Spring palette, thoughts on Winnipeg

After rebuilding my entire colour palette during the pandemic year, its been pretty much stable for the past several years. In the paint-out above you can see the range I use on location. Top left are earth paints, top middle are cool shadow paints, top right are green range, bottom left are highlight colours, with a blob of black paint off to the right. I keep a few within the mixing areas, like raw sienna, pyrol orange, indo blue, and for the Spring I carry bismuth yellow for depicting new foliage. So there are a little over 20 paints here, with some duplicates. The scribbles are the pigment codes, which are usually marked on the tube somewhere. I go to Jane Blundell's website to look up pigment codes and paint names on her colour swatches.  Also Handprint.com by MacEvoy has a tome of knowldege in his guide to watercolours page. 

Winnipeg surprised me with its subtle colouration. To be fair, I was there in Spring about a week before the green started to come out, so things were rather dusty, or rather sandy. The earth around Winnipeg comes from the great plains, grassy lands, its a sandy colour the same as raw sienna. They use this sand to put on the snow in the winter, so streets and parking lots were still covered in it. Moreover, the bricks of many older buildings were sandstone... a yellow ochre tone that could be easily made with variations of earth paints. There are prominent trees... not too tall, fanning out like mops pointing up, and with scraggly branches. They were painted with raw umber a dark brown, and indo blue to create greyish brown. Its the first time I ran out of brown paint on one of my palettes. I bring two palettes when I travel now so as to not run out. In the painting above, I mixed various yellow and brown colours, and called the painting Winni-beige, a play on words. 

Winni-beige, watercolour 9 x 12" watercolour paper, May 2026
 

Abstract paintings, remains of the tubes

As I use up paint tubes, I make sure to squeeze out every last drop onto the palette. However, the tubes can easily be cut open and there is more paint hiding in there. After collecting a bag of used up tubes, I started cutting some open, recovering what I can, and making these abstract paintings on weekends and evenings. This one is a hybrid of the words Magenta and Montreal.. The magenta shapes are supposed to be like people holding hands or shaking hands.  

Magentreal, watercolour 9 x 12" watercolour paper, April 2026 

With a lot of yellow tubes over the years, its the most used colour I have by far, I tried to use as much as possible in this painting along with orange, brown, and lime-green. Its like a 1970's era wallpaper or curtain pattern. Van Gogh used a lot of yellow paint, he was constanly asking his brother to send more. 

Mustard and Mud, watercolour 9 x 12" watercolour paper, April 2026 

Inspired by the rivers in Winnipeg which come together and apart as they meander, this painting used bright yellow surrounded by black, dark green, and dark red, with a chunk of bright green. The dark green and red are the perylenes... perylene green with perylene red. Despite having similar chemical structures, these two pigments are nearly opposite on the hue circle. So perylene green and red are together, chemically, but apart, visually. 

Together Apart, watercolour 9 x 12" watercolour paper, April 2026 

Palette Cleansers, going to Winnipeg

With a trip to Winnipeg starting tomorrow, I made some extensive palette cleansing and loaded up the palettes for some location painting. The main reason for the trip is the Canadian Immunology meeting, and as usual I will make a few paintings here and there in Winnipeg. The weather forecast is cold and nasty with wind rain and snow... so pretty much what I'm used to, although it will be considerably nicer back in Montreal. This abstract painting was done as I cleaned the yellow and earth sections of the palette, it ended up looking like a blinged-out totem chimpanzee or something.

Berried in Earth, watercolour 9 x 12" watercolour paper, April 2026

This was done with the cool section of my palette and the high chroma area (yellow to red). You can see a paint-out of my normal palette set-up here, its organized into earth colours top left, dark shadow colours top middle, green range top right, high chroma colours bottom left, and a blob of black paint bottom right. 

Leaf Table Sunset, watercolour 9 x 12" watercolour paper, April 2026 

My Birthday Trip

Today is a special day, on April 19^th 1943 a scientist named Albert Hofmann accidentally took some LSD that he prepared for entirely other reasons, rode his bike home... and had an 'acid trip'. Everything looked a little odd and he had a kind of out-of-body experience due to the drug's effect. Coincidentally, I was born on this day, although quite a bit later than 1943! Truth is, I never tried LSD, which may surprise some people who know my abstract art... In this painting I went with the theme, using an old painting called sky emotes, which has like 250 views by the way, and turned it into a new painting. 

