Bolton Valley

Having control over watercolour medium can be a chore, it may feel sometimes like the medium has more control over you! Through experimentation I discovered the backwash technique where you let a wash dry almost completely, then drop in some water which causes a blossoming effect. In this painting, done in May 1996, I used that technique to create the bushes next to the pine tree. The scene is from the south side of the Bolton Valley. The other trick I used was the 'blue fade' where you make the hills in the distance get lighter and bluer towards the horizon. I had read about that in a book 'Everything you need to know about watercolor'.

Another painting from summer 1996, this one shows the Bolton cemetery looking north. The cemetery is located on the North part of the valley and provides some great views of the town, and it is generally very quiet! This one was labelled 1996 in pencil on the back, but looking at it, I feel like the technique was too good for 1996, but the palette is right (all transparents). So maybe I did do this in 1996. I seem to remember the name on the stone was 'Crowley' but I didn't want to use the full name for some reason, like to not disturb the dead?

5 x 7" cold press, watercolour, 1996 (?)

Benny cultural center and library, NDG

For the last few months the weather has been exceptionally good making it possible to paint springtime like never before. During spring the trees do not have leaves yet which makes certain sight lines possible. For example, in this scene, the building, which is the Benny cultural center and library (with the big ugly apartment building in the background) would be totally obscured by leaves. Usually it is too cold, wet and miserable to go out and paint in March-early May, but this year perhaps due to global warming or something its been near perfect conditions. It so happens that the pandemic started in March which meant everyone was, and still is, staying at home for the most part.

I wrote about the pandemic blues in a previous blog, referring to the brilliant blue sky as well as the feeling of being blue. These paintings are meant to capture the moment with mostly empty scenes of the neighborhood, and with blue accents. In this case, the top part of the cultural center was a powder blue, also known as periwinkle, which is a combination of cyan and magenta. Its CMYK code is 20,20,0,0 meaning that it was a little bit of cyan and magenta in equal proportions, with no yellow or black. I had actually studied that beforehand, and used the knowledge to mix this otherwise mysterious blue colour using phthalo blue and quinacridone magenta.

The red part of the building turned out a little disappointing, it is supposed to be a brighter red but after it dried it looked more brick red. I used pyrrol red but that colour is not mixing well, I guess I will have to work out a new formula for bright reds like that.

7 x 10" rough press, watercolour, May 2020

Craft Show, Bolton Ontario

August 10^th 1996 was the day I did this painting! There are actually dates on these paintings done in the summer of 1996 which was the first summer that I was painting outdoor 'on location' paintings. My mom signed me up for an art show at the Bolton community arts and crafts fair on the South hill where I sat all day in the heat with my paintings on a small table. Mom was hanging around talking to people. I didn't sell anything that day although a few people came by and took a look. Instead I made a bunch of paintings, there are more than just these two. In retrospect I wasn't much of a salesman.
5 x 7" cold press, watercolour, 1996

Here is another one from the same day showing the tables, garbage cans, and trees in the background. The purple shadows are cool, I must have mixed french ultramarine blue and alizarin crimson. I also used aureolin yellow at the time, and viridian green. You can really feel the heat of the day! 5 x 7" cold press, watercolour, 1996

Farine Five Roses, Montreal

Velvety chocolate textures can be seen in the brick buildings, the muddy base of the dried up canal, and the various other concrete structures. I was motivated to paint a water scene and knew just the spot. Thirty minutes later, on bike, I arrived at the Farine Five Roses factory, an old granary that is no longer operational but has been maintained as a Montreal landmark. To my dismay, the canal was mostly empty of water, perhaps the city shuts it off in the winter or something? There were some sad little puddles of melt water in the muddy basin, in which a family of mallard ducks was hanging out. The wind was extreme that day (last weekend), I think my face was frozen and eyes blurry with tears by the time I finished. At least the ducks stayed there the whole time posing for me.

