McGraw Hill

It's been a while since my last post...I had a little change of venue with my studio in November of this year. This is one of the paintings I did during that time, it is based purely on a doodle that I must have done some time this year. I confess the title is not very original I took it from the name of a book publisher that I had jotted down on the same note page where the doodle was. I often do this, come up with the painting title based on some of the actual notes (e.g. Immortal Time Infinite Ideas), although usually it is more clever than this. This painting kind of reminds me of an old paitning I did called "Midnight on Chocolate Harbour", it also has a kind of 'Survivor' feel to it... that TV show.

I probably don't talk enough about composition... it is by far the most important thing in any media... oil, acrylic, ink, computer art, or even any genre whether it be painting, sculpting, maybe music even. What is composition? Composition has to do with where the objects in a picture are placed, and how everything fits together.  In this painting there are several objects, the torch, the tree/orbs, the swirling city, the sky.... and I'd like to think they have been tastefully arranged to complement each other, and to create a sense of depth. Imagine all of thise objects were just crammed together or stuck at the bottom of the picture... then it would be ugly. There are more subtle things, maybe rules, I have found work for me...like don't let the edge of any object touch the side of the painting. Notice how there is a little sliver of space between the egg on the bottom right and the edge of the painting which makes it feel more comfortably placed in the picture,

cold press 7.5 x 6" Nov 2012

Domaine de L'Orangerie, Seychelles

Somehow I forgot to post this painting, I did it in Feburary 2011 on a trip to the Seychelles, on the island of La Digue at a fancy resort called Domaine de L'Orangerie. This view was right from the back porch of the house. It was really in the middle of a jungle, there were these giant bats flying around the top of the mountain in the distance, and all kinds of wild plants. The flowers look bigger than they really were, they were actually part of the manicured garded behind the guest house.

I talked a lot about how to create the illusion of distance, and this is a good example of how to use blue to create that illusion. The mountain in the back was begun as a nearly pure layer of blue... when it was about half dry, I added in the light green of the trees, and then when that was about half dry I added in the darker grey of the shadows. Meanwhile, I worked on the foreground flowers, making sure to not let the colours blend into the wet background. It takes a bit of practice to get the timing right... if you spend too much time on the foreground than the blue dries and you are basically screwed. Practice makes perfect.

Domaine de L'Orangerie, Seychelles Mountain, Bats Flowers, 5.5x7.5" cold press 2011 (No. 1277)

Santa Bárbara Castle, Spain

Alicante is a Spanish city on the coast of the Mediterranean, it is one of the places I visited in the 1998 trip that I have talked about a lot on this blog.... I did somewhere close to 200 paintings on that trip and have been posting them every now and then, at least the good ones! This one was painted shortly before I traveled southward, to Granada where I made several paintings at Alhambra. The name of the castle is the Santa Bárbara Castle, you see it perched atop the mountain. I had walked up the mountain along a winding road and done a few paintings from the top, there is one other painting showing the view from the castle, where the people on the beach look like little ants.

Being able to paint light and shadow is absolutely key when doing landscapes. The shadows are often more difficult for an artist to capture properly, usually due to the use of black paint to depict the shadow. Unless you are are going for a fauvism, cubism, or other highly abstract approach then i would not recommend using black at all. If you look at the building in the lower center of the paining, there are two great examples of how colourful, and 'full of light' a shadow can be. On the left wall, there is a V-shaped highlight of a sunbeam, it is surrounded by a warm sandy shadow.....on the right wall the shadow is a cool purplish shade. So how can shadows on the same building be so different? It is because on the left shadow, the warm sunbeam is spilling light into the shadow. On the right shadow, there is not sub beam nearby, so the shadow is reflecting the sky, and probably the cool Mediterranean sea, which is just behind where I was sitting. So next time you are walking around, just study shadows a bit and you will see that they can be full of light!

5x7"  cold press 1998

Sunset in Valley, Ronda, Spain

Painted just before the sun went down, this scene was in Ronda Spain. It was done during my 1998 trip to France and Spain. There is another painting I did just before this one called Sunset in Ronda that I posted on a previous blog. Here, I am sitting on a tiny ourcrop that is on the edge of a steep cliff that goes down into the valley... I was looking almost straight down into the valley when I painted this. It's funny what I remember about this moment, there were a lot of ants at my feet. I recently took a bunch of photos of my older paintings, so I'll be posting a few of the old ones, including several sunset scenes.

