Wednesday, September 2, 2020

Under the Microscope (Artwork meets Sciencework)


There are eight of these endless colour paintings done on one crazy hot day in July. After years of carefully rationing my paints, I just used huge globs of the stuff, mixing it up in small jam jars with copious amounts of water and laying it down on the paper. The whole apartment smelled like wet rag paper and watercolour paint. It was 36C with 100% humidity which had a particular interesting effect on the paint that I wont be able to replicate any time soon, it seemed to almost hover on top of the paper and mix in a celestial way almost, but then again I was probably hallucinating slightly. Our kitchen table and most of the living room floor was covered in these large paintings.  Sorry for the run on sentence, I reviewed a manuscript today and critiqued run on sentence and grammar problems.

It's been tough 8 to 10 hour days of sciencework (new word I just invented to specify artwork versus sciencework) most of last week and this week, I know I can't keep this up for long but there are too many files and students and manuscripts. Septembers are always like this... life of an academic. Check my blog and you will see a huge drop in Septembers due to sciencework, I paint a lot less due to time and mental limits. They say painting is relaxing but its kind of stressful actually. I still hope to push out more artwork though, and take advantage of the weather. Fall is great sometimes with the leaves changing. I don't know if I want to do orange line metro yet, or wait until next year, there are 31 stations so I could only start. Maybe yellow line (3 stations) or blue line (8 stations) would be better. I have a few more Verdun scenes I wanted to do, and some along St ambroise street and the canal, I better go to bed soon I drank too much coffee today. 

 This painting is called Under the Microscope. It was the penultimate painting that day. I used my old phthalo blue Sennelier I bought in Paris Rive Gauche in 2008, then dropped in blobs of red and pink quinacridones PV19+PR209+PR122 and potter's pink PR233.  

It is on the B side life of an Onion, 140lb press cold press, watercolour, 22 x 30" July 2020

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