On a nice sunny day the sky is blue, but is it too blue? Or true blue? At the moment the sky is pandemic blue. Over the years I learned how to paint an urban sky and it always involved some brownish tint on the horizon and a touch of grey in the sky. Lately, due to the lockdown there is less traffic in Montreal, and the sky has become a range of brilliant blues, nearly perfect cyan at the horizon and a rich 'smurf' blue colour in the sky. By coincidence, I recently redid my colour palette and discovered the power of phthalo blue and indo blue. I learned of these colours from Bruce MacEvoy's website handprint.com, and Peter Ward's watercolour blog which is also on this platform, blogger.
I have stayed away from depicting the effects of the pandemic, but as a landscape painter I can't help but observe the changes. My paintings over the last month show a change in season- melting icicles, puddles, old snow, tree buds forming, and a change in society. Less cars, clear skies, less people, but more lineups! The grocery store only lets in one person at a time to control the number, and here you can see people on the bottom left lining up to get in. On another note, I used perylene maroon and ferrari red to paint the car in the foreground- both of those pigments are known to be car paint (literally) so I put them to good use here !
5 x 7" rough press, watercolour, April 2020
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