Vincent Study 4

Why not make it an even thirtytwo blogs for the year? Here is another, you guessed it, Van Gogh inspired study in watercolour. The key here was to replicate the effect of Starry Night the work he did while he was (voluntarily) staying at a mental asylum in southern France. I layered on about three or four different kinds of brush strokes to give the sky that abstract feeling, it kind of looks like a fireworks explosion. The sky has a moon, even though the rest of the scene is set in twilight. Two people watch the madness from a far. Happy new year!

6 x 8" hot press thin stock, watercolour, 2018

 

 On the B side was another abstract, I called it 'Desert Rose Garden'

NDG Montreal, Somerled Avenue

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Here I am catching up on the blogs, my new years resolution is to update the blog more regularly, and also look into creating a book of these works and the captions. Probably one themes with landscapes, the other on the abstracts. This year was a gradual process with my art, as of 2017 I slowed down a lot on the number of paintings and focused on original ideas and high quality finish. As the latter part of 2018 rolled around things picked up mostly after the trip to Amsterdam and the visit to the Van Gogh museum, and reading the book on his career. I kept thinking that his life ended at the age of late 30's, and just imagine what he could have done if he had lived longer. I was looking for a turning point stylistically, and I think I found it this year, not just in using a lot of yellow (like in the parking posts seen at the grocery store parking lot in this painting),. but in understanding the method, the journey. Unfortunately Van Gogh's journey took him to the stars too early. But his influence lives on.

6 x 10" hot press (block) watercolour Fall 2018

NDG Montreal, End of Town

As I try to make at least thirty blogs for this year I find myself typing a lot faster. This painting was done after the Amsterdam trip, late Sept. or early Oct. when the weather was just starting to get cold and the leaves had turned and were starting to blow off the trees. This scene is looking south west down St. Jaques St. towards the highway on ramp and into the distance. The building on the left  side is the U haul dept with a giant poster on the side of it. I made the light yellow because I was trying to experiment with a lot of yellow like Van Gogh did. If you read my past few blogs you know I have been on a Van Gogh kick lately, I think what inspired me was that he had an unconventional and uninhibited painting style that really conveyed the feeling of the scene. I added the swirls last to complete the impression of a powerful swirling overcast sky. I did this on the hot press watercolour block that I picked up in Glasgow.

6 x 10" hot press (block) watercolour Fall 2018

Vincent Study 3

Here is another small study inspired by Van Gogh's work. He had these really bright suns in some of his hay field paintings even though the scenes were kind of overcast or even twilight probably because he painted all day and conditions changed, and he made modifications afterwards to the paintings. I exaggerated the sun quite a bit here making it fill the entire sky- it looks more like a fluorescent ball of yarn than a sun. The pine tree is a Canadian thing but it was meant to represent the cypress trees he put in the paintings. And the hay field, well that is just a hay field.

6 x 8" hot press thin stock, Nov 2018

 

On the B side was another abstract, I called it 'Walks Around the Blocks'.

 

Vincent Study 2

Going with the Vincent Van Gogh theme this small study uses the colours purple and yellow and creates life like organic forms. I guess the figure in the middle is more of my style though...the blob meets the thing. The trees in the middle ground were modeled after the trees I painted in Amsterdam near the hotel. If there was somebody riding their bike in the foreground the scene would be complete. I also used blue orange complement you can see in the middle ground fields and background mountains.

6 x 8" hot press thin stock, Nov. 2018

On the B side there is another abstract, I called it Vincent, incomplete. Because the painting was incomplete, and he also left a lot of paintings incomplete due to his untimely death.

