Montreal Skyline and Construction

One  more for the record book, this painting was done from a vantage point just behind the new mega-hospital near Vendome, looking south east. There is narrow ridge of a grassy hill here that slopes sharply in all directions. Below, the Turcot interchange project is in full swing (although no workers were there actually doing anything at the time- it was Sunday). The ramp under construction looks like it will connect the main downtown highway to the new St. Jacques bridge and Avenue St. Jacques into NDG when it is done. We are hoping there is a bike path too that will connect NDG directly to Ville St. Henry and Verdun. These kinds of paintings are really leaps of faith, you sit down on location make a few decisions and then hope for the best. The amount of detail in the actual scene was absurd- for clarity I simplified the skyscrapers and the twisted mess of highways. The little details like the construction vehicles and the grassy hill, and the foliage throughout set the stage. I was sure to include as many traffic cones as possible, using a mix of windsor red, lemon yellow, and a touch of rose madder- a mix that I like to call 'Montreal orange'  mais oui?

It took a little while to complete this one, thanks to Cilei for heading out there with me by bike and waiting patiently!

8 x 10" hot press (block) Watercolour, Sept. 2019

Tree on Benny Avenue, NDG, Montreal

I am really posting a lot of paintings lately- over the years I probably average about 32 posts, this year looks like I will tip 40 blogs- like, is that over the hill? Not all the posts are new paintings, I like to scan and show off the old collection of landscapes and abstracts partly because it helps me understand how far my skills have come along. I also hope that the people who read the blog can get some back story on me as an artist. This painting was just done yesterday on a beautiful September Sunday down near the train tracks on Benny Avenue. The colours of the bark really caught my eye, they were a mix of yellow ocher, orange and mossy green which contrasted perfectly with the turquoise roof of the school and the sky blue. It is hard to see in the scan but I managed to get an airplane-streak across the blue sky by daubing out a diagonal line when the paint was still wet. I used the same technique for the tree. The outline of the tree was made first, then the blue sky and turquoise roof was added on top making sure the washes were even. Then I daubed out the tree trunk so the paper showed again. When it dried, I laid down the bark colours and started layering the different washes. There is a healthy amount of 'Glasgow Green' in this one (A colour I bought in an art store in Glasgow it is a brilliant pea green) to give it that Autumn feeling. The foliage is composed of hundreds of small blobs of colour, including some thick windsor yellow that sits on top of the darker tones almost like a gauche.

8 x 10 " hot press (block) Water Colour. Sept. 2019

Palacio de los Momos, Zamora, Spain

Another painting from Spain, this one was done in a small town in the north west called Zamora. My notes on the paintings from Zamora, of which there were 4, says that I didn't have a map, not did I have any idea of what locations I had painted! Nowadays with the magic of google maps I figured out that this is likely outside of the Palacio de los Momos church. It was an ambitious painting, I recall the challenge of having to fit the entire building in the background and had to make it a lot shorter that it appears in real life. There is a car in there too, hidden behind the palm tree. The statue gives just enough detail to see a mother playing with a baby. Like all of the latter paintings from the 1998 trip it was done on some crusty yellow watercolour paper I bought when I was there. It was still 140lb cold press and 100% rag- the brand may have been D'Arches. 5 x 7" watercolour.

Here is a second painting from the area, I wonder if that is the same car?

Fruiterie Cite, Av Harley, NDG

If the last post was a blast from the past, then this post is a pleasant surprise from the present (or is it a pheasant from the present?). At any rate, there are a whopping 21 years between now and the 1998 Spain trip. I had scouted out a bunch of cool spots on Avenue Harley which is just south of the train tracks in NDG which included the auto mechanic painting that was posted earlier this month. This is a fruit and grocery store in the neighborhood that I go to all the time especially during the lunch hour if I don't have enough food with me in the office, it is only 5 minutes walking. The train crossing can be seen off to the left in the distance, surrounded by trees. I wanted to capture the feeling that this grocery store was sandwiched between the landscape, with a giant apartment building sitting on top and a bunch of roads, sidewalks, and trees surrounding it. The tree that pops up behind the sign (over the 'uite' ) was a bit of an accident, because I dripped water there accidentally and it destroyed the flat blue wash. With no way to fix it, I decided to turn it into a 'Vincent Van Gogh' tree- reminiscent of his cypress trees done around St. Remy. Most of the effort went into the store front and window interior, I tried to make it look as lively and colourful as possible. I was also very lucky a delivery truck didn't show up and obscure the whole view!

8 x 10"  hot press (block) watercolour. Sept. 2019

Irun, Spain

Here is one of the paintings I did in Spain way back when in 1998! This was a scene from Irun, a town on the border of France and Spain where the trains go through. I was waiting for a train transfer at the time and must have found this scene while seated on the platform.
There were 157 of these small postcard-sized paintings from the trip, luckily I kept up a list of all of them and scanned the papers so its on file and I can double check the location. Most of them have the information on the back too. There is a Cathedral and some houses in the background. The wires crossing the sky were a nice touch. By the time I was heading back to Paris to catch my flight I had over 150 paintings under my belt and my confidence was at an all time high. There was no fear at all here- the painting tackles a train locomotive on train tracks with the electrical wires, a town-scape, and a cathedral in the background for good measure, all on a postcard sized paper! A lot of the paper went yellow with time, in particular the second half roughly, because I ran out of paper and had to buy some in Spain. Who knows how old it was when I bought it, but that paper may have already had 50 years on it or something! So the yellowish tone in this painting is from the paper stock.
 
