Night Rain

Acrylic collage painting on Somerset paper 7.5 x 11 inches. I'm using a bit of a new technique for me here.....in the sky some of the grey is painted on, over the collaged paper, and then partly wiped off with a wet rag. That helps one grey transition into the other more easily. It also lends more sureness to the fairly intuitive mark making that goes into each passage, since something can be wiped off completely in one second if it doesn't seem right. The wet rag and pail of water are always right beside me when doing collages, so I can always wash my hands and wipe clean the gluing surface....

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Lookout, November 2 (SOLD)

 

From high ground, looking onto the valleys below....8 x 8 inches, acrylic and pencil on matte board, gessoed both sides.

Whisper Road (SOLD)

If you go for an hour walk and look around you will see hundreds of things of note. So many that it doesn't even seem possible to comment on them all or reference them in paintings.  You look at something, and the image combines with another thought or sentiment running through your head, and the whole mood and meaning of what you are seeing changes. You look at the sky and note a motif....walk 10 paces forward, look again in a slightly different direction and something equally interesting presents itself,...and so it seems that very few things are actually noticed, and very few things are actually painted. There are a million more things to be done with landscape in painting.

Richardson's Lookout, July 27 (SOLD)

The hill is the highest point in this area. With some regularity I wander up there and make drawings that become paintings. You can see for miles in every direction. Lake Ontario is a half hour drive south and on a clear day it's visible from the top of the hill. Acrylic and pencil on unprimed archival single ply matte board. (SOLD)

Evening, Coyote Hill

8 x 8 inches, matte board gessoed both sides, acrylic.......walking on county Rd. 10.

Morning Stop

...the green was so vivid, and the trees were almost black.....8 x 10 inches, acrylic on matte board, gessoed both sides.

3 collages made today.

 

3 small collages, on single ply matte board,  with acrylic painted papers, made today. Every few days, I need to switch the methodology a degree. Nothing is abandoned, but everything needs to be continually refreshed.

Kestrel Place

 ....on my usual walk to this field with a distant view....some new companions. 2 kestrels sound their territorial alarm when I come within a short distance of this place. They have been dive bombing me regularly, sometimes coming quite close....I can hear the air of their wings as they pull out of the dive at the last second. Acrylic and pencil on matte board gessoed both sides, 8 x 8 inches.

Bobby's Field, July 7

Bobby's Field, July 7.
The crops are growing quickly. Beautiful rain is falling now, but it looked like this earlier. Acrylic and pencil on matte board gessoed both sides, 8 x 8 inches. I like how these small works rely on touch. The whole thing always seems to be a series of touches....how you touch the paint or pencil.

Morning Near Ida

 ...many of these roads are wonderful to travel. You never know where you will end up, and you find some beautiful properties...even better if you find a Saturday garage sale with some rare books. These hills are always enchanting....in this case the sliver of light green on the distant hill was compelling. Acrylic on matteboard gessoed both sides, 8 x 8 inches.

Rice lake Morning, North Shore

Rice Lake in the glorious, still early days of summer! 9.5 x 10.5 inches, acrylic on single ply matte board.

Morning Light, 2 versions

Sometimes they are a bit more abstract, sometimes a bit more realistic, or closely matching a visual reality....it matters not. It's all part of the same thing. You live and you receive sensations...you notice things.....so many in a day....and in some ways these sensations ARE the day. The picture making is one way to reference something that has gone on that seems worth noting. The picture is not a record, or an equivalent, but there is a relationship between the experience and the making. It seems important to not say too much and box yourself in......or at least it is an advantage to be able to get out of your own box. The process loses its charm if there isn't constant reinvention.

The sketch on the bottom was left purposely vague, to reference only the sensation noted here...the light on the road and the coolness of the shadow in the trees....the freshness of the summer sky. I made 2 painted versions.....This short series might continue today.

Echo

Play time means play time! The collages are often a chance to rethink initial guidelines. Any rule or rule of thumb may be broken. Some ideas may be harder than others to discard. Space will always be suggested, for example...not really interested in giving that up. The image may or may not resemble visual reality.

Acrylic collage on single ply matte board, 7.5 x 9.25 inches.

 I like to get a bit of alternation going in the style or process so I don't 'settle in' too much. I might do another collage tomorrow or maybe a painting.....I'll decide on the morning walk. The collages are more open ended, and therefore feel liberating, so I usually do more than just one....usually 2 or 3 in a row.

June End, Evening at Garden Hill

Diagramed last night....a very hot and hazy evening, and painted today. I stopped to make this drawing but I was on my way to Richardson's Lookout...high ground which is very close by...you can see for miles in 3 directions. This painting is 8 x 8 inches, acrylic and pencil on matte board gessoed both sides.

Sand Patches

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I always want a painting I haven't quite seen before, both in motif and method. In this case, the steep hillside and unexpected patches of sand created an unusual design.

Acrylic on Arches 6.75 x 9.75 inches.

Haliburton Sky, Early August

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It will often happen that I want to put the least amount possible into a picture...just enough to hint at some sensation that I want to make reference to. Collage is one of the methods that's very useful for this. In this case I painted first, then collaged, then painted a bit more.

There is also a long standing attraction to black...mixed blacks made from colour. I remember a colour similar to this that I used years ago in a number of paintings made at the Emma Lake Workshop in northern Saskatchewan. Recently I've been thinking of those blacks quite often...who knows why.

Flickr

I'll be posting lots of pictures to Flickr in the next while....please see me there.


http://www.flickr.com/photos/paintbox1/

August Haze

...very hot days at the start of August. The colours melt together in these conditions. I tried to do a bit of that here even though some contrast of light and dark was kept to keep excitement. It's always interesting to see how these effects can be pushed...perhaps the thing to do would have been to make another one right after, where dark/light contrast was much less.

June 26th

I was walking by the field adjacent to me....a place I don't often walk. It was evening and there was much mist in the air, and the foreground field was a yellow that didn't seem appropriate for this time of year....I don't know what the crop is. Just the relationship of the yellow, grey of the sky and dark of the trees (I wrote black on the diagram) created a sensation. I diagrammed it quickly. It was all blended more than this...intermingling with lots of thick air.

It helps to make these little diagrams. I never know how I will work....perhaps from a photo, perhaps from a more complete and complex sketch, or maybe from a chicken scratch like this....but only if the memory is strong enough to hold the image over a few hours or a night.

Back Acres, Mid April

6.5" x 7.25" acrylic on gessoed paper. A very pleasant spring day.

The appeal of painting what is there is that you can never really know in advance what particular combination of colours and shapes can unlock a strong mood or sense of rightness about a place. Subtle shifts make all the difference. I've been paying much attention to these spring yellows of the fields in the last number of days....there is a whole range of yellow that can be used, each different enough to vastly change the overall result.

But while all this activity may go on into the future, and any particular picture may have turned out any number of ways, there is only one piece or maybe two, from each day, chronicling my particular time and place. 1000s of things were possible, but this was April 11/2010, 2:50 p.m.