Warming up for Spring

Just as I was setting up to paint this one, an old fellow on a motorized scooter whipped by with a mini trailer in tow filled with bags and stuff. Purely from memory I included the image front and center. The rest of the scene shows a unique road in ville st Henri, where there used to be factories and warehouses, there are now factories and warehouses with some condos mixed in. At the end of the street is a whole row of brown and red new construction duplexes. The actual red in the building is likely to be pyrol red (PR254) since I could duplicate exactly with my pyrol red paint made of the same pigment. If I ever see the old fellow again driving in a red Ferrari I am ready!

Electric Scooter, watercolour 5 x 7" cold press, April 2023 (No. 3428)

Last fall I painted a scene along the Lachine canal of the gantry crane, and also leaned what the proper name for this iconic device really was (gantry crane). In this painting I am looking at it from the other direction, with backlighting from an overcast sky. In the foreground, there was a great mass of greyish ice still floating on the canal, although most of it had thawed. When I finished this painting on location I really thought it was a disaster, like, leave it off the blog kind of disaster. However, when I got it home and saw it dried it really captured my imagination. Recently, I studied Maud Lewis a bit, she was a Canadian folk painter who's work is now worth a fortune. While her paintings are the quintessential 'Gramma Moses' paintings, she had a brilliant way of simplifying things and showing them as they feel, more so than how they look.

Melting Canal with Gantry Crane, watercolour 5 x 7" cold press, April 2023 (No. 3427b)