Le Parapluie Rouge

 

Technology is always a mixed blessing. Recently I got a smart phone, a google product called android... within minutes of turning it on, I found an image of one of my paintings displayed in the phone's gallery database. I soon realized that the blog I am writing is a google product too, and the phone had automatically synchronized all of my blog pictures. So with a a few swipes of the finger on the touch screen I can bring up a 4x3 panel of thumbnails showing the 230+ images from the blog. What's more I'm able to insert a painting onto my phone's wallpaper (background). having done so, I realized that my paintings are just not composed properly for display on a cell phone, so I created this painting (Le Parapluie Rouge, hopefully you don't need a translator for that one... though I had to use the internet to figure out of it was masculine or feminine).

This painting was composed specifically to be a cell phone wall paper, more precise brushstrokes, better detail, and a horizontal arrangement for when you scroll back and forth along your app screen. The only downside is that the mostly white background makes for lousy contrast, I'll have to try and make a nighttime scene next time. The style of this one is completely based on my painting "The Twenty Ten Solution.", each doodle has it's own space, and the background is there to create depth. The doodles used were from notebooks completed just at the end of my stay at McGill, and overlapping with my new beginning at Concordia. I mention 230 paintings on the blog, but the total collection is probably more in the 2000 range, mostly small format landscapes, the rest larger abstracts and doodleism paintings.

Le Parapluie Rouge, 5 x 15" cold press. 2012 (No. 1486)

London Rhino Party

London Ontario was home for a decade, I painted a lot outdoors when I was there, summer, fall, winter, there are over 200 paintings from that time. This one was done downtown outside of the art gallery Museum London, in the heat of the summer when the grass was dry and the cicadas buzzing. I was interested in the reflections on the metal surface of the Rhinocerous sculpture, it reminds me a lot of the famous Chicago landmark "Cloud Gate" a giant shiny bean shaped thing in Millennium park (although it probably did not exist at the time I painted this one). Note the green grass reflection on the underbelly, and the blue sky and clouds reflected on the side of the beast.

I used a common trick to make the reflections really sparkle...juxtaposition of light and dark...look on top of the Rhino's back, there is a thin sliver of 'sun reflection' which is actually white paper showing through, and just on top of that, there is the dark green from the vines from the the building in the background. I selected this sitting location specifically to have this arrangement of foreground and background. Choosing where to site is half the battle! By juxtaposing the dark against the light, it makes the light look even brighter. The impressionists used this trick all the time to create luminous cloth, candles, and other eye-popping highlights. To make this work though, you need to use the trick sparingly... in this painting there is only one spot where I juxtapose the white and dark... the rhinos back. All other parts of the painting have a lower contrast, which makes the key point (the sun reflection) the highest contrast part of the painting, and thus enhances the illusion further.

5x8" cold press. 2002 (?)

Car Seat Anyone? (Vanishing Landscapes)

I've been inspired and learned a lot from many artists including the classics like Monet, Degas, da vinci (oil painters), and then some more contemporary artists like Steve Hanks, Jon Joy, and a local (Montreal) painter named Starkey (all watercolour painters). This painting was inspired by Andrew Wyeth, a watercolour painter, of note, he did a famous painting called Christina's World, where a woman in a pink dress was crawling across a hayfield, with farmhouses in the background. My painting was done from a photo taken along highway 50 (a road connecting Toronto to the suburb of Bolton where I grew up). I really liked the concept of the degrading status of farms and farm land, which are being replaced by suburbs and factories (as this barn eventually was). I'm not sure what the old carseat stands for, but if Christina (the crawling woman from Wyeths painting) were around maybe she would take a seat.... that just gave me an idea for a new painting.

Painting from photo is a very common activity for an artist, the advantage is that you have lots of time to make the painting, and you can avoid the embarrassment/discomfort of being on location.  The pitfall is that photos do not capture very well the shadows, often turning them to flat black (which is definitely NOT the case...shadows are filled with reflected light from the sky and surroundings). Also, the photo has so much detail in it, a lot of artists fall in the trap of trying to capture all of the detail... every wire, fence post, blade of grass....in this painting I used knowledge of location (outdoor) painting to keep it looking real... the shadows and grass are pale and filled with blue light, and the detail has been minimized in the less important places... study the hay field, and you see a bunch of controlled backwashes and brief lines to suggest grass, without painting every blade. Having said that, if you inspect Christina's World by Wyeth... he painted every blade, in watercolour that's tough. As they say, rules are made to be broken.

This is part of the Vanishing Landscapes series which captured disappearing farmland in the Caledon area. 

