Goldie's Pub

When I was painting the Parmalat factory some people at Goldie's pub leaned out the windows and were talking to me about the art. One of them was a local photographer who knew things about the community, like the condo building down the street used to be a hotel. They admired my painting, and said, why don't you paint Goldie's pub? At the time the sun was behind it and I was done painting for the day, so I returned to the location the next morning to get the scene with full morning sun. For a small painting it is very hard to pull off, all of the white highlight elements have to be left as blank paper and then filled in when the surrounding are dry. Above the pub there are several floors of apartments which you see as balcony over the sign. I took some liberties with the signage, adding my Instagram handle PJDART42 into the painting. These are really tedious paintings than can't be rushed, typically I do something like this on a weekend where I have more time and opportunity to paint. Anyways, I was glad to paint this small community fixture in all its humble glory. 

Goldie's Pub, watercolour 5 x 7" cold press, August 2024 (No. 4030b)

Back on home turf

Somehow we dodged the bad Montreal weather when we went to PEI, then when we returned, the weather was back to fantastic here. The painting was done in the Westhaven neighborhood I believe this is Elmhurst street. In the background is Sherbrooke west, and the City Fruiterie is the little yellow blob in the middle. The apartments on the right are all different colours and styles, and a man was tending to the grass and shrubs growing on the narrow space between the sidewalk and the buildings. Just a few meters of greenery can really add to the ambiance.
 

View up Elmhurst, watercolour 5 x 7" cold press, August  2024 (No. 3989)

A small garden and vegetable planting area can be found in Westhaven neighborhood on a plot of land owned by Renot Depot. There were still a lot of colourful flowers growing here, although I embellished them quite a bit. In the background is the famous field where I painted tables and chairs.  

Westhaven community garden flowers, watercolour 5 x 7" cold press, August 2024 (No. 3990a)

 

There is a dairy manufacturer that has dangerous silos full of coolant that can explode at any time. We know that because we get a flyer every so often explaining that there is a siren, and you should close the windows if you hear it. Who knew making yogurt and milk was so dangerous. The building is a mishmash of different architectural eras, you see some early 19th century brick construction along side of modern prefab, and the shiny drums.

Parmalat two silos, watercolour 5 x 7" cold press, August  2024 (No. 3991a)

 

And there are up to six silos, this painting shows three of them with one tucked behind the tree. When I select scenes like this the tree and grass are important, since the whole theme of my paintings has to do with the co-existence of nature and urban development. To do this kind of painting, you have to paint the sky first, leaving the shapes of the silos blank. When dry, you can carefully add the streaks of colour using neutral grey, blue, and white (aka blank paper). There is no white paint used in any of my paintings. Even if I had white paint it would not produce such a crisp effect, it would look cloudy and gummy. Its one of the challenges of watercolour, especially if a painter is moving over from oil or acrylic where you can use white paint.

Parmalat four silos, watercolour 5 x 7" cold press, August  2024 (No. 3992a)

 

 

August 2024 palette with colour notes on PEI trip

This blog is mostly artists notes and other thoughts on the trip. If we go back, its a good review of what I learned, and for anyone wanting to paint there maybe it would help too!

Here is a scan of one of the palettes I brought on our PEI trip, the other one was identical but without the crack and wire holding it together. The picture is blurred a bit since I used the flatbed scanner. This is normally the one I use in winter, which is why it cracks up like that, but in the summer I bring it as a second palette. If you run out of paint, you need to squeeze out fresh paint and let it dry for about a day, so the second palette allows for continual painting. However, I only used one of the palettes on the PEI trip to do 35 paintings, the only colour that ran out on the last day was yellow. 

When we went to Brazil last year I regretted not bringing raw sienna, so this time I had a blob of it on the mixing area in the top left. It came in handy, but caput mortuum would have been more useful, its a neutral dark red (PR101) that would have been great to make the shadows of the red cliffs. I came up with an alternative, which was red ochre (fourth from left, top row), with purple (PV55) and dark blue (PB60) which are 6th and 7th on the top row. When dried, the paint blobs tend to look dark, and almost black in some cases. Actually, sometimes I forget which green is which they look so similar when they are dried on the palette. Not much has changed in my palette setup since the last update where I detailed the pigment names and codes.

In PEI, the colours were very soft and neutral, almost pastel-like. Getting those half chroma hues required careful colour mixing, and cutting some of the mixes with yellow ochre (PY43, 1st on top row) helped a lot. Most scenes had a warm glow, while the water brought in a wide range of colours. Bright turquoise was also present on doors of houses, shanties, and in the water sometimes. There is a cobalt turquoise that would have been perfect, but I stopped carrying cobalt pigments awhile ago. To make turquoise I relied on phthalo green (PG7) with phthalo blue (PB15) mixed with just the right amount of water. Perylene green (PG31) was very useful, the pine trees had almost the exact same dark green. Magenta (PR122) and the oranges (PO62, PO73) were useful for pink skies. If you looked carefully, PEI had a wide range of colours, and I think the people who live there also really enjoy having colours in their lives. Hopefully the paintings I did capture the colours and vibes of PEI to some extent.
 

