Loyola Park (Danger!), NDG

I started this painting on Wednesday but it starting raining so I came back on Saturday to finish it. Usually I don't paint pictures of kids parks but since the pandemic got worse they closed all of them and put police danger tape around the apparatus. In this painting you see the yellow tape blowing around on top of the slide and on the ground. A man was practicing boxing moves too, although he was actually behind me a ways off, I just glanced out of the corner of my eye and composed his likeness into the scene. The slide, the mans pants, and the sky were all different shades of blue. This painting is part of what I am calling the 'pandemic blues' paintings.

For 30 years the only shades of blue I used were french ultramarine, cobalt blue, and cereulean blue. Around 2008 or so I stopped using cobalt blue, and used cereulean blue sporadically until 2020. Recently, I learned that french ultramarine is not really blue, it is called blue-violet, and it can be acid sensitive. In this painting, I used another blue called phthalo blue for the slide, pants, and the sky, which created that bright blue shade. Did you know there is another shade of blue called azure, and a lime-green called chartreuse? The official name for cyan-green is 'spring green'. You learn something new every day.

5 x 7" rough press, watercolour, April 2020