St. Jacques Street, Rusty Store, NDG

Rust is a very appealing colour and texture, it embodies rich earth orange, yellow, brown, black red, and has an almost velvety texture. The large family of artists pigments based iron oxides are perfect for capturing rust, because they are in fact, rust! Using rust to paint rust, it doesn't get any better than that. Other than painting a picture of a ferrari using pyrrole (ferrari) red which is on my painting wish list. To find rust, I used google maps to identify a junk yard for scrap cars. Unfortunately it was surrounded by a tall fence. This scene was on St. Jacques Street, usually a terribly busy an noisy light-highway, it was not too bad when I was there last week. The blue shop caught my attention, and of course the rusty overhanging metallic awning, and the rusty yellow poles.

I used to sign all of my landscapes, well most of my landscapes, with the P Darlington 'scrawl', barely legible and easy to miss. With few exceptions I signed in cerulean blue or mostly ultramarine blue. In the pandemic blues series, I have been signing with a PJD 2020 inscription using mostly indothrene blue. It is hidden in this painting, but you will find PJD 2020 if you look around. Part of the reason I haven't been signing as usual is just the situation being what it is, and these are very experimental paintings as I work out the new paints and how to use them. I will get back to signing normally in due course. By the way, the blue here was a mix of phthalo blue (PB15) and iron oxide red (PR101) and some adjustments with phthalo green (PG7) to make it turquoise. The rust was iron oxide red, bloodstone genuine (heliotrope with hematite from Daniel Smith co.), some vandium yellow (PY184), and purplish tints.

7 x 10" rough press, watercolour, May 2020