawing has three layers superimposed on each other. The foreground has seven objects each with a different colour arranged from top right to bottom left. The middle layer has the abstract flames going from bottom right to top left, and the back layer has the viscera-inspired undulations that represent internal structure. The background was done by paining red and orange shapes and then overlaying the red with green, and the orange with blue-green. One interesting thing, I also saved this picture as a text file just for fun,  and it got translated into a huge grid of numbers. I'll paste a bit of it below, kind of interesting to see wild creativity boiled into a bunch of dry numbers. Art meets Science.

8 x 10" cold press watercolour, March 2017


Bottom part of the painting converted into numbers!!
131.000    123.333    108.333    106.000    111.333    113.333    111.000    102.000    110.000    123.333    116.000    103.333    100.000    90.000    91.000    95.000    92.333    85.667    87.667    87.333    82.000    79.000    81.333    92.333    90.333    82.000    77.000    79.000    83.000    81.000    77.000    74.333    73.333    76.000    74.000    70.667    78.333    76.333    76.000    73.667    77.333    76.333    69.667    70.667    68.333    68.667    70.667    68.667    72.667    70.667    68.333    71.000    69.333    70.000    70.333    69.000    69.333    72.333    74.667    74.667    71.333    71.000    71.667    70.333    67.667    70.667    72.000    70.667    69.333    69.333    71.667    72.000    69.000    68.667    69.000    69.667    71.000    72.000    69.667    68.667    71.000    71.667    68.667    69.000    71.333    73.333    76.000    72.333    73.333    74.667    77.333    73.667    70.333    71.667    74.000    74.667    73.000    72.667    69.667    71.667    72.000    71.667    71.333    72.333    71.000    72.333    74.000    72.667    73.667    75.000    76.667    77.333    76.667    78.667    78.667    79.333    80.333    81.000    79.333    78.667    79.000    79.667    80.667    78.667    79.000    79.000    80.000    82.000    86.000    85.333    85.000    83.333    82.000    82.667    82.333    82.333    83.333    84.667    91.667    89.333    87.667    86.667    84.667    87.333    89.333    93.333    94.333    89.000    87.667    93.000    95.667    95.000    94.667    95.000    97.333    97.667    97.333    98.667    96.333    96.667    98.667    100.000    101.000    102.333    103.333    104.333    105.333    104.667    107.667    109.333    111.333    113.000    114.667    114.000    113.667    115.667    117.333    119.000    121.000    122.333    123.000    124.000    124.333    126.333    129.000    133.000    134.333    133.333    134.000    135.000    136.000    137.333    139.000    139.000    139.333    141.333    144.000    145.667    146.000

Microglia Illustration and Graphic

Microglia are tiny cells living in the brain and spinal cord, they crawl around looking for trouble and cleaning it up. At McGill University we studied microglia and made some time lapse movies to see how they move and how they acquire particles from the outside. In a recent manuscript we were asked to provide a graphic representation of the research, and after trying some things on photoshop I was not satisfied with the results so I made a watercolour painting. After scanning I combined the illustration with some photoshopped elements to create a final graphic. Below is a copy of the graphic draft, the final version has more text on it. This is not the first time my art has found its way into science. A brain-lesion being fixed illustration was included in a magazine on multiple sclerosis and a binary cell was included on the cover of a PhD thesis once at Karolinska institute. Watercolour 6 x 8 " cold press, 2017

Ten Percent Human (Turquoise)

We are only 10% human, the other 90% is bacterium living in the gut! I guess this painting is only 10 % human too, if that! A cat, an octopus, and creepy crawlies howling at the moon, the moon scowling back. Flowing organic lines bring the composition together, as does the theme colour turquoise. The turquoise appears throughout the picture in whole form, and broken down into its sum parts, blue, green and yellow. Complementary red and brown provide the colour balance.

I have often written that I am self taught but that is not exactly the case. William Clarke was perhaps the most influential teacher I had in high school art class he urged me to fill the sketch book full of drawings and has still followed my art to this day on social media. Around the same time Sue (Coleman?) was running watercolour classes where I learned about the medium. And Dini at artisans alley, an art dealer, she gave me quite a few useful pointers and encouraged me to pursue the doodleism style that began around 2001 until now.

15 x 22" cold press watercolour November 2016.

Victor: Pirajussara, Embu, Brazil

Here is the work done by Victor (Cilei's nephew) while in Brazil. He depicts the sky, the sun, and the kite that kids were playing with at the time. The red represents some red flowers that were growing in between the buildings and the green was the foliage. It was interesting to see the difference in what he saw as a child, and as a person who lives in a similar neighborhood near São Paulo. He seemed to have a lot of fun painting too!

5.5" x 6.5" cold press watercolour, 2017, by Victor

Pirajussara, Embu, Brazil

This painting was done on location in a neighborhood called Pirajussara, in a town called Embu, Brazil. The housing is built up along a narrow valley with sloping hills that goes for as far as the eye can see. Most of the buildings in this view are red brick and plaster with tin or slate tile roofs. Instead of trying to portray the detail in this painting I went with a more abstract approach. In the last painting I posted from this trip it was much more detailed, but lacked a bit of the feeling of the scene. Cilei's nephew Victor was also painting the same scene with me, and I noticed that his work portrayed the sky, the sun, and the children playing with kites in the neighborhood, rather than focusing on the dense buildings. I plan do do  larger version of the scene, incorporating some of the thoughts and feelings that I noted when doing this work on location, to capture the "ethos".

