Looking north on Devonshire Road in the industrial park there was a surprising amount of greenery. I have to give the industrial park designers some credit, they incorporated trees, landscaping, expanses of grass and some really interesting architectural elements in the buildings. And on the weekend it is very quiet here and not many people are around. Off in the distance is autoroute 40 running west-east. The hardest part of this painting was actually the road itself. To capture the faded asphalt I mixed dark blue (PB60) with purple magenta (PV55) and some brown (greenish umber PBr7), there is a subtle adjustment from warm to cool as it recedes to the distance. The composition really shows the desolate, open landscape that probably used to be farmland.
Industrial Park Devonshire Road, watercolour 8 x 10" cold press, August 2023 (No. 3627)
The main attraction for a cyclist on Devonshire is to go under the autoroute at the underpass that goes over the train tracks. You can easily miss the bike route, the first time I looked all around to find the spot to cross. In this view, I am looking east along the elevated highway where it dips down. As I got into this painting I realized it was harder than I thought, the perspective and 3-D structure of the underside of the road with its supports and the on ramp behind it made for a tricky paint. The wind was really whipping up the paper and palette making it even harder! I got some paint spatters on my UV protection shirt.
Autoroute 40 near underpass, watercolour 5 x 7" cold press, August 2023 (No. 3513a)
The few times I have made it up to Bois-Franc I looked for the mythical Bois-Franc (Hardwoods Forest) and could not find it. Today I got to the name sake, park Bois-Franc only to find several long acres of landscaped and bricked-over ground, decorative plants, manicured trees and flowers enclosed in pots. It wasn't much of a forest, although there was a long wetlands pond with ducks and reeds. Depressed at what I had found, I rode westward along a street that may have been named Ernest-Hemingway avenue or close to it. Finally, I saw some dense forest surrounded by wildflowers, and just stopped randomly to make a painting of it for posterity. We will call this the Bois-Franc painting so I never have to go back there again! At least the bike paths were good once I got into the neighborhood.
The Mythical Bois-Franc, watercolour 5 x 7" cold press, August 2023 (No. 3513b)
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