London Ontario

Variations on brown are important when painting landscapes especially in London Ontario where there is a lot of limestone, trees, and asphalt. These small studies were done on the University of Western campus during winter, it was not far from where I lived at the time (Bayfield Hall). To get the brown tones I used burnt sienna (transparent) from Winsor and Newton, it was the only earth colour I really used for my entire painting career. That all changed in 2020, this year, when I introduced many new earth colours like a thick iron oxide red, some raw umber, and the suite of earth colours from Stoneground Paint Co. In the past, I used yellow ochre sporadically but did not like it much because it was runny and mixed poorly with other paints.

In retrospect, I quite admire the quality of these small paintings. I was on my game, ambitious and well practiced. Soon after these paintings (there are a lot of them, I can scan more), I moved away from landscapes towards abstract paintings and the doodleism style. Perhaps it was getting rather boring painting pictures of parking lots and fire hydrants after painting Cathedrals and epic landscapes in Spain.  I never stopped though, every year I have painted at least a dozen or more landscapes mostly from travels or some local scenes. It wouldn't be until 2020 (this year) that I really got back into the landscape groove, partly due to the discovery of Hiroshige, my idea of doing a Montreal landscape series, and partly to do with the pandemic lockdown which deprived us of our normal entertainments.

5 x 7" cold press watercolour, 2000-2003? (these two scenes are on the front side of the same piece of paper)