Sunrise towards High Park

I have an upper-story balcony, right at the level of the treetops and surrounding roofs. In the mornings, I love to stand on it just as the sun rises, and look at all the crazy colours painting the sky.

Not a fully successful painting, but I’m very pleased with my colour mixing in the sky. The weakest area, I think, is the nearby roofs which are just sort of blank. I wanted them to be more graphic, and geometric, but couldn’t navigate my brain around it. I think, perhaps, due to the middle distance being too detailed. Perhaps if I had staged the detail a bit better, the nearby roof wouldn’t look so strange.

This is the anchor for the collection. “home”. The place from which all else radiates. Perhaps it is also a reference to George Shaw’s work, in some way; The city emptied.

Using two panels here, instead of one long one, will let me adjust distances in the collection. Create separation and interrupt the sunrise.

Interrupted Sunrise [Bird in flight]

Walking back to my house from Exercise 5.2, I found a dead finch below a midrise tower. It had hit a window, and died, falling on the pavement below. The pavement stones formed a cross as they intersected, creating an allusion to a grave marker. The bird’s colours were still lively as if it were sleeping.

“Morning” in my collection title might also be “Mourning” I suppose, given some of the other subjects I painted. The naming of this piece feels obvious, and yet appropriate.

I called on what I learned in my mentorship quite heavily here. Moving from dark to light, transparent to opaque, thin to thick, general to specific. Arthur Gain’s pops of unreal colour to help create highlights and interest — in this case, Cobalt Teal and Manganese Violet.

This painting will likely be framed and put on my wall. I’m very pleased with it.

In the time since I came across the bird, I’ve been actively scanning the streets for further such interruptions. Perhaps I’m mourning them, but I certainly want to memorialize them.

Milkweed Pods

My garden is a great source of both inspiration, and quiet. I love to spend time just sitting on my front porch and watching the bees move from flower to flower, or the wind gently swaying the leaves.

Following my painting of the fallen finch (Interrupt Sunrise, above), I noted that the milkweed pods reminded me of the fallen bird. I liked that echo, and decided to include in this collection.

Here, the sun has just crested the roofline of my neighbour’s house, and the morning sun is lighting up the tips of the pods. Here, and in the finch, I think you can see some changes in my brushwork coming from my reading of Van Gogh’s work.

Light Study on Balcony

Following on from Exercise 4.3, I was enjoying how sunrise cut between the railings, leaving patterns of interesting colours in the deck and wall.

I think, if I were to do this again, I might invert where I focus my brushwork. Instead of on the light bars, I might focus more on the plants of the deck. I think that would be more interesting.

Another possibility would be to flatten everything into hard line and solid colour. I may just do that.

Decomposition

This was painted after Ornamentation(see below), as a triptych. I debated the order they should be shown in, but I think the order to the left is good.

Its been a long time since I’ve painted at this scale, and I should remember to wear my glasses when doing so.

I think my favourite part of these is the flies, though if I were to redo the first painting, I’d move the fly somewhere else. It gets a bit lost in its current position.

Milkweed Pod Study

Ahead of the painting of milkweed pods, above, I drew a study in ballpoint pen. A stripe of guache paint adds some colour to the drawing. It doesn’t quite fit the rest of the collection, and is a bit odd, but I wanted to include it.

Ornamentation [Baby Mouse] I

On the weekends, I do many chores, walking into the nearby “village” to pick up groceries or visit the coffee shop. By “village” I mean neighbourhood – Toronto is a city of neighbourhoods, each with a “high street”, character, and culture. My area is Ukrainian, which influences the bakeries, butchers, and so forth. Digression.

On the way back, I found a baby mouse covered in flies at the corner of my street. Green Bottle flies like glittering emerald jewelry.

I built up layers of transparent acrylic and metallic powder to suggest the sundrenched pavement. I embedded strings to create virtual panels recalling Kazuo Nakamura. I traced little flies along the surface and rendered the mouse fairly realistically.

Originally part of the collection, it was removed because it was inconsistent with the rest. I still find it compelling, though I’m trying to work out why. I do like the splashes of green and how the flies intermingle with them.

Morning Transit

The least interesting of my experiments in this assignment. My backpack fills up with receipts from my morning coffee, breakfast, and other purchases, as I commute to work each day.

I layered all these receipts and napkins on a maple panel to form a surface to paint upon. A layer of thick acrylic sealed it all down. Then, I traced over a drawing of one of the rundown subway stations I often pass through.

I wanted all the receipts, etc., to show through, so I struggled a bit with how to paint this. I think there is something in this idea, but this was not it, and it didn’t fit with the rest of the collection—therefore, it was removed.

I was thinking of Jasper Johns layering wax and newsprint, but fell far short of my intent. Perhaps if I had painted in the bench and sitting, in some more rendered way, and leveraged other areas of paint to connect the whole together. An avenue to explore.

Barber Shop

I didn’t finish this painting, as it quickly became apparent that it didn’t fit with the visual themes of the others.

The subject is a view from my barber’s business, looking in the direction of my home. This represents one of the furthers distances I regularly travel by foot in my morning meandering.

Colour-wise, it would have been coherent due to the greens of the walls and furniture and the sunlight brickwork of the background buildings. Perhaps I’ll finish it as a standalone study in the future.

George Rorris

I’ve been looking at George Rorris for a bit, and have the opportunity to join a workshop he is holding in the spring. His twisting perspective is very interesting to me, as well as how he leverages various greys and the impression of light.

An idea I had considered in my assignment, though discarded, was how he builds rectangular forms into his painting that are distinct/seperate from the painted subject matter. It gives the impression of a panel assembled from smaller panels, and the seams showing through. Visually, he seems to use it to frame areas of the subject, and guide the eye.

Arthur Gain

It would be foolish of me not to mention Arthur, whom I worked with over the summer in an online mentorship. During this time, I learned a great deal about process and patience. I have a habit of being ‘frantic’ in my painting, but Arthur’s approach is calm and measured. It was very helpful and very grounding.

There are too many things that have come across from the mentorship into my painting now, from drawing and composing the painting to mixing colours and thinking about how to minimize frustration in the painting process.

Kazuo Nakamura

I have greatly enjoyed Nakamura’s forest paintings. The Art Gallery of Ontario has one that I tend to spend great time with, looking at the way that the artist applies ain’t to evoke pine trees, and other scenes.

During the AGO’s recent Moments in Modernism exhibit¹, I encountered Nakamura’s other interests; abstraction. He was an artist with a highly varied body of work from mathematical abstraction, and back into figuration.

I take heart from this movement back and forth from figuration, as I’m uncertain where I want to ‘settle down’ with what I create. Perhaps I don’t have to, so long as there are some forms of consistencies within bodies of work. Perhaps that is the answer? Constant shifting, yes, but randomness no? perhaps.

In the assignment, I pulled a link to Kazuo’s use of string in Central I and merged it with George Rorris’s virtual panels to experiment with whether I liked the effect. I ultimately didn’t include the resulting painting in my final collection, but not because I didn’t like the result — more that it didn’t fit with the rest.

Van Gogh

Brushwork. I was looking at many close-ups of Van Gogh’s work, particularly his plants, trying to see how he applied paint. This has been merging, I think, into how I apply the latter layers in an alla prima painting.