Painting a sunset is by far the hardest landscape scene to do, mostly because it does not last very long... but also because the lack of sun makes the paint dry slowly. The air was very dry in Ronda so the paint must have dried pretty fast, I can tell from the amount of detail I was able to put in. A lot of the technique for this painting believe it or not, came from a painting trip I did in Hamilton Ontario...there were a few key paintings I did there where I discovered the mixtures needed for that purple-blue-green colour that I used here to depict the tree covered mountains in the distance. Also, the back-lit trees in the foreground was a technique I discovered painting in and around Bolton Ontario in the mid 90's. As I look back on my landscape painting, I believe that it started in abut 1995 with studio paintings from photograph, and I did my first landscape on location probably in 1996.

5.5x8" cold press (300lbs), 1998

PS, 300lbs paper is much heavier than what I usually use (140lbs).... it is like thick cardboard made from compressed cotton rag.

Montreal Beach

How often does one visit the beach in Montreal? White sand, blue beach chairs, the smell of the water. It turns out that there actually is a beach, down in the old port area, they filled in a whole section with sand and put some chairs in there. Of course it isn't free to get in. The painting I did on location makes it look like the water is right at the edge of the sand but there is actually a rod iron fence and a 2 meter drop off to reach the water. In the background you can see the Molson Brewery.

The hardest thing to paint with watercolour is water. Ironic. After all these years I still feel completely challenged when trying to depict water. It has different colours, it reflects light, and worst of all it moves. In this painting I started with a sky blue layer, making sure to leave the white highlights.... you do this by dragging your brush sideways across the paper. Then I overlay a more purple-blue, but leaving little slices of the sky blue showing. This makes a wave-illusion because waves are three dimensional and reflect colour differently on each side. Finally I put on the greens and darker blues, in reality these are coming from the silt and deeper water below.When it is dry, I take one of my beat up old brushes and make it moist (not wet) and go over the area a few times really quickly. This makes things a little smooth and glassy. Cheers.

5x7" cold press. 2012

Immortal time, Infinite Ideas

I think the prospect of making up the title inspires me more sometimes than anything. I remember one painting, "The Crushing Delicate" I spent a whole week wondering if the title should have "The" or not. For this one, the title was already in the doodles... although it said 'immortal (art) time' in the notebook. I don't really know what the title means but it sounded poetic. In the bottom right there is a lego-scene depicting a funeral, it was based on my memories of a funeral I attended in early 2000's. I think that making an emotionally charged scene out of lego is my way of sharing a feeling but still keeping distance. And lego is just a fun kids toy, making it a sweet irony when emotions are depicted. Speaking of irony, the title "immortal time" is quite the opposite of the theme, a funeral. Hey, I'm just doing the art critic's job right now so I'll stop.

This is a pretty good example of me using similar techniques for landscapes and surrealist styles. I just posted a new painting (Theater Snowdon), where I explained how to paint a cloudy sky. I used the same technique here...laid down a moist wash, than dropped in the sky and cloud-shadows which bleed around and end up looking fuzzy. I used it in the top left behind the hydra-octopus-medussa thing. There is an incredibly small thing I am going to adjust in this painting to improve balance. I'll just not say what it is, so the aforementioned critics can have something to do when they see the original. Of course, there are no actual  critics (that I know of), I just imagine they are there in order to keep myself on my toes. Isn't that the beauty of the internet?

Of note, this is the fifth 22x30 painting I completed this year, most of any year so far.

22x30" cold press. 2012

Theater Snowdon, Montreal

The best scenes to paint are sometimes in surprising locations. Theater  Snowdon is right next to the Decarie expressway, a major submerged highway that connects the north to downtown Montreal. I pass this intersection every day on bike or by bus, and have noticed this scene. Today I headed out and found a good place to sit, on the overpass road sidewalk (I bring a lightweight portable camping chair, an aluminum tripod), looking south onto the Decarie. I liked how the 50's style art deco sign of the theater was dominating the skyline, with the traffic roaring by below. Incidentally I rode past the theater and it looked totally shut down. That's what was cool about the scene... this out of business theater, with it's sign proudly reigning over the land (a noisy highway).

Painting the blue sky and clouds is a staple technique when doing landscapes. I look back on my older works, and see that I have been doing it the same way pretty much the whole time... if it ain't broke. I start by wetting the area where the sky needs to be, then I drop in cereulean  tinted with a bit of rose madder genuine and ultramarine... this mix should be a little purply, it goes at the top of the sky. IF you judge properly the blue should bleed, making cloud shapes. The more wet the background was, the more fuzzy the clouds are. Then you drop in a grey-blue mix... use the sky blue you made and add a little more red and yellow. This becomes the shadows that are at the center of the clouds. If the paper is still wet then the shadow also bleeds, making it fuzzy. You may need to soften the edges here and there because it is really difficult to keep the paper moist, especially outside.

11x7.5" cold press 2012