Vincent Study 1

In a short time I produced a number of small studies on the hot press thin stock paper that I eventually used for the painting of Five Apples in St. Remy. I wanted to get used to the paper because it was so thin it handled quite differently than the usual cold press 140 pound press paper. The 140 pound is thicker and has a better finish on it so the washed of colour hold well and the contrast is sharper. The thin stock stuff seems to soak up the paint making it look kind of flat and dull. I figured out that lines looked good on this paper, and really tried to use expressive brush strokes to create the image. The other thing I was experimenting with was Vincent Van Gogh's style he developed in his relatively short (8 year) painting career. There are several elements here that he used: the sun is bright yellow even though the sky is a purple-grey, and the whole scene actually looks more overcast than sunny-day. He used paradoxical lighting to create dream-like pictures. Even so, I couldn't help putting some yellow reflections on the heart-like object, the mountains, the grassy field, and the ocean. The other thing he often did was create a plunging (seemingly sloping towards you) foreground, which makes the viewer feel like they are floating or flying or smoking something. In retrospect I had been using this trick for awhile without knowing, for example in "The 2010 Solution". I also had Lawren Harris in mind when I painted those strange looking mountains in the background. There was a time when I was trying not to copy famous artists, then I just figured that if you could paint like one of them then more power to you! Not to mention many artists including Vincent Van Gogh copied other artist's paintings and borrowed stylistic elements. I'm like Sylar from Heroes, the bad guy hero who stole other heroes powers.

8 x 10" hot press thin stock. November 2018

 On the B side is another abstract, I call this one Voyage to the Legendary Isle of Sixe (LIS)...

 

Five Apples for Vincent (still life of five apples in a hay field in St. Remy)

For some time Vincent Van Gogh was at the mental hospital in St. Remy, Southern France where he painted some of his most iconic work including Starry Night. Many of the paintings he made were in the fields behind the hospital which were surrounded by a stone wall and backed by a wonderful landscape dotted with cottages and rolling mountains. The golden hayfields would be the subject of many of his final paintings. He would also discover the cypress pine tree motif in this area, one of which appears on the left front of Starry Night. After visiting the museum in Amsterdam and reading the book on Van Gogh by Taschen I was inspired to try and fuse his style with some other ideas I was working on at the time. I pulled an old painting out of my portfolio called "Apple Eye, Violet Sky" it was part of the doodleism lab book paintings, and decided to redo the painting in several different ways. This was another feature of Van Gogh's work, he would paint series of motifs making consecutive improvements and copies of the original. He did this because he was self taught and was learning from his trial and error, but also to fill the winter months and rainy days when it was impossible to paint outdoors as he liked to do. So I went to the grocer and bought five distinctive apples, then quickly made a practice version similar to what you see here. I resisted the urge to eat the apples, and made the finished work a few days later. The painting is larger than I usually do because I wanted it to fit in the frame that I use now to show a painting at home. The idea of specifically making a painting for decoration was another inspiration of Van Gogh, when his friend Gauguin came to visit, Vincent wanted some decorative paintings to make the apartment look inviting to entice his friend to stay. The result of that initiative was the infamous sunflower paintings.

My painting is a still life of five apples trying to escape a hay field in St. Remy. In fact, something that would make a pretty cool title, so I will put that in parenthesis. The apples are pushed up very high in the composition , and against the stone wall, making it look like they are blasting off or flying away. The biggest apple perspective wise (fourth from left) practically has a comet tail of fire coming off it (the hay). In the distant upper right there is a cottage and a very tiny figure of a painter with an easel representing Vincent. The top left has a city skyline which is a homage to the original painting I was working from (Apple Eye, Violet Sky). The cypress trees along the left edge are more tributes to Van Gogh and meant to fill the empty space there. Unfortunately it was hard to get a proper photo in the poor light, the original is more pastel-toned, while the photo you see is over saturated and unevenly lit. I will try to get a better photo if the sun comes out. This was the first painting I made with my new Series 7 Windsor Newton no 6. and no. 8 brushes that my parents picked up for me from Curry's in Ontario. They are pure sable and really handle the paint very well.

 24 x 36" hot press (thin stock) December 2018

Cape Cod, USA

This is another painting from the Cape Cod trip done about a decade ago. The scene is on the main street of the old part of town, I don't recall what the building was but it looks like a town hall or museum or something. There is a lot of detail in this very small painting, normally I would have simplified things but here you see the brick work detailing,  window frames, flag with stars and stripes, trees, shingles, etc. If I remember correctly there were some very large trees in the filed that obscured the view, and I had decided to edit them out to get the full building in the painting. I like how this painting pretty much captures the moment, the sun was just about to go down and this was probably the last painting of the day.
5 x 7" cold press Watercolour, ~2009?

