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