My birthday Trip, watercolour 8 x 10" hot press, 2026

 

Here is part of an older painting, done in 2010 shortly after watching Avatar... I liked the idea of neon things creating a variety of glowing effects. The rest of the painting is purely abstract expressionism, I like to call it doodleism. 

Neon trail right, watercolour 8 x 10" hot press, 2010 

 

Completing the birthday trip, here is a floating flower, I might have been thinking of stem cells or something something. More truth, I used to drink a fair bit of beer and then make watercolour paintings, I don't anymore, mostly sober for 12 years. In fact, my art is even better and slightly more odd while painting sober which is cool to know. But you can tell whatever story you want. Anyways, here's to 50 more birthdays!

Floating Flower, watercolour 9 x 12" paper

 

 

Nature veto

Spending a lot of time around Montreal and I see small pieces of nature here and there, usually around highways, near fences, or back in parking lots. These spaces are fleeting because every square meter of Montreal must be developed with sidewalks, concrete containers, parks benches and plenty of interlocking stone bricks. I usually get a few months or years at most to paint such scenes. A perfect example was the Champ-de-Mars station, if you click that blog and scroll down, there was a huge field of wild daisies, incredible like a hillside in Switzerland or something. It didn't last long because the city has been digging up and pouring concrete there for the last five years. Thus, whenever and wherever nature can be found, Montreal has to veto it, and get the bulldozers fired up. 

Nature veto, watercolour 9 x 12" watercolour paper, April 2026

Hue Knows?

Starting off with the central yellow brushstroke, the rest of the composition worked around that element to create a playful mosaic. It was also a so-called 'palette cleanser' which is where I clean the paint blobs on my palette with a paint brush and use the extra colours for a painting instead of just running my palette under the sink tap which wastes a bit of paint. Some artists only use watercolour freshly squeezed from the tube, which makes the paint a bit more potent and thick, but its not practical to do this on location. I am so used to letting the paint blobs dry, and then re-activate with a moist brush when needed. Whatever works! I did a quarterly count of paintings, and I am up to about 162 at the end of March, so a little over 50 per month. I feel like its a high number considering that most of them were on location, some in Brazil. Usually its harder to paint in the winter and I do studio stuff, but to be honest I do not find studio painting very fun in comparison to location painting. These abstracts are all done in studio. By the way, the studio is actually half of our dining room table, I have a grey cloth tablecloth folded over half the table and use it to paint and put all my paint stuff after a painting excursion. 

Hue Knows? watercolour 9 x 6" watercolour paper, April 2026 

Digital art yellow and warm colours

Recently the wise Premier of Ontario was criticizing basket weaving, but in fact, basket weaving can be very lucrative. An indigenous artist makes artisanal baskets and sells them for up to thousands of dollars, and actively teaches courses to others on how to weave baskets from traditional knowledge. You can read the CBC article here. This digital art resembles a peanut woven out of colourful strands. 

Basket weaving peanut, 800 x 1000 digital Sketchbook app

Working from a black background, this sketch uses very bright primary colours and basic shapes to create a sort of 'flag' with creepy eyes. Texture is created with a chalk-pastel brush. All of these are done with the Sketchbook app on Android. You can also get it on i-phone. 

Primary colours and shapes, 800 x 1000 digital Sketchbook app

Another fluorescent-on-black sketch, this one only uses yellow, and the background is actually a very dark blue. Its like an angry spirit flying down from the top of a hill. In Japan they had a festival going on where they walked with giant torches to draw evil spirits from the mountains. 

Angry spirit, 800 x 1000 digital Sketchbook app

Dark yellow can look green, a kind of olive green as you see in the painting. That cream-colour is also yellow, but a low chroma variation. On the app, you can easily select hue, chroma, and value at the touch of a finger. Knowing what those words mean also helps. Hue is the 'colour' as you might think of it... red, yellow, blue etc. Chroma is the intensity... bright versus dull. Value is the light/darkness... how close to white or black the colour is. I remember hiding my initials in this one, but cant see it right now, in the top left somewhere. 

