Joe and Ralph Auto has been the subject of many paintings now, owing to its very close proximity to our condo. Of all artists, I have made the most number of paintings of Joe and Ralph's auto shop! For my birthday, the students gave me a coffee table book on Renoir, the great French master from the late 19th and early 20th century. He was of course an oil painter but also dabbled in pastel, watercolour and sculptures. Most of his work was portrait and figures, with a decent number of landscapes, some of which were painted along side of Monet. One thing that stood out was that Renoir used a lot of dark/light contrast using flake white (lead white) and bitumen black (carbon black). He used dark mixtures of ultramarine, viridian and alizarin as Monet did at the time. Renoir juxtaposed dark/light contrast with high chroma (intense) highlights and plenty of tinted pastel colours (coloured grey). Somehow he got it all to work together to great effect. I was thinking about these ideas when I made this painting. It is a little different than I usually do, it has a heavy base of grey, dark black, and pops of high chroma colours. On top, there is an airy, pastely depiction of the evening sky and soaring trees. Just a hint of yellow-green on the left horizon depicts the budding leaves and Spring season.
Auto Shop Sun Behind Trees, watercolour 5 x 7" cold press, April 2023 (No. 3436b)
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