Garden of Hope New Glasgow

New Glasgow has a special meaning to our family since my maternal grandmother Alice was born there and met my grandfather who was from the nearby Wheatly River. This garden is called Garden of Hope, it is maintained by the owner of the adjacent restaurant and cafe (who also owns the pizza place down the street). Not knowing where the cemetery was, I asked the clerk who did not know, but she went and got the aforementioned owner who grew up in the area. She knew where it was, and also knew of the Dickieson family, including Roy and Ester she mentioned. At any rate, Cilei and I made it out to the cemetery to see Nana and Grandpa's final resting spot, which was really peaceful and had a wonderful view of the entire countryside which is fitting. I made this painting back down at the garden, it shows a blue deck chair and some of the manicured flowers with a sparkling lake in the background. Its the last of the PEI painting to blog about, I had two more but they didn't quite work out and perhaps I will repaint them. I also wanted to paint a scene of the supermoon over the fishing village from memory, as we looked I tried to memorize the details. Aside from all the painting, we had a great time and enjoyed the fresh seafood, beaches, and friendly people. Would recommend.  

Garden of Hope New Glasgow, watercolour 5 x 7" cold press, August 2024 (No. 3988)

Victorian-Era Street, Charlottetown

 

Continuing with the PEI painting blogs, here is the one painting I made in Charlottetown. This street was featured on the tourist map and brochures, they call it Victorian lane or something to that effect because the buildings are more or less preserved from the old days. Being from Montreal this type of scene was no surprise, most of Verdun and Ville st Henri have this type of architecture, complete with cafes, restaurants and sun umbrellas. It was definitely hopping here. We walked around the corner and found an almost empty patio on the art cafe, and had a decent meal of fish burger and beef burger. To paint this, the perspective needs to be enough to give the illusion of depth, and the crowd of people just needs to capture the energy, not all the precise detail. The big tree anchors the composition, it prevent the eye from sliding off to the left, and draws the view from the background architecture back into the foreground elements. It was a neat downtown, but I have to say that all of PEI seems to close at 5PM, and restaurants at 8PM, so we really had to plan our days around that!

Victorian-Era Street, watercolour 8 x 10" cold press, August  2024 (No. 3904)

Miscellaneous sky effects

Miscellaneous sky effects included sundown, sunset, dusk, and the moon in PE. There was a super moon one night and we saw it while walking back from the fishing village on the community-made boardwalk. This painting however, shows the sun going down over the fishing shanty. As I painted, a lady walked by and said she knew the owner of the shanty, I said that the shanty would become famous on instagram! You see the lobster traps piled up in front. Fishermen would occasionally gather in the shanty at the end of the day and cook fish and talk loudly. It was quite a cultural immersion.

Sunset over shanty and lobster traps, watercolour 5 x 7" cold press, August  2024 (No. 3975b)

 

At the back of the cottages there is an outdoor swimming pool surrounded by a fence. In the background was a very long field of green beans, and the dark pine trees surrounding it, and a creamsicle and cotton-candy sunset. With orange light, the green looked almost beige on the horizon. The pool which was bright blue, also had a reduction in chroma towards grey. I was really excited to paint this scene, because it had blue (cool) in the foreground, and orange (warm) in the background. If I were to repaint this on the horizontal format it would be even more impactful.

Sunset over field of beans with swimming pool, watercolour 5 x 7" cold press, August  2024 (No. 3981a)

 

At the end of the day, the moon rose on the south side, and it reflected the golden light from the descended sun. Cows in a hillside pasture had an eerie amber glow. It was nearly impossible to try and paint this scene with almost no light, but I could not resist making a painting that I could call 'Moon over Cows', kind of like when I painted 'Crow on a Pile of Snow'. Its another one I might try and repaint to get the cow details right, and widen the aspect to 5:4.

Moon over Cows, watercolour 5 x 7" cold press, August 2024 (No. 3983a)

Scenes of Fishing Boats

The fishing boats in North Rustico PE were mostly idle, with the occasional one going out with a boat full of tourists. In the painting, you see the many fishing rods lined up, they would be used by the tourists to try and catch fish in the deep sea. From the looks of it, they were catching very small fish, I saw a few boats come back, then the captain would gut the fish and throw the entrails into the water where gulls were waiting. I made a painting of that chaotic scene, showing gulls hovering over a fishing boat. In this painting, I chose the boat to paint because it had a Montreal Canadiens sticker on it (not seen in the painting), and the scene was quite dramatic considering how quiet it was, and that I was the only person in the entire area. It was about an hour to sundown, so the colours were still clear and bright, with intense sparkles on the back-lit water. Getting the boat right was a matter of careful observation and perspective. My initials are on the life preserver.

Sun over fishing boat, watercolour 8 x 10" cold press, August  2024 (No. 3903)

For a small piece of paper this was a real challenger of a painting. There was a huge row of boats tied to a long dock that connected to the main dock by a series of ramps. Everything was sort of bobbling around. The sparkling water looks neat. I knew that the horizontal slats on the central dock were key to getting the whole scene to make sense. I painted something similar in Amsterdam many years ago, an overhead view of boats on a canal. So I had that painting in my mind as I completed this one.

Row of fishing boats, watercolour 5 x 7" cold press, August  2024 (No. 3987a)

 

Here is a closeup frontal view of one of the fishing boats. The vessels all looked to be in good repair, and they ran on diesel fuel. If we had more time I might have made more paintings of the fishing boats, they are very technical to paint. Perhaps there are some like this around Montreal.

Fishing boat at dock, watercolour 5 x 7" cold press, August  2024 (No. 3987b)