Palette Cleanser #1

Buying a lot of paint brings the fun problem of using all the paint. As I was cleaning my palette the other day it occurred to me to use the leftovers to make a painting- no planning no thinking, just painting. To mitigate the stress level I used a low grade watercolour paper from a pad by Fabriano that I bought at Deserres before the lockdown. The colour concept I was exploring was to mix magenta with grey. In the remainder of the picture I combined a lot of "warm colours" in the foreground and sky with a few "cool colours" in the distant foliage. Magenta, funny enough, can be considered in the middle of the temperature scale neither warm nor cold. I discussed colour temperature more in a recent post on The Plan, Suburban Escape. Even though the colour temperature theory is full of holes, I quite like the results of this quick study.

9 x 12" 300 g/m² acid free paper, watercolour, June 2020

The Plan (Suburban Escape)

Keeping up with my mission of filling out the links for the 'stretching rack blog post' which lists all of the major 22 x30" works, here is the blog for the third painting I did in 2011. By now I had abandoned the idea of planned designs and gone back to the doodleism style where I copied drawing from my work (laboratory) notes and assembled them into a somewhat coherent design as I went. The scene is supposed to represent the side of a building with many different porches and people. At the time I was living in a dense row of triplexes with the stereotypical Quebec balconies everywhere. In the previous year I had completed the Three Ring Flying Circus series, and used a few similar elements like the large face in profile on the right seen in the Tight Rope Walker. I also sense a lot of pain, sorrow, and a growing divide in this painting.

Recently I read an article on Handprint.com (MacEvoy) on colour temperature where the author completely dismantled the theory of colour temperature in art. For instance, if red is hot, what about frozen strawberries huh? Or blue flames. What about white hot, versus white ice. Not to mention putting the stereotypical warm colours (yellow, orange, red) looks terrible together, as do the cold colours (green, blue, purple). To add to the confusion the 'hottest' colour of all, red, can be a cold red, as there can be a warm blue. Blue represents distance, but what about during a sunset? It must be about the feelings of colour... warm colours remind you of a cozy wood fire cuddled up under a blanket sipping orange pekoe, but the same warm colours could represent the house burning down. Red for love? How about red for blood. Blue for sadness, what about blue for weddings? Basically there is no sense, no use, and no science behind the colour temperature idea. If you are still a doubter... ask yourself what temperature is lime green?

22 x 30" cold press, watercolour, 2011

The Extruders, and The Deluge

Jumping up and down in celebration, this painting was completed just after Sidney Crosby scored the game winning goal in 2010 Olympics for the Canadian men's team, and I made a marking to that effect on the center left of the picture. I was living on Clarke street in Mile End Montreal in a medium sized flat, the best part about it was that I had a dedicated room to use as a studio for the first time up until I moved in 2011. Conceptually this painting explored lines and forms, which construct and deconstruct throughout the design. In one passage, the image of a brick house reflects in an amorphous bubble. Another work from 2010 called The Woven World  used a similar concept of forming shapes with intertwined ribbons. 22 x 30 " cold press. watercolour, 2010

In  2010 I completed 5 large format paintings which was the largest output I had done up until then, in 2013 I would eclipse it with 6 large works. Part of 2010 was shifting the style away from dark and gloomy and more towards light and open. In between these two paintings was the "The 2010 Solution" where I totally opened up the design elements and reduced the amount of doodles. Following that, I did a completely spontaneous painting without using doodles called The Deluge, shown here. It had balance and colour problems in the composition although the effect was striking and the meaning was deep. The sky effect was created using large wet washes of alizarin crimson and letting them dry overnight. I first used that technique to great effect in Dream Tree.

22 x 30 " cold press. watercolour, 2010

Preventing the Deterioration of an Otherwise Normal Scene

By 2009 the doodleism style had evolved into a landscape fusion, a kind of surrealism meets cubism. Surrealism is the style made popular by Dali, with melting clocks, long legged elephants, and humanoid rock formations, while cubism is defined by Picasso and his twisted lines and shapes that vaguely resembled everyday objects. I am not trying to place myself with those artists, just trying to describe what this style turned into. Parts of it are seemingly familiar like stars in the sky, a beat up car, a growing flower, but your eyes do not rest for long on any given object. My goal was to pack as many doodles into one picture while maintaining some sense of it being a finished painting. Objects seem to disintegrate into space, while organic beings try to keep it all grounded, hence the fanciful title.

Painting stars like this was a big challenge considering I eschewed any white paint or masking fluid. I knew how to do the effect already after many other paintings with stars in space, Sun Earth Moon was perhaps the first one. I started with a red under painting using fairly strong wash of alizarin crimson (red), leaving the star shapes in blank paper, and keeping some areas without the wash. Then I repeated with a viridian hue (green) wash, following the basic shape of the sky but leaving the blank paper stars mostly opened, while covering a few here or there with the green. I also left some green spots open where the red wash is present. Finally a french ultramarine wash similar to the others, leaving the spots open where I want stars. There is no more painting to do. The result from these three washes area a mix of white, red, blue, and green starts on a near black background. The white stars are rimmed with chunks of red, green and blue giving them a shimmer. The effect is profound when seen in real life, the scan does it justice though.

