The Blue House
What a strange year it has been. In the end things went mostly well for us, including family and work. For my painting hobby it was a great boom, a combination of spare time and cabin fever inspired the largest number of paintings I have ever done, including the creation of a complete art catalogue of over 2400 paintings done since 1989. In this blog I am picking out a few of the notable paintings I did this year, sort of like an award show but I am doing the picking!
The first one is The Blue House, done in May down in Ville St. Pierre this painting captures a charming little house painted in two tones of blue, located right next to the highway. The dandelions were just popping up. The Blue House is my personal favorite from this year because it has a Van Gogh inspired composition, it is part of the pandemic blues paintings, and it just has a lot of character to it, more than just the sum of its parts.
St. Lawrence river at Parc Honoré Mercier
The next painting I wanted to highlight was a landscape done on the St. Lawrence river at Parc Honoré Mercier. It was the furthest point that I reached with my old bike. I did it on the same day I completed the Stations of the Green Line Metro Series. The painting captures the rugged coast and strong current, using short interlocking brush strokes reminiscent of Monet or Tom Thompson, but in watercolour. I did quite a few St. Lawrence river paintings this year, mostly upstream in Verdun, Lasalle and Nun's Island.
Lake Vogel, Sutton
Keeping on the nature theme, this was a memorable experience- I went out to Sutton on a solo hiking trip and made a number of watercolours including this one at Lake Vogel, nestled up in Mount Sutton. I found a nice spot in the shade sitting on a thick carpet of pine needles, and enjoyed the relative peace. smell of pine, and the hum of the dragon flies.
Hiking Elvis
It was also a big year for abstract painting, which began with the completion of Hiking Elvis, a doodleism painting I had started late in 2019. It definitely gets the award for best title.
Palette Cleanser #10
There is always a painting that everyone else likes but me. This year it was one of the palette cleansers, number 10, which is an energetic mix of tropical flowers. I should make posters or T shirts from this one.
Your Melting Heart
Done on the hottest day of the year, this is one of a series of paint-intensive abstracts called Your Melting Heart. It was named by Cilei, and I hung it on the wall for some time. Like an ink blot, everyone can see something different!
World Inspired Landscapes: Bahamas
To escape, this is a hybrid landscape-abstract I call 'World Inspired Landscapes' where the material comes from a variety of sources on the internet and from the local library. This one depicts the Bahamas, which is somewhere a lot of us would like to be right now! Perhaps in 2021 things will improve and we can travel once again. For now we live vicariously in our imaginations.
Summit Park Barrier
I went for a bike ride during the first wave pandemic and made this painting of a barrier in Westmount's Summit park, in fact the whole lookout was blocked with a tall fence. Later in the summer I went back and it was open again, with some curious sight seers, adhering to social distancing signs and staying apart from each other. Unfortunately like everywhere else we had a second wave that is still going strong. With the vaccine hopefully we start to see the end of it in 2021. Going into next year I hope to continue painting and blogging although perhaps not quite as much as this year which was an exception.
Happy new year!
... enough said
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