Montreal, St. Laurent, Lufa Farms

Here is an interesting painting done in ville St. Laurent at the Lufa Farms location where they grow rooftop greenhouse vegetables and distribute a wide variety of organic local foods. As a result of the pandemic lockdown they are doing a first come first serve system and deliveries have stopped to the normal pickup points. One option is to pick up your basket at the center. So I rode my bike up there today just to see if I could make my way in good time and it took about 40 minutes to go 10.5 km. Luckily there is practically no cars on the road and the air is clean so I had a great ride.

Composition is the most important part of any painting no matter what the subject or the media. Balance is an important aspect of composition, it means to have approximately equal 'visual weight' on both halves of the painting. Of course nothing weights anything in a painting, but the human visual system is good at judging things like weight and distance. If you had an elephant on one side and a mouse on the other side, the picture would appear to be unbalanced. In this painting, everything is leaning towards the left due to the perspective, so I had to include the large brick tower, the forklift, and my signature on the right to try and balance it out.

The yellow everywhere is isoindolinone yellow py110, I really unleashed it on this painting just to see what it could do. It does cut through the coldness and bring a nice bright glow. Incidentally it was 5 Celsius with strong biting wind when I did this, and I needed a little psychological warmth!

5 x 7" rough press, watercolour, April 2020