The Blue House, Ville St. Pierre, Montreal

This scene is just down the street from Elm Park in Ville St. Pierre, a small neighborhood sandwiched between NDG and Lasalle just north of autoroute 720/20. In fact, I was sitting on a small boulder in a patch of grass backing onto the tall concrete wall of the overpass. I was nowhere near the cars or the people so it was safe, but it was rather noisy. Good thing I was using earplugs. The wind was strong on that day blowing the paper up and down several times creating splashing effects. I have wanted to paint this scene for a long time, it is on the way when you ride your bike from NDG to the Lachine canal. The house has so much character, as does the tree beside in on the left, which had branches cut off the top but was still growing and surviving. The name and composition of this painting was inspired by Van Gogh's Yellow House. Awile ago, I did a painting called Green House, Barbados. Now I just need to find a red house, orange house, purple house....

Blue has become a theme of the pandemic series, it started with blue skies, and then slides, shorts, and houses apparently! Having trouble with phthalo blue, I decided to go back to some of the other blues including iron blue (prussian/PB27) for the outline and tints, cobalt blue (PB28) for the house paint, and cerulean blue (PB35) for the sky. It made the sky a lot easier to control, in fact I mixed cerulean with a touch of phthalo. After the light blue dried, I layered on cobalt blue to create the brilliant blue paint on the bottom half of the house. I finished with a darker layer of cobalt blue and a touch of phthalo. To complete the tour-de-bleu, I used french ultramarine blue (PB29) in the purple-shadows, and indo blue (PB60) in the dark shadows. Cobalt paints are slightly more toxic than average paint, but they are generally safe with proper handling.


7 x 10" rough press, watercolour, May 2020