After a long teaching day I stopped to make a painting on the way home of this smokestack on campus. A passer-by said in a bemused (sarcastic) tone, 'nice scene eh?' to which I replied 'not bad!'. Aside from just wanting to paint something on location, this scene reminded me of some Van Gogh paintings where he painted smoke stacks or smoke from trains which ran on coal back in the old days. After renewing study of Van Gogh, it impressed me how versatile and unafraid he was to try and paint just about any landscape. While he may be best known for the Starry Night, which was done from imagination, and the sunflower series, which were still life and re-paints of his original, he also painted hundreds on hundreds of on location landscapes such as the wheat field series and the pear tree-blossom series. To complete the homage I attempted an impressionistic style in the smoke stack painting by using a lattice-work of interconnected brush strokes to represent the colours and textures. This style was also much easier to pull off in the -20 windchill while wearing my heavy deerskin mitts!
You may notice the change in the title of my blog to PJDART42. I chose this new name to be a better brand name across platforms, I will change the name of my instagram and facebook page to match. More people are interested in what I am doing while on location, and this will make it easier to tell them where to look. It can also be bilingual, french PJ d'Art or english PJD ART. The 42 was to make it unique on the internet. As some of you may know 42 was the answer to life the universe and everything in the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. But what was the question?
Smokestack on Campus, watercolour 5 x 7" cold press, January 2023 (No. 3384a)
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