Charlevoix Metro Station, green line, Southwest borough, Verdun Day 2

A few things came together today to make these paintings possible, the weather finally cooled off and it was mostly overcast all afternoon, and I finally got through a 'mini mountain' of work related to graduate students and my research laboratory at the University. We are slowly opening up activity with abundant safety precautions and even more abundant paperwork. It occurred to me that my whole life has involved paper- writing papers, earning degrees (printed on paper), toilette paper, wrapping paper, paper airplanes, painting on paper! Did you know that real artists call paper and canvases, etc. 'surfaces'. Yeah you don't go into an art store and ask for paper, you ask for surfaces. Can I have a watercolour surface please? How about buy 3 get 1 free surfaces? I'm going to call my paints coulored-surface-coatings from now on and see what people think.

I wanted to go back to Charlevoix station for the charm and ambiance I found on Day 1, but also to paint the flowers and interesting plants. The yellow ones were some kind of brown-eyed susan, I used warm and middle-yellows for the petals and a variety of earth paints for the middle. The pale minty leaves of the plants were a highly neutralized and diluted turquoise, and the pink flowers were painted with pink. Magenta actually. It was a tricky painting to execute, after making an outline in paint, I filled in most of the dirt with raw umber, then worked through the coloured plants and grey neutral surrounding sidewalk and window. I learned my lesson at Angrignon station, put the dark neutrals first, put the bright colours last. The striped thing in the top right was the mailbox seen in the Day 1 painting. 5 x 7" cold press, watercolour, June 2020

Here is the sketch from the location made just before the painting. The purpose of the sketch was to get all the lines and shapes of the flowers and plants correct, I also threw in my knee, sketchbook, hand, and pencil along with a drawing of my sketch book page. Like, a picture in picture! When I did the painting I left out these details and mostly tried to get the colours and values correct. 9 x 11" pencil, sketchbook, June 2020

I went on to the next station after this, will post soon.