Beach time! USA, Dominican Republic

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here are some nice warm looking beach scenes to enjoy during this cold and wet winter! The first one was done in Cape Cod, where there are beautiful white sand beaches for miles and lots of hot sun. One thing to be aware of of is that the Atlantic water is very very cold! The scene was neat because the sand dune was like a giant wave, and the sign was like someone surfing on it. 

 

 

 

 

 

The second scene is from Punta Cana beach in Dominican Republic, looking up at one of the palm trees and a local bird with coconuts. That is not what is sound like, its an actual bird, and coconuts, well never mind. I managed to fit the topaz water in at the bottom of the painting, it was much warmer to swim in as compared to Cape Cod. To make all the subtle yellow tones work it is important to keep in some purple tones. The Cape Cod painting has purple shadows and washes on the sand, while the Punta Cana has some purple shadows on the tree and hatch roofs.
5 x 7 cold press 2009 or 2010?

View from Glasgow Green, Glasgow, Scotland

There were a lot of nice scenes in this large park called Glasgow Green, including a picturesque cultural museum and botanical garden. Maybe I was saturated with pretty scenery because what caught my eye was this industrial park across the Clyde River which could be viewed from one of the park benches in the Glasgow Green. On the roof of the building there was a work crew (not shown in the painting!) and I got the feeling that they were staring at me, perhaps wondering why somebody was making a painting of their factory. It took some time to complete this one, and midway through painting this it looked like a total disaster because all the paint was running together. Things started to dry and I got the defining lines onto the equipment on the roof, and the features on that glowing smoke and the reflections on the river, then everything came together. I love the little car in the parking lot, it really gives a sense of perspective and makes the scene come alive. For once there was no rain interrupting me, the weather held up and it was just quite cold and windy but I am used to that!
10 x 7" hot press (block), Sept. 2018

St. Enoch Subway Station, Glasgow, Scotland

This is a modern architectural addition to Glasgow's subway system, the St. Enoch station. It lies in the core of the downtown nearby one of the original subway stations that is now a cafe. The structure was made of mostly transparent glass, with stainless steel at the bottom. When I sat on this location it seemed like the impossible mission of watercolours, but I knew if I could get the perspective drawing correct on the complex shape of the subway entrance then the rest of the painting would hang together. The other challenge was that the landscape behind the glass was warped and altered by the curved and transparent glass panels. Not to mention is was about to rain here, but luckily it held off until I was complete.

5.5 x 7.5" hot press. Sept. 2018

Botanical Garden, Glasgow, Scotland

Another scene from Glasgow, this one was to the north side of the city, in the botanical gardens. They had two large complexes filled with tropical plant and flowers. This one had a desert theme inside, some of the trees reached the very top of the structure which was about five stories tall. From the outside the glass was fogged and frosted, so you could just see a blur of green and yellow. The glass panels were surrounded in very delicate white rod iron which I attempted to capture using negative space. In terms of difficulty level, this scene was easily a ten on a scale of ten, where ten is the most difficult. The reason is that painting white means that you leave the paper showing, and then paint around the shape you want. Considering the amount of thin white shapes and the complex geometry, not to mention the reflections on the glass, well, it was a real struggle. I felt like this painting was a bit of a disaster but when I saw it dry afterwards it seemed to work pretty well, at least I get the same feeling looking at this painting as I got looking at the original scene.
 I did another painting of the other structure in the botanical gardens, this one had quite a different construction it was a lot of glass, with a dark brown steel structure with more angular designs. It was a lot easier than the other one, lets say a seven out of ten on our difficulty scale because I could paint all the complex reflections and blurry plants behind the glass, and then apply the steel structure over top at the end. In fact, I started with a thin outline just to get the shape right. The final touches were the pigeons hanging out on the edge of the roof!

