Marché Jean Talon Autumn season

 

Marché Jean Talon is a large semi-open air fresh food market in Little Italy, not far from the Anatol spices store where I bought a load of health food today. The main building at the Market is the Premier Moison bakery, although in the painting I changed it to the PJD bakery... the bread takes like crap but the paintings are decent. Luckily, these people were enjoying the fine weather and drinking some coffee in the sitting area in front of the shop.

Marché Jean Talon coffee time, watercolour 6 x 7.5" cold press, October 2024

I navigated the light crowd with my bike and found a good spot to set up my bike. A good spot usually means the sun is on my paper, and it is on the scene. This apple seller noticed me painting and I wondered if he was pissed off that I was not buying any apples. Truth is I would have bought some apples but my bike pack was almost full, and we have apples at home. If I go back soon I will buy apples. The scene looks effortless which is nice, but it was a complex painting to get right. Without thinking too much, I sketched out the basics with a paint outline, then just filled it in piece by piece. It was not quite paint by numbers, the background components in particular had to be done freestyle. It turned out pretty good though, the worry with painting a scene like this is that it turns out dark and muddy, or the details are not clear. Instead, it looks just as if you could walk up and buy some apples.

Apple seller, watercolour 6 x 7.5" cold press, October 2024

There is nothing more satisfying as an artist than to paint on a street named after you. Normally someone has to get famous before they name a street after you like, Taylor Swift, they are going to name a street Swift street for her upcoming concert series in Toronto. Well I am one step ahead of her, painting on Darlington Avenue. People really look at me and sometimes want to chat with me, one guy leaned out his window and said he wanted the painting last time I was here! When I rode by after going through Park Jarry on the way back from Anatol spices, I saw this tree with an intriguing blend of brown, maroon and yellow. It occurred to me that I was only ever stopping to paint colourful high chroma trees, but this one seemed to be infused almost charred in its appearance. It worked allright, but the orange and red did not come through enough. The smaller tree on its right worked better... I think thats the way to do it, use high chroma earth variations, then overpaint the dark brown, instead of the other way around. You see in the big tree where I tried overpainting yellow on the brown. Sorry for the technical notes, sometimes its just for me in the future, I often read the blogs and remember how I did things or what I learned. The more you paint the more you learn, and I have learned a lot lately!

Brown, maroon and yellow tree on Darlington Avenue, watercolour 6 x 7.5" cold press, October 2024