Farine Five Roses, Montreal

Velvety chocolate textures can be seen in the brick buildings, the muddy base of the dried up canal, and the various other concrete structures. I was motivated to paint a water scene and knew just the spot. Thirty minutes later, on bike, I arrived at the Farine Five Roses factory, an old granary that is no longer operational but has been maintained as a Montreal landmark. To my dismay, the canal was mostly empty of water, perhaps the city shuts it off in the winter or something? There were some sad little puddles of melt water in the muddy basin, in which a family of mallard ducks was hanging out. The wind was extreme that day (last weekend), I think my face was frozen and eyes blurry with tears by the time I finished. At least the ducks stayed there the whole time posing for me.

Mixing paints is a big part of watercolour painting. Unlike oil or acrylic, you can easily mix two, three, four, or more watercolour paints together in order to produce variety. In oil or acrylic, based on my limited experience, colour mixing will quickly produce mud, and it is hard to change the colour on your brush especially with oil. In the old days, I used only a half dozen or so transparent colours to make everything. The brick and mud colours seen in this painting were done using an opaque red iron oxide (PR101 mixed with PBr7) adjusted with PR179 maroon or quinacridone red to get it to be more reddish. As I did this painting, it occured to me that I should have just started by painting the whole thing brown, it would have been faster!

7 x 10 rough press, watercolour, May 2020