5 x 7" cold press Watercolour, July 1998, painting #154

Beaver Lake, Mont Royal, Montreal

At the end of the day I found this scene up on Mont Royal near Beaver Lake. There is a large sloping hill of grass where people like to sit and sun-bathe and relax, and smoke weed! When I caught a whiff of the wacky tabacky it gave me a psychedelic hippie vibe which inspired the painting to be a little more trippy. The sky and tree line look more like layers in a cake or the bottom of the ocean. This painting was deceptively hard due to the strong back lighting from the sun. Back lighting is when your scene or subject has the main light source behind it, which creates silhouettes and forward casting shadows. Shapes, forms, and colours are all the more difficult to interpret. It also means that you (the artist) are going to get pounded by sun the whole time. I guess you could say I got baked while doing this painting.There were so many seagulls that I included one in the bottom left, it was walking around looking for handouts. Or maybe I imagined the seagull?

5 x 7" cold press watercolour, Sept. 2019

Mont Royal, Montreal

Up on Mont Royal there are several kilometers of trails winding around the forest with spectacular views of the city. Here, the view is looking northwards, the buildings are part of Outremont or the village of Mt Royal. I liked the fact that the tree was blocking most of the view, and the city-scape was kind of peeking through the bushes. There were a lot of people around so they were looking over my shoulder from time to time.

Traditionally, watercolour is meant to be painted from light to dark, meaning that the lighter parts go on the paper before the darker parts. I usually follow this rule because it keeps the water clear for longer; If you start with dark and rinse your brush the water turns dark and cloudy right away and all the subsequent colours will be muddied. Another way I avoid this problem is to have two cups of water: one clean, one dirty. Just before I pick up fresh paint, I dip the brush in the clean water. By the end though, usually both cups of water are dirty! In this painting I completed the lighter background scenery and then overlaid the dark tree and leaves. You can see where the bark of the tree blended with the mid-ground foliage and turned green in the middle of the trunk. I liked the feeling that the tree was being absorbed by the landscape. The tree also looked like an orchestra conductor standing up and waving its arms.... The Maestro of Landscape?

5 x 7" cold press watercolour, Sept. 2019

NDG St. Jacques St. , Montreal

Keen on painting more outdoors, I took a quick bike ride down to St. Jacques Street which is the very south part of NDG past the train tracks. I am sitting in a large grocery store parking lot looking north towards the big apartment complexes on Maissoneuve and along Cavendish. These urban scenes are tricky to compose because there is a ton of detail to pick from and everything is moving. Those cars stay for 30 seconds if you are lucky before the light changes, and the cloudy sky was shifting and churning. The only things that remains the same are the traffic cones, which are depicted in the lower left part of the paining. With all of the distractions in this composition it is easy to not notice the main character, right smack in the middle foreground, the young tree blowing in the wind. I wanted the tree to look like it was a maestro, that it was somehow at the center, and almost conducting the weather and the traffic.

Since studying Vincent Van Gogh, I have really tried to bring more character and expressiveness into the composition elements, to give everything a sense of being. One of the students in my laboratory recently gifted me a small Van Gogh book and I got to see a bunch of paintings I hadn't seen before. It inspired me to continue painting landscapes, something that had fallen out of my oeuvre for awhile. From reading about art I also learned the word oeuvre, it is meant to describe the accumulated works of an artist. I'll just give a quick shout out to Mr. Clarke, a high school art teacher of mine and avid facebook user- he was the one that really instilled the passion for art history and being analytical about how the old masters accomplished things.

8 x 10" hot press (block), watercolour 2019

Parc Ex, Montreal 2019

At the corner of Rue de Bellechasse and St. Dominique in Little Italy there is a big construction project going on, looks like an old industrial park has been rezoned for condos and retail. In the background of this painting you see the elevated portion of Rosemont Boulevard, in the foreground is the walled-off construction zone with some equipment visible over the fence and of course, the ever-present traffic signs and cones. I painted a construction scene once and it was a big hit, at least it was sold to a colleague who now hangs it proudly over the toilet. Don't worry, I have one of my paintings in the bathroom too, and what better place to put an artistic tribute to Montreal construction than the bathroom?

I spent a lot of time on the rue barre sign in the foreground because it needed a lot of detail being the first thing a viewer will see when they look at the painting. It was an interesting touch to include, like, saying, don't look here ! Look somewhere else! The base of the sign was made from three washes, and two texture overlays, along with two different shadow effects (the cast-shadow behind, and the shadow between the object and the ground at the front of the yellow dome). The background items took a long time too, but I made sure to keep them looking brief and fresh with minimal detail. Controlling the level of detail helps give the illusion of depth, and also helps the viewer know where to look. I'm getting good at doing that construction-orange colour but I wont tell you the secret formula!

5 x 8 " cold press. Watercolour, September 2019