The Blue House, Ville St. Pierre, Montreal

This scene is just down the street from Elm Park in Ville St. Pierre, a small neighborhood sandwiched between NDG and Lasalle just north of autoroute 720/20. In fact, I was sitting on a small boulder in a patch of grass backing onto the tall concrete wall of the overpass. I was nowhere near the cars or the people so it was safe, but it was rather noisy. Good thing I was using earplugs. The wind was strong on that day blowing the paper up and down several times creating splashing effects. I have wanted to paint this scene for a long time, it is on the way when you ride your bike from NDG to the Lachine canal. The house has so much character, as does the tree beside in on the left, which had branches cut off the top but was still growing and surviving. The name and composition of this painting was inspired by Van Gogh's Yellow House. Awile ago, I did a painting called Green House, Barbados. Now I just need to find a red house, orange house, purple house....

Blue has become a theme of the pandemic series, it started with blue skies, and then slides, shorts, and houses apparently! Having trouble with phthalo blue, I decided to go back to some of the other blues including iron blue (prussian/PB27) for the outline and tints, cobalt blue (PB28) for the house paint, and cerulean blue (PB35) for the sky. It made the sky a lot easier to control, in fact I mixed cerulean with a touch of phthalo. After the light blue dried, I layered on cobalt blue to create the brilliant blue paint on the bottom half of the house. I finished with a darker layer of cobalt blue and a touch of phthalo. To complete the tour-de-bleu, I used french ultramarine blue (PB29) in the purple-shadows, and indo blue (PB60) in the dark shadows. Cobalt paints are slightly more toxic than average paint, but they are generally safe with proper handling.


7 x 10" rough press, watercolour, May 2020

View Down Lansdowne Avenue, Westmount, Montreal

Cityscapes are a kind of landscape done in the city, hence the clever name. I try to observe nature in the city such as trees, grass, and water and how they integrate with the human-made stuff. Houses are made of brick wood and clay, and concrete and asphalt are made of minerals and oils from the ground, so in some ways, even the human-made stuff is part of the earth. And the trees, grass, even the water are all put there or modified by people. In this scene I was looking down the steep part of Lansdowne Avenue from the vantage point of a small embankment of grass up and away from the sidewalks. The towering apartment buildings and old houses seemed like they were part of the forest.

With all the new colours in my palette I have been adapting to several challenges, such as tree bark and blue skies. In this painting, I left the tree trunk until the end, and then put down one quick wash of iron oxide red with phthalo blue. When it dried I made the bark textures with bloodstone genuine which is a heliotrope/hematite pigment. Heliotrope is a kind of black sandstone, while hematite is a red iron oxide found within the stone. I am quite satisfied with this method of painting trees, it provides the weight of a tree trunk, but still gives the warm reflectivity of the bark. The blue skies have been tricky since the clouds showed up- the phthalo blue tends to flood the whole area and obscure the shapes of the clouds. This time I put the blue last, but it dried with hard edges. The shadows in the clouds are almost the same mix as the tree, but with a touch of magenta and french ultramarine (purple) added in.

7 x 10" rough press, watercolour, May 2020

Barn Burner, Bolton Ontario

Ok, I will admit it, I painted the barn. This was one of the vanishing landscape series chronicling the slow development of agricultural land into suburban housing developments. This barn was located on the north hill just past the neighborhood on Coventry road. The city had put a moratorium on new housing developments, but the farm had been sold and nobody was maintaining it anymore. I did a painting of the property a little earlier before it got abandoned.

Not much longer, and the barn burned down, it was in the newspaper! I packed up my supplies and walked down the street to see the burned barn, complete with smouldering ashes. The painting is below. Talk about a vanishing landscape! As of today (2020) the farm lot still sits vacant.

5 x 7" cold press, watercolour, July 1996

Elm Park, Ville St.Pierre Montreal

I would wager that this is the first ever watercolour painting done in Parc Elm, which is located in Ville St. Pierre, right next to autoroute 20. The wall you see in this painting is the sound barrier separating the houses and park from the highway. The park is about 1000 square feet or less, just a path, a bench, and a small garden you see here with some tulips. One tulip was pushing up into the shadows, and the sun was otherwise sparkling on the grass and sidewalk. It was a pleasure to capture this thin sliver of spring.

Convenience mixes are paints that come pre-mixed, like, the company puts two colours together so that the artist doesn't have to do as much work. I never knew that until recently, when I started reading Handprint.com which is a vast resource of knowledge and opinion. I decided to mix my own convenience mix consisting of winsor green (PG7) and benzi yello (PY154), yielding a spring-like lime colour. As spring turns to summer, I added slightly more of the green to represent the increased chlorophyll. The grass and budding leaves both contain ample amount of the convenience mix. Lets call it Montreal spring green.