Watercolour hot press 5.5 x 7.5" Sept. 2018

Downtown Glasgow, Scotland

Here are two scenes from downtown Glasgow in the heart of the shopping district, the old building on the very right of the painting with the mossy bricks is the museum. The museum used to be a house back in the 19th century before it was donated to the city. On the left are some early 20th century style buildings with living space on the top floors and retail on the bottom. In the background is  more modern steel and glass office building. I liked the contrast between these constructions, the old being made in stone, the medium built with wood and brick, and the new with steel and glass. This also tells part of the story of Glasgow, and ancient trading center that went through many booms and busts over the years. In the 1990's they worked a lot on improving the living conditions and community atmosphere in the city. It was a great place to be for a visit. And yes, it was raining when I did this painting, although very lightly. I was lucky though because just when I finished it really started to pour. On another day I painted a similarly themed painting in the downtown, the weather was better for this one. It is near the central square where a lot of people (and pigeons) hang out. The pink building is an apartment complex, it actually had a slogan written on it but I left that out since the pattern was difficult enough as it was to capture on a small painting surface.

5.5 x 7.5" hot press watercolours, Sept. 2018

Clyde River, Glasgow, Scotland

Glasgow has a river running through it called the Clyde river, it is a rough cold looking river that seems to define the city. Along the shore it is developed with sidewalks and parkland, crossing it are a number of historic bridges. While painting this scene a couple of locals cam by to talk to me and introduced themselves. They were very friendly, I asked them what the name of the bridge was and they didn't know. It was hard to understand the locals anyways with their thick Scottish accent. I remember it being very cold and windy when I did this, perhaps that is why I didn't sign it. The energy of the weather is captured in the clouds, the rippling water, and the shrubs which look like they are blowing in the wind. I left out a white rod iron fence that was at the edge of the sidewalk, it would have made painting the Clyde river impossible, that is called artistic license!

5.5 x 7.5" hot press. September 2018

University of Glasgow, Scotland

University of Glasgow is a very old University around five hundred years! As a consequence they do not have water fountains anywhere and I remember quite well running out of water and having to go back into town to buy bottled water. The scarcity of drinking water seemed silly considering just how much rain they have. Armed with water I could complete this painting, although in a dramatic twist of irony it did start raining in the middle of my session. The last twenty minutes there was a drippy mist coming down as you can see on the grass at the bottom. I had to really rush, and when I put the painting away in my bag to escape the downpour it got messed up a bit in the middle. Considering how much detail there was in the architecture I did the best I could to rush out the bricks windows and doors. The brick was that sandy orange and the grass was a brilliant emerald.

5.5 x 7.5" hot press, watercolour September 2018

Canal with Swan, Amsterdam, Netherlands

Swans were swimming along with other aquatic fowl on this narrow canal. Lily pads gently rocking back and forth in the light wind, water rippling. The apartment block in the background (barely visible) reflecting off the water's undulating surface. The canal itself, a murky, sepia brown. I knew I had to try an make a painting of this scene, and there was a convenient bench next to the canal where I could sit. This is the second try, the first attempt did not work out so well but I thought about it for a long time and came up with another technical approach. To be honest, this is probably the highest technical difficulty I have ever attempted on location or even in the studio. The water has several things going on- the murky brown colour coming from the sediment, the blue door, white windows, orange brick reflecting off the surface, the ripples of water blowing in a distinctive pattern and catching reflections from the sky. Then we have several lighter tone shapes in the swan, the two birds and the lily pads which have to be depicted on top of a darker background. Remember that there is no white paint here, so I had to get the complicated water effect around the tight spaces of the swan and lily pads. The adjustment I made in this version was to make the outline of the lily pads first and then paint around them. I also lifted some paint to create the lily pad stems disappearing into the muck.

5.5 x 7.5 hot press, September 2018

Amstel River, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Along the way to the conference I had to cross the Amstel river which divides the East part of the city. It was a very foggy day but it was not raining that morning giving me the chance to sit down on a staircase and do this picture. I am looking north, on the bottom of the scene is a launching dock for a rowing club. People were very active around the river, they were jogging along paths, and rowing up and down on the water, and of course, there were hundreds of cyclists here getting to and fro. It was very noisy to, because the rush hour traffic was at its peak.  Mind you, their version of rush hour has about one third the number of cars that we have in Montreal because so many people take public transit or ride their bikes. To get the sky right I actually went over it a second time a few days later because it was way too light in the first version. The sky and the water really felt like they were one continuous object.

