The End of Curfew is Near

 

This Friday Montreal is lifting the curfew and a few other changes due to the improving situation with COVID and widespread vaccinations. As you know from the blog, there is an auto shop nearby, which I painted at night once before. Police cruisers are always parked there, maybe because they break down a lot, or just don't have anywhere else to park since they removed the station from our neighborhood. Without breaking the curfew, I made this painting sitting outdoors, it was extremely quiet with not a soul to be seen. Painting at night is a challenge, for one thing there are insects crawling all over, and of course you can't really see what the painting looks like, or your palette. I used the Van Gogh palette, it has heavily pigmented paint that really gets onto the paper easily, and I had memorized the position of the colours since they all look gray or black at night. Inside, I outlined the painting in grey (PBk11 diluted) to make the cop car and other highlights the lightest value of the painting, and I adjusted the contrast settings to make it look dim as when I painted it. One funny thing, the fence just above the car looked to be a perfect grey outside, but it was actually a kind of turquoise, and I could not see the green of the tree, but I could see most of the other colours, just not how much chroma they had. The sky is navy blue (PB60) with pylon orange (PO71), a mix I discovered in an earlier night painting of a Pizza store down the street.

Police Cruiser at Auto Shop, 5 x 7" cold press, watercolour, May 2021 (No. 2666a)