Variations of yellow patterns, 800 x 1000 digital Sketchbook app

 

Another exploration of yellow, with some maroon and green accents. I figured out how to make the equivalent of yellow-ochre, its a medium chroma, medium value, orange-yellow.  These digital sketches are kind of fun. The previous one I did while waiting in the dentist office a few weeks ago. 

Droopy flower, 800 x 1000 digital Sketchbook app

Digital art cool colours

Last month I started using an Android app called Sketchbook, by Sketchbook Inc. Its a very powerful app for making art, with a wide range of tools available in the free version. A premium version apparently has even more goodies but I am still just scratching the surface of what the free app does. The neat thing is that you can make colours not possible with real paint, for example the bright magenta (pink) dots, and the cyan lines are only possible on a computer screen. 

Large initials in cyan, 800 x 1000 digital Sketchbook app

I make each image 800 x 1000 to fit perfectly on social media (Instagram and Facebook), same with my watercolour paintings which are 8 x 10 " or 6 x 7.5" which works out to the same aspect ratio. This sketch is like a hail storm behind a window with bars. 

Ice window bars, 800 x 1000 digital Sketchbook app

I accidentally rotated this one and it looked even better this way. To start, I changed the background into cyan, then draw over the other elements using a variety of brushes. I use a lot of the chalk pastel brush, it gives a great crumbly texture. 

Leaves and eyes, 800 x 1000 digital Sketchbook app

Thee is also a synthetic acrylic and oil paint brush... each brush stroke runs out of 'paint' and blends with the other colours in a realistic way. Since you use your finger to make these digital sketches, it feels a lot like finger-painting in early elementary school which I remember well. It was back in Lachine as a young child, a friend of ours, the Toddles drove us there, and there were tables set up in long rows and I was placed at a station with paper and finger paints... I recall using pale blue, and the paper had a smooth texture and off white colour, it was probably craft paper. 

Paint over symbols, 800 x 1000 digital Sketchbook app

I did this one today, after realizing that I could scroll down and find like another three-dozen paint tools including texture-washes and splatter effects. A few finger swipes and I had this graffiti-inspired psychedelic creation. Having a good knowledge of colour theory helps a lot to navigate all the possibilities. I also have extensive practice as a doodler, and have created doodle paintings, although none this year. An example from 2024 can be found here. 

Symbol texture splashes, 800 x 1000 digital Sketchbook app

Synthetic Earth

Holbein company had a line of watercolour paint called Irodori Antique, but recently they discontinued and replaced it with a similar line of gauche-like paints. Avenue des arts put their Irodori stock in a bin and I picked up a tube of russet brown. Like most paint names, its an ill-defined concept, but you can think of russet brown like 'leather jacket' brown. Its almost exactly what you would expect when you think of brown as a colour. To understand it a bit better, I put some of the russet brown on the top right of this painting, and then completed the scene with a variety of other browns and on the bottom, synthetic red-orange, magenta, and red. Russet brown was closest to Caput Mortuum, which you see in the tree and roots structure on the right side of the painting. Caput Mortuum translates to 'dead head' because legend has it that they used to grind up Egyptian mummies into a brown powder to make brown paint! Its an unlikely tale, but makes for a good yarn none the less. In fact, virtually all paints now are synthetic, even the ones sold as earth or natural. Small companies may still use artisanal pigments, for example some of the paints from Stone Ground paints, a Canadian company, might have been authentic. You can see my example of their earth paints in the Armenia painting from the World Inspired Landscape series. 

Synthetic Earth, watercolour 9 x 6" watercolour paper, March 2026 

Colour Compost

We are big fans of composting, in fact I have a composter on the tiny bit of grass that we call a backyard and use it regularly. By now, its heaped with frozen vegetable and fruit peelings, no meat because that attracts rats and mice. We put the meat and egg shells into a separate bag for the City compost service to pick up. Recently I composted one of my old paintings to see what would happen and sure enough, the 100% rag fiber disintegrated and got absorbed into the soil. So one day when I need to decide what to do with my collection, I know what to do! This painting was a palette cleanser with a compost-inspired colour scheme hence the name. Its on a watercolour paper stock (not cotton fiber) but it would probably still compost just fine. I was keen on painting outside the last few days but with howling winds and frigid chill I decided to wait it out. 