5" x 7.5" hot press, Watercolour. Sept. 3 2018

Boerenwetering Canal Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Google maps helped me find out the name of this canal, it is near the RAI convention center where I was attending an immunology conference. I walked through the woods that you see at the top right of the painting but couldn't find a place to sit with a clear view of the canal so I kept walking and found an overpass that had public seating facing the direction of the canal. I have a feeling this seating was intended for homeless people because it was shielded from view and contained quite a bit of rubbish and I didn't feel all to safe there to be honest. There was also a highway that was right behind me and it was very noisy so I wore earplugs to mute the sound a bit. The image shows the canal on a top-down perspective, with the wonderful variety of boats that have different shapes and colours. I especially liked the reflection on the water, the whole forest was reflecting off, with just a gentle breeze causing ripples. This painting was very complex and stretched me to the max, by the time I finished my body was pretty sore I could barely get up. I usually finish a painting in one go, like 20-30 minutes this one probably went closer to an hour to complete. 5.5 x 7.5" hot press

NDG/Côte St. Luc Montreal

When I returned from the trip to Europe and Scotland I had plenty of practice painting scenes in the rain or between rain storms. There was no exception back in Montreal. The first one I did was interrupted by rain, you can see the little dots on the painting where the paint was still wet when the rain droplets hit the paper. In a way, the dots gave a rain effect to the picture. I came back a day or two later to the same spot and finished the painting as you see it here. The birds on the wire were only there on the first day and they flew off pretty quick when the rain came, so I added them from memory on the second sitting. 
 The impressionist painters of the 19^th century had the same problem, that is, the weather was constantly changing and when painting outside you are at its mercy. The masters like Monet would have several paintings going at once so he would pick one that suited the weather conditions of the day and keep working on it. Van Gogh used to work on paintings outdoors, and then put in finishing touches during the off season, in fact many of the bright sunny skies in his paintings may have been added afterwards.

7x 10" hot press (block), September 2018

Ringvaart Canal near Hotel Casa, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

It is always special to see real paintings in a gallery as opposed to seeing images of paintings on the computer screen, smart phone, or even an art book. I had studied Vincent van Gogh in high school and of course seen his work in various reproductions, but it was not until our recent trip to Amsterdam that I got the chance to see his paintings up close in the Van Gogh museum, or at least as up close as you can get in a crowded museum! When I saw his paintings in real life I appreciated what he had done with the colours and brush work. I also noticed that he had a particular way of giving each part of the painting a sense of life, whether it was a tree, a mountain, the sky, a hay field, the sun, a sunflower. When we got back from the museum it was raining a little bit but I was determined to go out and use something of what I had learned from seeing van Gogh's work. In this small watercolour the trees are shown along the canal (which you can not see in this view it is behind the berm of grass) each with its own character. Its like the trees could walk off on their own! The green of the grass is more luminescent than it was in real life, and the red of the roof gives it a nice complementary colour. The tree leaves are infused with green, orange, and a variety of yellows. For good measure I included an ever-present cyclist whipping by on a bike path so fast that I could only capture the back wheel. I kept the figure simple and almost all black which is the way van Gogh painted his figures. It is not signed because the rain picked up and I had to get out of there. The other cool thing is that I stupidly forgot to bring water with me, so I used some water from a nearby puddle to make this painting, there was a bit of sand in it. A real Amsterdam painting through and through.

5.5 x 7.5 " hot press, Watercolour, September 6^th 2018

Amstel Station Bicycle Racks, Amsterdam

Here is a painting that I almost did not do because it seemed impossible. There are so many bikes in Amsterdam that they built two-level bike racks where a metal roller is pulled out and the bike loaded up on the second level. As a result there was a veritable pile of bikes, hundreds, outside of the Amstel station (east part of Amsterdam). I completed the upper part of the painting including the sky, building and tree in the middle, and then faced with a blank piece area of paper at the bottom I painted the bikes. Not knowing how to accurately paint hundreds of bikes in a 3 x2 inch space, I decided on an abstract approach. The wheels, handles, seats and myriad of colours were completed in a mere 5 minutes. To my surprise it worked out very well, the feel I get looking at the painting is the same as the feel I got looking at the scene, even more than a month later I remember. Lastly I filled in the trees behind the station, did the windows quickly, and lifted some colour off the tree because I wanted the tree to look like the wind was blowing and the leaves were moving, reflecting the sky.

