1993: The Flower (and Photo) Painter

 

When I started painting watercolours in 1989 I was focusing on florals and imaginary landscapes, which persisted for the next few years. I was doing okay, selling the odd painting here and there to friends and family. In 1992 I did a pivotal series of Studies of group of Seven plus Tom Thompson paintings that began an initiative to do landscape painting. The idea of landscapes had interested me from the get go, probably influenced by the many camping trips we did as a family when I was younger. 1993 saw a steep increase in productivity, I have catalogued 80 paintings from that year, which was more that I had painted in all of the previous years. The work continued along the flower theme like in this example, which combined flowers from a source book, and imagination. I posted previously about some of the other flower paintings from this era. 

Old Fashioned Yellow Rose    11 x 15" watercolour paper,  1993 (No. 0116)

 

I had also started taking a lot of photos with the old film camera, including on a camping trip in 1993 with my best friend Chris. After the trip I went about making paintings from these photos, including this interesting scene of canoes and row boats at the dock. It is probably the main launching point from the highway, at Canoe Lake.

At the Docks, Algonquin park    12 x 16"   cold press 140lb    1993(No. 0133)

Bolton was and still is a major theme of my landscape paintings, there are quite a few in the catalogue, over 100 I suppose. In this painting I used a photograph to recreate a typical scene on the backroads of Bolton and surrounding areas. The real painting is brighter and more colourful I will try to get a better picture on a sunny day. I was using mostly clean, transparent paints back then, and the paintings looked light and fast.

Eighth Line Stormy Field    12 x 16"    hot press, watercolour, 1993 (No. 0021)

 

 

On the back of that one, I did a half page study of our house cat at the time Tabby, doing what Tabby did best, lounging in the sun! Otherwise he was asking for food or killing the ET doll for the thousandth time. This brown 'suede' style chair is also a relic, it is not longer in the house. I noticed how good the browns were in this painting, I didn't have any earth colours, so it was a mix of aureolin, alizarin, and viridian with some ultramarine. In retrospect a good raw umber would have been perfect.

Sleeping Tabby Study    12 x 16"    hot press, watercolour,    1993 (No. 0021B)

There are a few other blogs from this era, including the Bolton grand tour,  Mom and Dad's boat, Snow Scenes, Valley View, Water Tower Fall, and Drumheller Alberta.