Montreal West Station, NDG

Learning never stops, no matter how much you think you know. On the way back from getting groceries today I took a moment to do this painting on the waiting platform for Montreal West Station, part of the commuter train that connects NDG to downtown Montreal. The sun was going down, creating a slow, creeping shadow from behind me so I had to paint fast. It's about the fourth or fifth time I've painted these train tracks by now, I can add that to the 'most times anyone has painted watercolour paintings of something in NDG guiness records.' Hey if a dog can be in the guiness records for holding 6 tennis balls in his mouth at once, than surely they have a few extra pages for a watercolour painter?

Painting asphalt and yellow traffic paint is surprisingly difficult, in fact, I have never quite got it right after 25 years of trying. In the past I was attempting to use purple or brown mixtures because that's what I thought I was seeing. The other day I walked around my apartment taking pictures of the street including asphalt and yellow traffic paint, and then did a colour analysis on the photos. The asphalt was in fact a fairly saturated blue, but very low value (dark)- there was no purple or brown. In this painting, I mixed a strong saturated blue paint with a lot of lamp black (carbon black), and then diluted with a little water. Sure enough, the colour of the asphalt just below the yellow line, is almost exactly what I saw. The yellow line, it turns out, is a very high value, medium to high saturation yellow, in other words, almost pure yellow. I tried that in the painting but may have over done it a little the yellow is too bright, just a touch more water would have been okay.

The other thing you may notice, or not notice rather, is the signature. I didn't put the PJD 2020 marking on this painting, or did I?

5 x 7" cold press, watercolour, June 2020