5x7" cold press. 199?*

*note: I have a bad habit of not dating my paintings, so can only estimate on the older collection, this was probably done between 1996 and 1999.

Wiki God

On the subject of religion I know little, but through my paintings I have often tried to explore the theme, recent attempts were "Creation's Creations" and ..
In wiki god I tackle the idea of a man-made god...coming from the sky is a mechanical device that is creating, (or spraypainting?) the landscape. The landscape is a broken, bipolar contradiction in terms... stormy on the left and serene on the right.

The broken landscape theme is one I have used in many paintings... here you can see that the horizon is a little lower on the left, not quite joining up with the horizon on the right hand side. This idea was a product of the doodleism style, my notes often contained miniature landscapes which I would paste together into larger scenes. In this case I decided to do it on purpose, to make some kind of statement... I'll leave it to the critics.

Cold press, 5x7" 2012

The 2010 Solution

Surprising, but I never posted this painting, probably because I finished it in January, winter of 2010... it is always difficult to get a quality photo in the winter, it kind of went forgotten in my portfolio until today. It is bright and sunny, so much in fact that I had to reduce the exposure on the camera to get the colours right. At the beginning of the last decade (2000) I painted a pivotal abstract painting, in fact one of the first since 'Art vs. Science' 1995... that began a string of abstract paintings, one a month, for the years 2000, 2001, onwards. When 2010 was approaching I wanted to create a painting that also represented some kind of turning point or beginning perhaps. The answer? 'The 2010 Solution'.

I did not shy away from a Dali-like surrealist landscape on this one. I also kept a lot of open spaces, most of the painting is done in thin coloured washes. Some areas are more detailed, like the bar, and the funny creature smoking, as well as the neural-network/rooted thing on the right of the smoker. Instead of creating a wall of doodles, I tried to feature each doodle more prominently, each has it's own space and time to exist in. In retrospect (it is mid 2012 as I write this), this painting helped to open up the style... let it breath. Together, with the just finished "The Paper Chase (No More Outline)", I am pretty excited about where the style is going to go next.

22x30" cold press, 2010

The Paper Chase (No More Outlines)

Following 'Creative but Can't Escape', this painting develops the concept of working without outlines...basically there aren't very many at all except in the papers that are under the foot-shaped lamp in the middle, and a few others here and there. The subject matter of the painting is very organic, abstract twisting hands and feet, multiple skylines, strange plants populate the landscape. Yet all the elements are connected...that concept, of connecting elements, is inspired by Inuit art that I saw when my family took some trips around Ontario... Norval Morrisseau was one of the most famous ones.

 Still based on notebook doodles, in 'The paper |chase' I established the elements using flat washes instead of starting with a painted outline. I had to control the washes very carefully to avoid overlaps... where two washes touch they either create a blur (if they are both wet), a backwash (if one is wet and the other is half dry), or a dark line, if one is totally dry. The dark lines create the impression of an outline even though I did not put one. In some cases I left these dark lines to create definition, in other cases I erased them using a moist brush (not my good ones). By not using outlines, I found that I concentrated more on the quality of the washes, because that is all I had to define the shapes. It also took a lit longer than normal... but it also helped keep up my inspiration since each element was almost immediately established as opposed to making outlines where you have to finish the drawings in steps.

22x30" cold press 2012

Fertile Idea

Are all ideas fertile? I guess this one was. The character in the middle is spewing fire from his forehead into the sky... otherwise the sky is raining fire down onto his poor head, either way it sounds hot. Anyways, the doodles I used to make this painting came mostly from a conference that I attended down in Texas. Conferences make the best opportunities for doodles...long lectures, relative anonymity in the crowd, a pen and paper handy...

I've probably covered this in a past blog, but it is worth reviewing, that is, using white, or 'blank paper'. This term is kind of illogical, because if a paper is blank, then how can you use it... if you put paint on it then it's not blank anymore. While you are thinking about that, I'll reiterate that I do not use white paint for my watercolours... white paint does exist but it is more like a heavy acrylic or guache, and most watercolour painters (including myself) consider this to be not really watercolour. A similar case can be made for black paint, it is too heavy and dark and does not belong in watercolour. Of course rules are made to be broken, see 'Birdman' where I use chinese black ink... however it must be called mixed-media as opposed to watercolour. Anyways, there are several areas that are just the blank paper in this painting... mostly along the diagonal axis of the composition. I made the blank sections seem connected, so it looks like a sort of river of white going across the page, that helps the viewers eye move across the page. I also like how the white background makes the doodles stand out. The first Doodleism painting I did that featured a lot of blank paper showing was "The 2010 Solution."

22x30" cold press, 2012