7 x 10" rough press, watercolour, May 2020

Stretching Rack, List of Large Paintings with Links to Respective Blog

No painting this time, just a photo of the backside of the stretching rack I use to make larger sized watercolours. On the front is the surface of the wood frame riddled with staple holes. Mom and Dad helped with this one, years ago they drove me out to a hardware store to buy the lumber and we whacked together what was a very large frame (like meters) for holding acrylic canvasses. As I gave up on acrylic, I cut it down to size for 22 x 30" watercolour paper to complete "The Grapes of Tuscany" for my late Uncle Ross. Every painting done on the rack was written in pen on the back. Since it is hard to see, here is the list of year, title (the spaces denote where the piece of wood ends, it starts with the bottom piece and goes counter clockwise), and links are provided for ones that have a blog:


2002 The Grapes of Tuscany
2003 Superencrypted
2003 Floating Cathedral Statues
2003-2004 Public Highway Drivers (PHD)
2004 Lab Book #4, Finding Space
2004 Blue Flames Consuming the Stylized Image of a Woman
2004 Lab Book # 5, Making Connections
2004 Lab Book #6, Spanky's Fantastic Cathedral
2006 Inner Workings
2006 Failure to Understand, Something to Learn
2006-2007 Summer Scene
2008 Lab Book #9, The End of Colour
2008 Lab Book #11, The Legendary Isle of Sixe

2008 Lab Book #12, Archi-doodle City (W/E)
2009 Life of an Onion
2009 Lost in a Mall
2009 Addictive Puzzle
2009 Preventing the Deterioration of an Otherwise Normal Scene
2010 Current Demand
2010 The Extruders
2010 The Twenty-Ten Solution
2010 The Deluge
2010 Creation's Creations
2011 Insignificant Details
2011 Instant Nostalgia
2011 The Plan (Suburban Escape)
2011 Fertile Idea
2012 Social Networking (Life on Venus)
2012 The Paper Chase (No More Outlines)
2012 The Crushing Delicate
2012 Attempted Evolution
2012 Immortal Time, Infinite Ideas

2013 Where we Were (Ancestors)
2013 Perpetual Load Theory (The 2012 Question)
2013 In Sequence [B side]
2013 Responsible for Reality (Dinosaurus)
2013 The Lemon Sunset
2013 She Was...
2014 New Thoughts and Human Adaptations
2015 Never Done (No Idea)
2015 The End of Ego (High Tide)
2016 Desert Appliances (Applications Unclear)
2017 Community Connections
2018 Tourist Destiny
2018 Apple Eye, Shrimp in the Sky
2019-2020 Lab Book #23, Hiking Elvis

update: I have finally filled in the missing blogs, and updated some of the old scans to make the images better. I needed to be outside on a sunny wind-free day to take good pictures. The Grapes of Tuscany is now posted, I found an old photo of it while it was still on the rack in 2002. 

Hiking Elvis

Find Hiking Elvis! Last year I stretched a 22 x 30" paper on the rack, and there it sat for months on end. In December I splashed some colours around including a swath of cerulean blue, green and blue blobs, and some washes of alizarin crimson red. And there it sat for almost six months without any progress. It first occurred to me that this was to be a mountainous scene, and that it would involve Elvis, four Elvis' was the original plan. By accident I had dropped four beads of water on the washes when it was wet, and I became obsessed with the idea that they represented Elvis. At the same time I had a doodle in my lab book #22 that resembled Elvis on a mountain, and the idea started to come together (it was mistakenly labelled lab book #23 on the painting). I also worked out a few compositions in my sketchbook that would fit the background painting. Complicated path just like the painting.  

There are a lot of little symbols and jokes in this painting, the main joke turned out to be that the characters are all taking selfies! I also included the abominable snowman as I remember from the SkiFree game, and a Canadian maple leaf to remember Canadian climbers who died on Mount Everest. In the end, this painting is about the absurdity of commercialized climbing in the Himalaya's, which is currently on hold due to the pandemic. There is even a Ferris wheel, fast food restaurant and french fries strewn throughout. Hokusai's wave-drawing style was used in the foreground cliffs.

22 x 30" cold press, watercolour, 2019 - 2020

note, I went over the alizarin washes with quinacridone and pyrrole reds to make sure they are lightfast, since the beginning of 2020 I dropped alizarin from use which is a shame since it is such a powerful colour, but it fades like crazy in sunlight. Here is a crop of Hiking Elvis taking a selfie...

St. Jacques Street, Rusty Store, NDG

Rust is a very appealing colour and texture, it embodies rich earth orange, yellow, brown, black red, and has an almost velvety texture. The large family of artists pigments based iron oxides are perfect for capturing rust, because they are in fact, rust! Using rust to paint rust, it doesn't get any better than that. Other than painting a picture of a ferrari using pyrrole (ferrari) red which is on my painting wish list. To find rust, I used google maps to identify a junk yard for scrap cars. Unfortunately it was surrounded by a tall fence. This scene was on St. Jacques Street, usually a terribly busy an noisy light-highway, it was not too bad when I was there last week. The blue shop caught my attention, and of course the rusty overhanging metallic awning, and the rusty yellow poles.

I used to sign all of my landscapes, well most of my landscapes, with the P Darlington 'scrawl', barely legible and easy to miss. With few exceptions I signed in cerulean blue or mostly ultramarine blue. In the pandemic blues series, I have been signing with a PJD 2020 inscription using mostly indothrene blue. It is hidden in this painting, but you will find PJD 2020 if you look around. Part of the reason I haven't been signing as usual is just the situation being what it is, and these are very experimental paintings as I work out the new paints and how to use them. I will get back to signing normally in due course. By the way, the blue here was a mix of phthalo blue (PB15) and iron oxide red (PR101) and some adjustments with phthalo green (PG7) to make it turquoise. The rust was iron oxide red, bloodstone genuine (heliotrope with hematite from Daniel Smith co.), some vandium yellow (PY184), and purplish tints.

7 x 10" rough press, watercolour, May 2020