White Teapot #1

oil/canvas 9x12 inches, 2010

White is a fun challenge for a painter. Since white is not a colour, but a value,  it can be rendered with any colour.  What is important is a good tonal structure. Another great challenge is to paint using a limited palette. I painted this old teapot using just ultramarine blue and orange with white of course and a small touch of yellow.  I structured the colour using the concept of warm versus cool.

Here is a detail:

Scherzo in Blue and Green

     This is a study in analogous colours for my Impressionism class. The cool colours and the misty atmosphere seem quite appropriate for the rainy week-end that we have had in Montreal. It is often difficult to completely finish a painting demo when I am teaching a class so I thought it would be interesting to show how the colours and composition evolve when I work in my studio.  See the video below.

Still Life: Scherzo in Yellow

11 x 14'', oil/canvas, 2010

I love to work with yellow.  It is the colour that I most associate with light. This is a study using the yellow family of analogous colours.  It was done with my Impressionism class.

When I studied art history at University of Toronto, one of my professors described Van Gogh's Sunflowers painting as a mastery of the colour yellow.  According to him, yellow was a difficult colour to work with.  Does anybody have a particular colour that they find hard to work with?

Significant Places Exhibition

 Significant Places is a series of landscape and floral paintings that represent the joys and challenges of everyday life. The landscapes are places that exist is the real world and in the imagination.  They are places that I know literally and metaphorically. The floral paintings represent a contrasting point of view or an alternative way of communicating the idea of the landscape.  Perhaps you have also experienced these places.

You can view the exhibition on my pages at the right.  Even better, come to the Galerie de la Ville and see my paintings first hand.

A New Day

 New Day, Miramar Garden

Dawn is my favorite time of day.  There is something fresh and pure about the start of a new day.  The rose in its beauty and innocence is the hope for the day to come.

Florida Beach House #1

I think that there is nothing more sublime then a sunrise over the ocean.  This new day brings both expectations and uncertainty.