Mixing paints is a big part of watercolour painting. Unlike oil or acrylic, you can easily mix two, three, four, or more watercolour paints together in order to produce variety. In oil or acrylic, based on my limited experience, colour mixing will quickly produce mud, and it is hard to change the colour on your brush especially with oil. In the old days, I used only a half dozen or so transparent colours to make everything. The brick and mud colours seen in this painting were done using an opaque red iron oxide (PR101 mixed with PBr7) adjusted with PR179 maroon or quinacridone red to get it to be more reddish. As I did this painting, it occured to me that I should have just started by painting the whole thing brown, it would have been faster!

7 x 10 rough press, watercolour, May 2020

Palgrave and Bolton

Dad and I go for bike rides when we get the chance, although it has been too long since our last one! This scene was done up around Palgrave which is north of Bolton, the scene depicts a fish ladder that was part of the river rehabilitation program. In theory the trout would have a chance to jump up the rock steps to reach their spawning grounds. I don't know if it ever worked but the idea was good and it certainly improved the look of the whole river all the way down to Bolton and beyond. Dad was sitting right next to me, we were having a water break and he was patient enough for me to finish this detailed painting.
 5 x 8" cold press, watercolour, 2005?

I found a photo I took of Dad sitting near the ladder. I spy my painting box (held with duct tape) and green cup there which I was using around this time for painting.

Speaking of Bolton, if there ever was a signature motif from Bolton it would have to be the water tower out in the woods, but a close second would be the outhouse. It was part of a four seasons camp that they ran up in the woods where we would go cross country skiing in the winter or hiking in the summer and fall. It was a favorite place of mine growing up. Seen below is a summer scene of the outhouse. Other paintings of the same outhouse with some embellishment are the very early Winter Palace, and a similar scene outhouse in winter.

 5 x 7" cold press, 1997?

Tulip Time, NDG

For May the weather has been remarkably good, I can't remember a time when March, April up until now was so amiable for painting outdoors. There have been a few cold and rainy times, but for the most part clear blue skies and tolerable temperatures. This scene was painted up at the Fleet Street and Cavendish intersection where they have landscaped the area with nice trees and flower beds that are just now sprouting tulips. It is the third painting I did up there, mostly because there were some great places to sit while keeping distance with the walkways. Unfortunately the traffic has picked up significantly as of late, and it really made this location unpleasant. Up on a hill side, my butt was literally vibrating from the construction trucks, recycling trucks, and buses rumbling down Cavendish. I captured one of the recycling trucks in the upper middle of this scene.

I packed a lot of detail into this small painting, there are hundreds of elements including two types of flowers (tulips and dandelions). To accommodate everything I started with a fairly detailed outline using diluted black paint and then worked up the details one by one. The last element was the tulips and dandelions. I saved them for last because I wanted to properly judge the colour. If you put the colourful things in first they could end up looking pale and faded at the end. It was still offa little though, so I added red, orange and yellow washes where needed to enhance the tints. The 'PJD 2020' signature that I adopted this year is hidden on the street sign in the foreground.

5 x 7" cold press, watercolour May 2020

Rural Caledon/King township

While riding my bike out in the east part of rural Caledon I crossed over to King township, basically the middle of nowhere. There were never-ending rolling hills, farms, fences, cows, and plenty of bad weather that day. I remember being worried about getting stuck out in the rain 10 km from home! The conditions were tough but I managed to hack out a few watercolour paintings that day. The technique was rather simple, but the wet humid conditions made it impossible to get more that one or two layers of paint down. As evidence, they weren't even signed. I think the results were okay, these paintings may even be worth redoing in a larger updated version. 

Here is another one done on the same trip. The paint was drying a bit better there and I could get multiple layers. It really conveys the atmosphere, and I love the yellow/violet contrasts. It is really hard to know when I did these, the techniques and pigments used indicate an early 2000 work. There is obvious use of iron oxide pigments, cerulean blue, and a rose coloured paint in the sky that I got sometime in early 2000. I also vaguely remember the circumstances around the time and it was when I was a graduate student at University of Western Ontario, visiting my parents in Bolton. 5 x 8" cold press watercolour 2003?