Verdun, Montreal, Dog Park

Verdun is known to be green and brown (in french: Vert et Brun, which kind of sounds like Verdun in English). That of course refers to the distinctive brown brick buildings and plenty of green trees around the neighborhood. Verdun is actually where my Dad grew up back when grandpa was working at the Glen train yards which used to be a big train interchange and repair facility. Now the old industrial land is park land, which includes sports fields, trails, a new beach, and a sizable dog park. I was sitting amid the dog park here, luckily dogs tend to ignore people ... there is important business like sniffing butt and chasing each other around, and the dogs like to do that too! The sun was rapidly going down for this painting, I had about 15 minutes to get it done. You can see the long shadows from the objects stretching all the way to the background. You might wonder now, why is their a giant construction pylon (Montreal Orange) in the middle of a dog park? I wondered the same thing, but there it is. It didn't stop the dogs though, you can see one tearing about on the left of the scene below the bench.

Landscape painters all face the same challenge when doing work on location, that is, the weather and the sun.  You start the painting, and by the time you get an hour into it the sun changes, the cloud changes, and the whole scene looks different due to the lighting. It can even rain, then you have to abandon the project. Claude Monet used to have many canvasses for the same location, one for each type of weather (full sun, overcast, sunset etc), and then he would bring the appropriate canvas to the scene that day. There was another painting I forget who, (was it Corot?) who would install a wood pole in the ground so he could set up his easel in the exact same spot when the conditions were right. Van Gogh painted fast, and he filled in a lot of the canvas in his studio from memory and imagination. Somehow the artist needs to have access to the subject matter long enough to capture all the detail. You could take a high resolution colour photo (not possible in the old days), but in my experience that approach tends to suck the life out of the finished product. I paint small postcard-sized paintings on location and it only takes 30-45 minutes usually to complete it, so the changing conditions are not too much of an issue. In this example, there was not enough time for the paint to dry, so I added some details at home later, including the dog, the outline of the bench, some of the pylon and pole details, and the leafs and trunks definitions. The black dog was a homage to Van Gogh who liked to put random black characters in his paintings. The dog looks a little like a L.S. Lowry detail, even though I didn't know that artist when I did this painting. I found out about Lowry from a Netflix documentary on how to detect forgeries.

5 x 7" Cold press, watercolour, October 2019