RBG

Very soggy and rainy the past two days and as a result I’m a bit housebound – not that I would melt if I ventured out. I painted this near the study centre of the Royal Botanical Gardens late March – an overcast day looking  through trees and brush to York Boulevard on the other side of lake Ontario.

oil on pre gessoed panel 8"x10"

House in order

There were still puddles of snow on the street when I painted this two months back looking down at a house from the vantage point of the second story of the former town hall in Dundas. The car in front of the house drove away  from right under my nose – not my car – and it didn’t return for me to renegotiate it into the picture – just fine and dandy.      

click to enlarge

oil gessoed board 9"x12"

A blustery day

It’s become the norm lately these days that are a reprise of everything winter had to offer except that now the audience consists of crocuses and budding branches. 
It was like this two weeks ago when I persuaded David to drive me to an outdoor session at the royal bowman near Rockwood where he sat inside the car and read while I scribbled  color onto a tiny format while the wind was whipping at me - brrr -  and then for my amusement he pretended to be a bear beside an archery target!

pastel on gessoed water color paper 8"x8" 

pastel on gessoed water color paper 4"x5.5"

David thinking he's a bear

In no particular order

I lie – in fact the order was just as the model intended,  moving effortlessly from one engaging pose to another -  from start to finish – first she sat leaning back, then she stood with weight on her left leg leaning into her left arm and finally - semi reclining on a drawing bench since we are not especially equipped with cushions, fabric or comfy furniture although that could change. 

The drawings are on Strathmore charcoal paper 18”x24” using thick  and thin sticks of charcoal and soft pastel. Each pose lasted forty minutes with  breaks  every twenty minutes. 

Chair

in order to finish off the remainder of a load of paint at my disposal from a previous outdoor session I attacked an unfinished chair.

This chair was one of four that served in my daughter's kitchen at Rue Stanley in Montreal when she  was a student there. They had belonged to her room mate’s grandmother.

When the room mate moved out my daughter acquired three of the chairs and now they’re serving in my kitchen at Stanley St. in Hamilton. 

oil on 9"x12" pre gessoed panel

Hot to boogie

I’d forgotten about  Hamilton’s race around the bay  a 30 kilometre  marathon that has attracted runners annually since 1894 – the oldest marathon in North America – three years older than the Boston marathon. Phew, wow….

So when I left early to draw two Sundays ago (March 25) I wasn’t prepared for the closure to the downtown and horrendous back up of traffic that kept me driving a good 50 minutes around in circles, wrong way down one way streets, cursing vehemently and  causing me to be a good 15 minutes late for my life session.  Then to give new meaning to the cliché ‘adding insult to injury’ I learned that our model would not appear because her booking had not been confirmed! Really!

These drawings are from this past Sunday, April 3 -  hardly any traffic, the town seemed quite deserted.  

One plus one

I had left over from painting two weeks ago at the RBG  some globs of pigment, too entirely seductive to let them lie idle and not earn their keep – some Indian red, cad yellow, sap green (hello, my name is sap green), mighty chested Prussian blue and dollops and smears  of cad red, alizarin crimson, ultramarine  and this and that etc  - but no particular subject matter. So I selected a pastel I’d done a few years back between Ancaster and Brantford on what I remember was a sunlit day and used it  as a point of departure. Well for one, a big difference in the feeling of light.

12"x9" oil on canvas panel - 2011 

 off Powerline Road between Ancaster and Brantford

soft pastel 14"x11" - 2008