Changing Styles

 In 1993 I was painting quite a lot, mostly florals with the occasional landscape from photograph. This floral was done from imagination, although it was inspired by a painting that my parents have on their wall, its an original watercolour of lilacs. My version is mostly done wet in wet, that is, the paint was all wet when I applied the various colours. The blue would have been cerulean blue, and the red likely a mix of impermanent alizarian crimson. The green background was aureolin yellow and viridian green. It also looks like I splashed paint on to give it some extra verve.

Lilacs Wet in Wet, watercolour hot press 9.5 x 12.5", 1993 (No. 1326)

 

Fast forward ten years and I was living in the basement apartment of Bayfield Hall in London Ontario, cranking out abstract paintings on a hot press watercolour block. A block is a stack of papers fixed by a mild adhesive, so when you do a painting its fixed on the block, but you can easily peel it off. For some reason I was using this cathedral motif in a lot of abstract paintings, stained glass situated in surreal landscapes. Maybe it was just a coincidence, but the bottom left looks a lot like Van Gogh's starry night. I knew of the painting, so it was probably a homage.

Floating Cathedral Windows, watercolour cold press, 11 x 15" 2003 (No. 1332)  

Jumping in time and space once more, I did this painting in Montreal on Esplanade avenue shortly after moving there from Ontario. For about I year I produced paintings using the colour splash technique, which involved large amount of wet paint and letting it dry overnight. The results were unpredictable, kind of like a tye-dye technique. When dry, I embellished the paintings with some details depending on what I imagined. The blue colour in the sky looks a lot like phthalo blue, but it may have been prussian blue. During this time I pursued the doodle style quite a bit, for about 5 more years, as I write about in an older blog. In recent times most of the abstracts I do are in conjunction with palette cleaning, and they tend to be completely abstract, without the surrealism. And I continue to turn laboratory doodles into large abstracts as well, such as Lab Book #25 Words Belong Here. In fact, lab book 25 might have enough doodles for a new one soon, and I recently went down to Avenue des Arts and stocked up on paper and paint so I am good for more paintings! 

Complementary Splash Colour, watercolour 7 x 9" cold press, 2005 (No. 1488)