5.5 x 7.5" hot press watercolour. Sept. 2018

Centraal Station Amsterdam, Netherlands

Amsterdam is a very touristy place, the main area where they tend to congregate is near the central station (central is spelled with two a's in Dutch). In this small painting you see the central station in the background, it is actually a really long building that goes on for about a large city block! In front you see a restaurant/cafe that was built upon a pier where the tour boats come and go for canal tours. I am sitting on the opposite side of the canal, looking back toward the central station. On the patio near the edge of the canal people are no doubt enjoying their expensive espresso's and latte's talking about Van Gogh or Anne Frank.

We arrived in Amsterdam late afternoon and made our way up to central station with about an hour and half of light left in the sky. It was hard to find anywhere to sit because the Dutch are not big on installing benches anywhere in the city. So I sat on a large stone staircase that had many tourists sitting down enjoying the atmosphere. And by atmosphere, I mean weed. Like, I smelled a lot of weed wafting around, but I tried not to inhale ; ) I completed about 15 paintings while in Amsterdam and will be posting some of the highlights on the blog. One common feature is the ever present canal. The water was difficult to paint, it is a muddy green colour, and it reflects the blue sky and the architecture.

5.5 x 7.5 " hot press watercolour, Sept. 2018

Sunflowers, NDG, Montreal

Here is a small painting I did of a large sunflower growing in one of the community garden boxes on Somerled Avenue near Prince of Wales. I exaggerated the proportions to make it look like more of a close up, in fact, I was sitting all the way across the street since there was no way to sit closer. In the background is the Metro grocery store, but I put windows on it so that it looked more like a building. That is called artistic license! This is on 140lb hot press for a change ( I usually use cold press). The conditions were extremely humid so the paint wasn't drying fast, which created the blurred effect. I kind of like that, it draws even more attention to the main sunflower at the top. I wanted to paint these flowers to practice!

5.5 x 7.5" hot press, Watercolour. Aug 2018

Ile de La Réunion

Here are a few paintings from my trip to Ile de La Réunion a small island in the middle of the Indian Ocean. The first two are on the top of the old volvanic ridge that forms part of St. Denis, a city on the north of the island. It is quite built up there, in fact the painting of the tree was done next to a large grocery store, that fence in the background is the parking lot. The one with the road is just in the suburbs, you wouldn't believe how good the view is from some of these houses. I emphasized the light and colour by using plenty of bright yellow.The last painting here is the pink flower growing on the side of the road that leads up the side of the old volcano. In the background you see the Indian ocean. It wasn't very safe there due to all the cars and the possibility of falling rocks. That's why they call it intense island I guess! 2011 Watercolour.

Heat Wave

Recent events inspired this painting, namely, a heat wave in Montreal! It is literally melting temperature here, you could fry an egg on the sidewalk and some bacon too. This painting was originally something else, and I scraped off the paint and turned it upside down, and then created the image. The last thing I did was the patterns in the orange blob in the sky which is meant to be a stylized fire cloud.

5 x 7 " hot watercolour, July 2018

Walkley Street, NDG, Montreal

Is this the first watercolour painting of Walkley street ever? Nobody knows, but it is the first one I have done! It was something I wanted to do for awhile but just couldn't find the right scene since Walkley street is basically a long row of condo style housing with a lot of trees. This scene caught my eye because of the flower bush and the large tree casting shadows over the building and the lawn.

Painting details like these flowers is very difficult in watercolour because you cannot put lighter paint on top of darker paint. This time I tried something different, I made the shape of the bush in red/pink first, keeping the top right of the bush lighter to suggest a highlight. Then I put the green on top to create the outline of the flowers. The results were good I think, the bush looks together and realistic. The rest of the painting was just there to fill in, I wanted the tree to have bright yellow. There is no sky shown in this painting but you still get the feel of a bright blue day.