Colour Compost, watercolour 9 x 12" watercolour paper, March 2026 

Warm axons map

Its probably not the oddest title I've given a painting but probably close. After a lot of winter painting I cleaned the palette with a small brush, using the excess paint to make a few abstracts. I call these palette cleansers. Using different colours and making shapes is also a different experience compared to painting on location. On location, I try to represent the scene, while the abstracts are pure imagination. The idea was to create a maze-like tapestry, like a map of brain cells or axons. I liked the sound of 'warm axons', the way the two words blurr together. 

Warm axons map, watercolour 9 x 12" watercolour paper, March 2026 

More digital abstract art

Using the skerchbook phone app I can make endless doodles. With a bunch of brush options there are quite a few tricks to learn. I've been a prolific doodler since the first piece of paper was put infront of me, and I started doing abstract paintings frequently around the year 2000. Some of the colours like the magenta tongue and cyan sky in the image above are impossible to create with real watercolours. 

Tongue totem 800 x 1200 digital, February 2026 

At least digital art doesn't take up any physical space. I could do endless variations of these types of drawings. Andy Warhol was one of the first artists to make digital art in the 1980's, a company paid him to make art on their new computer drawing program. 

Three eye scribbles, 800 x 1000, digital February 2026

Going for a black and white scheme, this one made use of quite a few different brushes. Since it was grey scale I could add a lot more textural variations. Its possible to zoom in which facilitated the more detailed patterns. Its like finger painting in kindergarten again!

Bubble and pepper explosion, 800 x 1000 digital February 2026 

Year end tally 2025, vegetable circuit

In 2020 during the downtime, I catalogued all of the paintings I had done since 1989 and kept it up ever since. Its been a regular activity throughout the year, to name, number and catalogue the paintings into a spreadsheet. The main reason is to help find the paintings, for example, my cousin bought some of the images and I used the catalogue number to find the paintings and do high res scans. It also helps me to see where I've been in terms of productivity, not that the number of paintings really matters. Picasso was known to have created close to 150,000 pieces of artwork, although many of those were prints and mass produced pieces. Most of the paintings in my collection are very small, postcard sized, although I also do the occasional larger piece. Since 1989, I made about 6380 paintings, and in 2025 alone, I made 1060 paintings. Including Vegetable Circuit, an abstract painting shown above. There is a graph at the end of this blog, 

Vegetable circuit, watercolour 9 x 12" watercolour paper, December 2025

Here is a graph of the number of paintings since 2019,  per year. There was a huge jump in the pandemic year and it increased lately. For 2026 I might shift into less numbers but larger paintings on location, otherwise I will start running out of boxes to store them. But then again I said the same thing at the beginning of 2025. 

 

 

A puzzling planet (reprise)

Based on an older painting called a puzzling planet done in 2010, I created this version with emphasis on the sun effect and simplifying the overall design. To begin, I applied a yellow circle around the sun, then painted additional circles with warm colours while wet, so the paint blended together smoothly. I use the same technique on location, for example in Intense Sunset over Lachine canal. As that dried, I worked up the blocks of colours and shrubbery in the foreground, outlined the character, and adjusted the sun effect with a thin ring of yellow ochre (PY43) to make it pop. Once the painting had a chance to dry, I took the plunge and over-painted the puzzle pieces. The puzzle was warped to the contours of the scenery, and seemed to emanate from the sun. Leaving the buildings, character and shrubbery free of puzzle pieces gave the scene a really surrealistic appearance. 

