Urban Montreal: Rue Cabot area

For some good scenery of urban Montreal, rue Cabot is an accesible location just off of the Lachine canal bike path near the Passerelle Côte-Saint-Paul bike and pedestrian bridge that runs next to the highway. For this painting, I captured the Lachine canal with its famous black railings, with elaborate concrete-work and pigeons. Oh yeah, and a few autumn colours with a yellow and a red tree growing out of the old stone wall of the canal. As usual, I converted the local Graffiti into my own initials and year (PJD 25). Its kind of fun trying to emulate graffiti artists, their work (vandalism) can be very elaborate. In doing so, I get to be a graffiti artist without wrecking anything! 

Yellow green and turquoise, watercolour 6 x 7.5" cold press, October 2025

As most Montrealers in the area know, some intrepid artists painted part of the old derelict malt factory pink with green trim. I did a good one on that location of the Old Canada Malt Silos, albeit without a view of the pink house. And earlier this summer, rather incredibly, I saw people sitting on the roof of that thing driking beers which seemed absurdly dangerous.  

Pink house blue-green factory, watercolour 6 x 7.5" cold press, October 2025

Most of the autumn colours are dark yellow, olive, brown and maroon this year, no spectacular oranges or bright reds. To make up for it, as you can tell from reading the blog post, I found colours elsewhere, like this giant violet graffiti tag. Its part of an abandonded factory that the city is planning to develop into some kind of urban resisdential area. I painted this location a few times, for example I did an interpretive painting on location last year called Zen Factory. 

PJD in violet, watercolour 6 x 7.5" cold press, October 2025

The whole area around rue Cabot, which I believe is part of the Sud-Ouest (South-West) neighborhood, are factories and warehouses with just a few houses here and there. It seems to be a graffiti hotspot, with many colourful tags, and entire walls covered in street art. The rear side of this factory was a fascinating tapestry of shapes and textures. It must have had large windows at one time that were mostly boarded up and painted over. Multi-coloured bricks were plastered with bubbly graffiti tags in blue, green, yellow, pink and black. I painted fast here because dry dirt was blowing and it didn't seem to healthy to be standing around for too long. Usually we only get dry dirt clouds in the Spring, but worry not, there are like 7 days of rain predicted for us. 

Rear Factory tapestry, watercolour 6 x 7.5" cold press, October 2025