5 x 7 " cold press watercolour, June 2018

Bakery in NDG, Montreal

A few doors down from where we live in NDG there is a little, old fashioned bakery and deli that sells pastries pasta lunch meat, sauces and that sort of thing. I tried shopping there once but it seemed to be more of a social club where the customer talks endlessly to the shopkeeper and tries a samples of everything before actually buying anything. The good news is that they give you free samples while you wait! The unique colour of the brick work and the contrasting bright colours of the sign and awning caught my attention for this painting. Across the street is the Royal Bank, but I put the current year on the sign instead!

Painting these kind of ivory colours in watercolour is very challenging like you see in the bricks. I accomplished the effect with a layer of warm yellow-orange to give it the brightness, then overlayed some neutral greenish-grey, very thin. When dry I looked at the actual bricks and adjusted the tone a bit using a third layer of very thin warm yellow in places to give is a shimmer. The brick detail is done in warm grey with a smaller brush. The effect is better observed in the original painting, but the scan version here does it justice.

5 x 7" cold press watercolour, June 2018

River in Ontario

Here is a recent painting I did in Ontario while I was out there at a Science Conference. There wasn't much time off so I just made one painting near the hotel I was staying at close to campus. Since I left there not much has changed, except there was a lot of construction going on, so much that I thought I was back in Montreal.

I tried to copy the old master style of painting these kind of scenes. To do this I kept the brush strokes thick and colourful, and used a composition reminiscent of Monet. The person on the embankment just sort of showed up for a moment, probably looking for cans and bottles. I made their shirt red just to give some contrast to the green.

5 x 7" June 2018, cold press watercolour

Mallorytown, Ontario

This view from the highway 401 was at a rest stop near Mallorytown during a brief stop there. I mean brief! I think this painting was completed in less the fifteen minutes. It helped that the conditions were ideal, sunny, dry air, and not wet or rainy for early May. The rock formations under the tree are classic Canadian shield rocks that can be seen along the highway all the way through Kingston. I tried to capture the cars too, just a few brush strokes on top of the rocks you have to look carefully to even see.

Painting objects on top of things in watercolour is very difficult because the medium is transparent. You can paint things that are darker on top, like the lamp post and the tree trunk and branches in this picture. But the lighter, white highlights have to be left blank from the beginning, like the clouds, the curb, the other sparkling details. For that reason it was impossible to really paint cars in front of the rocks. If I was using acrylic then no problem, let the first layer dry then put the next layer on top, any colour or tone. That is just one of the challenges with using watercolour.

5 x 7 " cold press, watercolour, May 2018

The Questioner

This painting was actually untitled when I finished it, then since it looked like a big walking question mark I decided to call it the questioner. It was done on a small cutting that I had leftover from some other piece of paper that I had cut to size. It was mostly done using layers of paint, a technique called glazing where the thin washes dry on top of each other. That gives the work an eerie glow. 

4 x12 "

Rain Surf

Rain or shine surf is up! This painting was inspired by a song by Marcos Pagu translated as "Returned Rain After Ten Years" a friend of our friend David who makes artistic projection projects in São Paulo.

Community Connections, Brazil

Communities by definition are connected within, and to the outside by roads. In São Paulo these communities could be seen along the highways, between the condo sky scrapers, and behind the shopping malls. Separated by only a few broken walls the houses were jammed in together, made from cinder block and red brick, with the occasional plastered and painted construction crawling up the hill sides. Here in the communities of Brazil, connected by washed out dirt roads, families live,work and play oblivious to the passers by.

This painting was done entirely from memory and some small sketches I made while in São Paulo. I wanted to capture the spirit of the community and depict the chaos of buildings cars and people. Among the where's-waldo-like design there are many details that are typical. The blue bucket shapes on top of the houses are rain water collectors, the satellite dishes are for TV, the musicians on the balcony are playing songs (imagine the voice and the instruments), the car parked up on the mountain side is apparently defying gravity, the kites are flying in the big blue sky, the condo buildings grow up on the horizon. But the one image that stuck in my mind most of all was a mother walking hand in hand with her child, slowly making her way up the steep, coppery-coloured dirt road. That seemed to say it all...

Watercolour 22 x 30 " cold press, December 2017