A puzzling planet (reprise), watercolour 8 x 10" cold press, December 2025 (No. 4953b)

Office tag blue yellow red

Due to the achromatic (pale beige) nature of my office, I made a special painting with maximum colour brightness to spice things up. Being on a graffiti kick, I used a graffiti-inspired design, with a bit of influence from Japanese woodblock print. The initials and date (PJD25) were made to look like they were applied with a stamp. Since spray-painting my name on the office wall probably would have got me in trouble, I opted for the st Armand paper that I acquired from the local paper makers down by the Lachine canal before they moved their business out of Montreal. I met the paper makers, an old couple who had been hand making paper for decades, and they sold me a couple of stacks of paper in various sizes. They start by recycling old rags and clothing, processing the paper fibers, and pressing them out on a giant press device that I saw in person. To do this painting, I used the colour splash technique with a large watery blob of blue (PB15) and scratched in lines with the pointy end of the brush. After a few days of drying I applied the numbers and lettering with pyrol vermilion (PR255), waited a day, then brushed on copious amounts of bismuth vanadate yellow (PY184). The colour scheme was inspired by an abstract painting I did in 2020 called Palette Cleanser #42. 

Office tag blue yellow red, watercolour 16 x 24" st Armande paper, November 2025

Cool Burner, catalogue update

Time for another catalogue update... in 2020 I used some of the down-time to name and number every painting I ever did, and have kept up with it ever since. Its quite a chore, this time it took a few days of sitting down and going through the pile. Its also fun to look at the work from the past little while, it gave me a few ideas. I broke through the 6000 total painting mark when I did a painting called 'Self Portrait in vehicle' by coincidence. This year, there are about 871 paintings to date with a little over 2 months left. I haven't concerned myself with numbers or volume of paintings, in fact, I planned to paint a lower number but on larger pieces of paper and ended up doing both. Although the plan one day is to go even bigger on location like 9 x 12" or even 16 x 20", its just a logistical issue with the bike, and windy days. At any rate, the painting shown above is an abstract done in a colour scheme I call minus 1.... that means you use every colour minus 1, in this case there is no blue. I called it cool burner because graffiti artists call a masterpiece a 'burner', so this is a cool burner, lol.  

Cool burner, watercolour 6 x 7.5" cold press, October 2025 (No. 4881a)
 

Tri-petals

Doing a little palette cleansing, where I literally clean my palette with a brush, I came up with this small abstract I called tri-petals because the flowers seemed to each have three petals. Recently, I painted sunflowers in Montreal including in Cabot Square, downtown, and near the Domino's Pizza. Sunflowers of course, will forever be linked to Van Gogh who famously painted them in southern France during his hay day. And he painted hay too, lots of it! In fact, Van Gogh was constantly running out of yellow paint and when he ordered more through his brother, he would ask for two tubes. The way he got paint was to write a letter to his brother in Paris with the list of supplies, who would order it from an art supplier, then pack it up and mail it back to France. Back then, commercial art supplies were just beginning to be popular, the store Sennelier in Paris was one of the first ones. Its neat to think that the historic Sennelier store that I visited in Paris left bank years ago may have also been the one that supplied Van Gogh with his paint, although who knows really. Some work colleagues visited st Remi in Southern France where they saw the old sanitorium where he stayed and made many of his most famous paintings such as Starry night and others.  

Tri-petals, watercolour 5 x 7" cold press, September 2025 (No. 4844b)

Making the cuts, catalogue update

 

Just past the midpoint of the year, hard to believe that time flies! I completed a catalogue update and could tabulate the total number for 2025 to be at least 512 paintings with a few unaccounted for. Keeping up that rate, it would be over 1000 on the year but I usually paint more during the summer and typically slow down in the fall due to teaching and committees. However, those of you who know me, also know that I am on a one year sabbatical from July to July, so I will be travelling a bit more and concentrating on research exclusively. The main thing is to learn more about cancer immunology... that is empowering the immune system to eliminate cancer. With all the painting, I finally decided to give a second life to some of my old paintings... in other words, I selected about two dozen of the weaker paintings that had blank backs and cut them up mostly into 6 x 7.5" and 8 x 10" which are the most efficient sizes. Unfortunately, that meant loosing a few paintings, but I had to ask myself, would I hang these paintings on my wall? Would I want them hanging on my parent's wall? The problem was that I used a lot of alizarin crimson and aureolin yellow both of which fade, and my technique at the time resulted in very bland and greyish paintings that were overloaded with details. I am glad to have cut the paintings up, it freed up some space, and I examined each one to see what could be done better in future paintings. Most cut up paintings were in the doodleism style, which kept me busy and I had fun painting them. In recent years, I refined that style and got better results than the works from about 2005 - 2020. The abstract painting above was recently done on one of the cut-offs, I used the 'earth max palette' which has like 15 different earthy paints and a few synthetic colours. 

