Painting Year in Review: 2023

 

Lachine Canal, Sunset on a Snowy Night

I've been posting these retrospectives for some time now, you can find the previous years in review for 2020, 2021, and 2022. It was another busy year of painting in Montreal interspersed with some important trips abroad. I always start the review with my personal favorite painting, the one that stuck in my mind all year. This one was done back in February down at the Lachine Canal on a snowy night, with the sunset just finishing. The traffic on st Patrick can be seen on the top left, and the lamps along the walkway provide an eerie glow. Considering what an exhausting slog it was to get down there by foot after a long day work, and what the painting represents is quite definitive for this part of Montreal, and the snow effect is captured beautifully. There were a lot of other great paintings of the Lachine Canal, such as the train bridge at sunset, a frozen buoy in canal, and three ducks in a lock on the canal. By the way, another personal favorite of mine this year was Chartreuse Dumpster on a Sunny Day, it says a lot about me as a painter, doing paintings on the way back from work!

Montreal provides a never ending supply of industrial-urban scenery, typified by the dilapidated Canada Malt silo upon which the pink house sits. In this painting of the old Canada malting silos, you can see the rusted metal exterior with crumbling bricks, the iron structures on the ground rusting away, the colourful wall of graffiti, and if you zoom in, there is a bike in the distance on the canal bike path. This was a difficult painting to pull off, and perhaps the best technical piece of the year, although the monumental Château Frontenac at night was equally if not even more of a technical feat. Some other cool industrial Montreal scenes were Farine Roses and Grain elevator, gantry crane with sunset, and the Victoria Bridges.

 

Auto shops were a theme this year, for example a gas station at dusk, an orange sun over auto shop, the auto shop at dusk, and auto shop blue. In the painting above, Auto Shop Night Grey, I did a scene of the auto shop across the street at night, after they had painted it grey. It really captured the LED-glow on the otherwise gloomy surroundings. I wanted to mention this painting too, because it had one of the highest view counts of all the blogs, so apparently this one wins the popularity contest! Another popular one was Fresh Snow on Campus.

Cilei and I went to Brazil for a few weeks to visit her family and see her new house that her Dad built. I made quite a few paintings including the intense colours in the neighborhood, seen above, which shows a steep street in São Paulo, with the tallest mountain in the area, Pico do Jaraguá, in the background. There were lots of great paintings from the trip, including the Brazilian Kitchen, a city vista, and a plate of fruit which was one of Cilei's mother's favorites and we left it with her. 

 

Speaking of trips, I spent about 5 days in Québec City on a conference, and managed to squeeze in some fantastic paintings. It didn't take long to adapt to the environ, in fact, the painting above showing the view north, was the first one I did on the trip, still with luggage in tow. Other notable Québec City  paintings were a sunset in the city, flowers on the Plaines, a dancing corner at night, and a view from the hotel window. But really, most of the paintings I did on this short trip worked out better than I had hoped. Later in the year I went to another conference in Toronto, and made a series of paintings in challenging conditions.

It was another decent year for abstract paintings. I did a large doodleism painting called the Budget Beast, an AI-guided abstract called Sun Earth Moon, the punk rock painting, and the stress-induced Grant Grunt. One of the neatest ones was Invasive Spectrum, seen above, which also had a high view count, so it must have been good! It has a nice flow to it, and a pleasing harmony of colours. It was actually inspired by banana slugs.

 

I continued the World Inspired Landscapes series, where I do research on the internet and at the local library to learn more about countries and compose an original painting. The Italy painting seemed to hit all the right chords, it had an interesting blend of colour, contrast, and composition. You can see the whole series on one page, which gets updated regularly.  

 

Trying to pick the best overall painting is highly subjective, and this year there were a lot to pick from including Sunset on a Snowy Night, which was shown at the top of the blog, the brave Montreal scene of a snowy bridge, a scene of a parking lot with melting snow, a vista of Montreal's curving highways, springtime flowering shrubs and tulips, a night scene of crescent moon over power station, or a touristy scene of Old Montreal. But the one painting that stands out has to be Rain on the Deck with Geraniums, done while sitting in my parent's kitchen in Bolton. The blog for it has one of the highest view counts, but I know its a good one because before the painting even had a chance to dry, my Dad put it into a frame and hung it on the wall right next to the sliding doors! So now even on a sunny day they can see what it looked like on a rainy day. The painting has eye-popping geranium-red flowers set against an earthy, damp background, and the rain drops on the puddles combine seamlessly with the wooden deck boards. There were quite a few paintings from Bolton this year, flowers next to path was another favorite. 

In conclusion, after completely rebuilding my palette and updating my knowledge over the past few years since the pandemic started, it seems to be all coming together with some fantastic artwork this year. The painting above is a memory painting, showing my family paddling in a rainstorm on Balsam lake. That says it all, just keep on paddling and you will get through the storm with some help from family.