8 x 10" cold press, Watercolour, January 2017

Pirajussara, Brazil

Here is a painting of a scene looking out the back window of a family member's house in a city called Embu in Brazil, the neighborhood is called Pirajussara. The remarkable aspect of this scene was how the community was building their homes and businesses on the rugged hillsides and in among the dense trees and foliage. There were kids flying kites, and traditional music was being played on a guitar with singing accompaniment from one of the balconies.

The weather was hot and humid making it difficult to capture detail, most of the work had to be completed in one or two layers. I also was standing up to complete the work with my equipment on a windowsill. The key to this composition is the large tree in the center, it anchors the treeline in the rear onto the line of houses on the bottom. I did the big tree first, and then painted the treeline, while sketching in the outline of the houses using pale blue paint. Waiting for it to dry took about 15 minutes, then I could get a bit of detail on top like in the roof tiles and some brick work.  Emphasizing yellow was important to give it that sun-drenched feel.

8 x 10" cold press watercolour, January 2017

PS, the painting says 2016 on it, this was not correct, I have a habit of writing the previous year on things for awhile in January!

Ibirapuera Park, São Paulo, Brazil

In downtown São Paulo, there is a very large park with a swan lake, lots of trees, an art museum, a planetarium and other cool features. There are also a lot of vendors selling coconuts and popsicles. We stopped for some pão de queijo (pronounced ponjay kayjoe) which is a salty baked cheese bread, and another treat called a coxinha (ko-cheen-oh) a kind of fried thing with hot cheese in the middle. This painting was of the main lake where the swans were, looking towards the massive downtown area which is a super dense collection of condominiums as far as the eye can see.

 Painting water is always a challenge especially when using watercolour, which is kind of ironic when you think about it. There is no white paints in traditional watercolour, so highlights on the surface of the water need to be done by leaving the paper showing. In this painting I tried something a bit new for the water, I dragged a brush sideways across the bottom very fast, creating that energy filled ripple effect.

2017 January, watercolour, cold press. 8 x 6"

Itu, Brazil

Here is the only painting I was able to make on our recent trip to Itu, a small town in Brazil. It rained the rest of the time unfortunately. You can see from the sky here that the rain was just about to start. In this area shopping is the main sport, there are many stores selling shoes, clothes, sunglasses and everything you need to look like a surfer. Succumbing to the trends I also picked up some surf shorts and a cool T shirt at a local store called Montreal Magazine of all things! The buildings are mostly colonial-era architecture as seen in the painting, re purposed for retail.

What grabbed my attention for this scene was the colours of the buildings and how they contrasted with the storm clouds. The main awning featured in the middle was a salmon-brick red, the one beside it an emerald jewel green, and the building a cotton candy lilac. There were a lot of people walking too, but I omitted them for clarity, try to imagine a crowd, and motorcycles and cars going by constantly. The other plus was that there was a marble ledge in front of a store that I could sit on.

January 2017, 8 x 10" cold press watercolour

Be Mine

Before leaving for Brazil I did this quick painting from some doodles in a book from a few years ago. I have been trying to finish the doodle book for what seems like a year and finally it is done, the last doodle was the monkey-dog you see in the top left portion of the design. I put the heart in the last second, it was not in the doodle book but for some reason it seemed to fit the theme. At the time I was listening to the album Sergent Peppers Lonely Heart Club Band and the song 'Within You Without You' was playing. that song is a psychedelic experience to match this painting.

Here is a good example of using contrasting atmosphere's, on the left a dark and cloudy background, on the right a blue sunny day. Going with that idea, I made sure the elements on the left were red-green-grey and a little bit scary, on the left things are primary colours and looking more excited so to speak. Controlling the design, colour, and attitude is important to create any work of art.

8 x 10" cold press, Watercolour, January 2017

Stress Deprivation

This one was completed just at the end of 2016, done from doodles that go back to 2014 when I had attended a scientific meeting of some sort. The theme is hard to describe, it kind of reminds me of an old favorite, "Alien Hand" I did years ago, and also "Woven World". I like the interconnections of it all, with the flowing lines going from horizon to main object. The pointy object that points downwards (mid left) was probably a deliberate choice to create a sense of sadness and anxiety. Sharp objects create angst, and pointing down signifies sadness. The first idea I read from an American book on painting composition, while the second idea was learned from the Chinese art and calligraphy classes I took 20 years ago.

Creating realistic skin tones requires a lot of practice. The best way in watercolour is to start with a blue/purple underwash and overlay with warm peach and reds when dry. Extra shadows and details can be added in successive layers. I used that formula here to make the main object, and the whole world, seem somehow alive.

7 x 10" cold press watercolour. December 2016

Love and Fear (Video by David)

Here is a cool video made by our friend from Sao Paulo, David who is a professor and an expert video jockey- this involves going to concerts and projecting images in a dynamic fashion using a turntable and on the fly video editing in sync with music. There is a new version with music built into it. Clicking on the image should play the video. This brings new meaning to the term visual arts! The painting itself is a watercolour I did awhile ago, probably 1999 if memory serves, there is a previous blog on this painting. The theme is about apprehensions and love, symbolized by a character stuck inside of a lymph node.

2016 video (of a watercolour painting!)