Wasserman forest summer

Wasserman forest is a small woodland in east NDG across the Decarie. I painted there during the thaw  and vowed to go back once the forest had a chance to grow into summer. Today, I revisited the location and was impressed by the health of the forest and its robust growth. The neighborhood brought in an arborist a few years ago to cull the non-native trees and plant indigenous trees which are growing well. The neat thing is that the park is surrounded in busy city roads and wall-to-wall triplexes, its not often you get both things, a forest, and a city, so close to each other. Lucky that Mrs. Wasserman bequeathed the land to the city and asked for it to preserved. On the other side of this park, the entire park is torn up and getting paved in with some kind of park facility. Lets hope that development never happens to this forest, otherwise I will go there and stand in front of the bulldozers with my paint set! 

Path and truck, watercolour 6 x 7.5" cold press, August 2025

The conservationists put ropes along the paths to avoid people trampling through the underbrush. It was a tough painting to do, forest scenes always are, most of my practice comes from the Bolton, Sutton, and Mount Royal forests.

 Ropes along path, watercolour 6 x 7.5" cold press, August 2025

Lastly, I painted this scene of a tree with its growth and a few parked cars and condos in the background. It was a deceptively hard painting to do because the light yellow leaves had to be superimposed on the parked cars. The cars had to look like cars with a minimal amount of visual information. I made a fairly detailed outline of the scene with a small paint brush before launching into the colours and textures. I was looking for a scene like this where the forest was visually overlapping with the city in order to tell the story of Wasserman's woodland. 

Tree and cars, watercolour 6 x 7.5" cold press, August 2025