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
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