1995: The Experimental Painter

 

As I go through the old catalogue I am finding some interesting things about my growth as a painter. After beginning with flowers and landscapes, I discovered my passion for location painting (en plein air). There was a one year period in the midst of that phase where I tried to break out of the flowers and photos approach. My painting area was a folding card table that I set up in the basement of the student house we were renting with about 6 other students, I called my studio area 'The Pit' because it was a musty unfinished basement of concrete, but it was all mine! Science vs. Art was one effort from this time, and I continued to copy photos probably to give as gifts to friends and family. In this example, I used an impressionist technique to produce an abstraction of a bunch of flowers. 

Impressionist Flower Garden, 10 x 11" cold press, watercolour, 1995  (No. 0009)

 

Here is another take on a floral theme but with a much darker background. I had discovered the combination of alizarin crimson, winsor green, and ultramarine blue, which produce a wide range of celestial darks. 

Red Rose from the Pit, 5 x 7" cold press, watercolour, 1995  (No. 0011)

 

In the mid 90's I was searching for ways to commercialize my art, there are a lot of efforts to make bigger, more finished works that could have been sold. Most of those ended up as failed attempts that I cut up and painted on the back of. I recognize this building, it is the physics building on the University of Western Campus, done in ink. The attempt at the windows was poor, so I surrounded it with abstract flowers and labelled it hybridism. It was easier to invent a new style than to improve my drawing skills! It would be a few more years before I fully embraced abstract painting, but the beginning of it started in the pit. 

The First Hybrid, 10 x 11" cold press, watercolour, 1995  (No. 0010b)

 

And a better effort here, it is a portrait of my sisters old house in Kingston, I actually did a whole series of preliminary tests before doing this one. Another piece is in Ann's house. It is filled with light and energy, a precursor of the flurry of location painting I would start doing in the winter of 95/96. So 1995 was a year when I explored strange new styles but did not stray too far from the flower and landscape themes.

Ann's Old House, 10 x 14" cold press, watercolour, 1995  (No. 007)