22 x 30" cold press, watercolour, 2009

Parc Angrignon, windy pond (tonal yellows)

Yesterday as the weather turned I squeezed in one more small painting of a pond near the station in Parc Angrignon. I found a vantage point up on a steep hill under a tree. The wind was whipping up a fury making the trees bend and the water move in all directions. You may be surprised, but I used very little green to paint this picture, just little tints here and there. In fact, I explored the use of darkened yellow to make green. What? Yellow plus black = green. I didn't believe it at first when I read that on Handprint.com (MacEvoy), but sure enough it works. The trees, the lilly pads, most of the lawn, and the trees in the background are vanadium yellow (PY184) and touches of lamp carbon black (PBk6). In a few spots I tinted with PG7 like some trees in the distance and the closest parts of the lawn.

There are certain 'colours' that are actually not totally unique. For example, brown is actually a darkened version of orange, and beige is a lightened version of brown. In this sense, beige can be produced directly by adding grey to orange. Those are called tones, perhaps they can be understood as pastels. The colour called olive is mostly a semi darkened tone of yellow, although it may lean more towards the green side, or the dark red/brown side. Now that I have discovered this, I find that starting with yellow, darkening with black, then adding some diluted green as needed produces a much more natural looking green. The same mix but a bit stronger ends up being the shadow. The shadows of the trees, and below them, do not contain blue paint, they are tonal versions of yellow.There is more to say about this, in terms of making shadows, but I will save it for another blog.

5 x 7" cold press, watercolour, June 2020

Angrignon Metro Station, green line, southwest borough, Day 2

In the evening I contemplated the work done down at Angrignon Station that day and felt unsatisfied. While there was a lot to like about the paintings, the oranges were considerably off, and the structural drawing was lackluster. The next day (which is actually today as I write the blog), I headed down again to parc Angrignon and sat on the same location of the first painting although the shadow had shifted due to earlier time of day. One thing I had been missing was a pencil sketch which was always part of the plan for the metro station series. My new sketch book was way to big and heavy so I grabbed an old highschool sketchbook that was only half full; it was much lighter. In the scan, you see a preliminary sketch where the scene was changed to horizontal, and a more detailed sketch below where I was able to identify the key structural elements.

Another adjustment was that I brought along some benzimida orange deep (PO36) from Da Vinci company that I recently obtained. It was nearly the perfect orange with a little vermilion hue (PR255) added, and with slight tonal adjustment. The main thing was getting the drawing right which I executed in neutral tint (PBk6, PV19, PB15). Then I completed the grey neutral concrete, the sky, and some of the foliage before applying the orange. My mistake on the oranges the day before was putting them down first on the unpainted paper. By adding them last, I could better judge their hue, chroma and lightness. It real life the oranges were slightly brighter, but it looks pretty close, and it looks quite natural this way. I find this painting to be much more accurate, although it misses some of the verve in the initial sketches. As mentioned these works were preliminary, I don't plan on returning to this location but will see about turning this into a finished work along with some photos I took. The day 1 Angrignon blog is in this link.

This is part of 'The 27 stations of the green line metro, Montreal' series.

7 x 10" cold press, watercolour, June 2020

Angrignon Metro Station, green line, southwest borough, Day 1

For my 600^th post I wanted to do something big, so here is preliminary work done this weekend down in Parc Angrignon at the metro Angrignon in Lasalle. Wanting a 'reboot' of sorts I decided to take on a project that I had in mind earlier this year, to do a painting of each metro station in the spirit of Hiroshige's series called "53 stations of tokaido" which depicted the many rest stops along the tokaido route beween Edo (Tokyo) and Kyoto. Okay, the green line metro doesn't have the same mystique, but it will have to do! For the first painting I rode around the sprawling station on my bike surveying the landscape and building. I sensed contrasts... the lush foliage of the park with the stark concrete structures and apartments in the distance, the earthy colour contrasted with the oranges of the station, the hustle bustle of people in transit with the relaxation of a day at the park. Sitting in the shadow of a juniper tree I executed this painting with little planning- I just wanted to let the brush and the inspiration do the work. 7 x 10" cold press (new Arches block I started). watercolour, June 2020

To capture the contradiction theme I found another angle this time sitting in front of the main entrance under some trees in the humongous parking lot. The sky was turning nasty and rain was on the horizon. In this painting the station is kind of 'sandwiched' between the tumultuous sky/city-scape and the lush flora of the park. My new found knowledge of desaturated tones helped get the lilacs, the railing, and the various shades of green correct. I will make a post on that point shortly. I also adjusted the orange the best I could under the circumstances. 7 x 10" cold press, watercolour, June 2020

As the weather worsened I made a quick painting of the nearby pond which I will post shortly along with a discussion of desaturated tones. I made a separate blog for day 2 on Angrignon location.

These were the first studies for 'The 27 stations of the green line metro, Montreal' series