Making the cuts, watercolour 8 x 10" cold press, July 2025 (No. 4866)

Here is what is on the back of the previous painting... a piece of 'Attempted Evolution'. There were things I really liked about the painting such as this character and the eyeball in the ground, but overall it would need a re-work, and a re-paint with better contrast and higher quality finish. When I was painting these large doodleism paintings, I knew the backs of the paintings could be used one day if I ever ran out of money. It wasn't money I ran out of, but space! 

Attempted evolution crop cut, watercolour 8 x 10" cold press, July 2025

Here is another crop cut of a painting called 'Apple eye Shrimp in the sky' which was a remake of an earlier painting called 'Apple Eye Violet Sky'. It was my 'Magical Mystery Tour' phase of being an artist, like the Beatles Psychedelic period.  If the time, opportunity, and mood presents itself I would pick through these paintings and see if I can make finished pieces. Before you go thinking I cut up all my paintings, I currently have nearly 6000 paintings in my collection, most of them postcard sized, so loosing a few dozen to gain a few hundred in return was great, and the work from the past few months seems to be top notch. There is still a good pile of cuts to paint on, and I have new Arches paper I bought last week. I notice a big difference, in the old days I soaked the paper to remove the sizing, that was based on the advice of a famous painter John Joy. However, the sizing is there to prevent the paint from diffusing into the paper pulp. Quite a few of the old cut pieces were pretty hard to paint on especially in humidity, and there were some strange textures not to mention staple holes. There was one painting where the texturing really helped, it was the elevated train in Griffintown, it was on the back of Tourist Destiny. When I painted tourist destiny I also noticed the weird texture and I believe it was a manufacturer defect. The texturing defect-effect is so cool I wish I knew how to reproduce it for certain paintings. Like in the gravel field yellow flowers I used the grainy cut offs from Tourist destiny and it was perfect for the subject matter.  

Apple eye crop cut, watercolour 6 x 7.5" cold press, July 2025

The education of intelligence

Funny thing about 'artificial intelligence' otherwise known as machine learning, is that a human has to teach it how to function. True story, not a Curio Folio this time, artificial intelligence started with early computers in the 1960's, the military was trying to use them to predict missile trajectories for interceptions. They used something called a ROC, a type of math equation that could be adjusted with a formula. They taught the computer to keep trying formulas until it learned the best one for the interception. Then they could add air speed, wind, and other variables and keep training the computer. This allowed missile interceptions to be much faster especially when computers sped up in subsequent generations. Modern 'AI' is all based on the same concept, albeit much more ambitious and involving trillions of data points. 

The education of intelligence, watercolour 7 x 11" cold press, June 2025 (No. 4316)

Fossilized pop art

Missed opportunity, this painting should have been called fossilized pop tart. As I finished it, the scene looked like some kind of fossilized insect from 300 million years ago, with a kind of Gustav Klimt or Andy Warhol style. To get the neon-green background, I used almost pure yellow (PY154) with a very slight touch of green (PG36), then faded to pure yellow at the bottom. It was actually done as a palette cleanser since my palette was pretty gunky with paint stuck around the corners of the wells. Having cleaned it out I squeezed in fresh paint and its good to go. I keep two nearly identical palettes on the go so that one is all ready while the other one sets. Unfortunately, we have more rain on tap for the next week, so I may have to engage my new series idea a little earlier than expected. Series painting was good for doing things a bit different in the studio (kitchen table), on rainy days for example. Maybe I will do a painting of a fossilized pop tart, or even better, a petrified pop tart.

Fossilized pop art, watercolour 6.5 x 9" cold press,  May 2025 (No. 4874)