Saturday, November 30, 2019

1158 Shabbat, 8x10, egg tempera

sold-California
I considered calling this painting"Youth and Wisdom" but settled on Shabbat. What do you think?
It's a typical Montreal scene from the borough where I grew up.
I always put my paintings on eBay auction at a $100 start bid for the first week. It gives people a chance to buy them at an affordable price. If they don't sell I put them on "buy it now" for $200 OBO.  They do sell for that.... and I often accept a reasonable offer.
Today I listed this painting on auction but this time I am allowing people to make offers. Someone might be put off by having to wait for the auction to finish and this gives them an opportunity to buy it right away. I wonder how it will go.

Wednesday, November 20, 2019

1155 Winter Shadows, 24x36, Oil (Work in progress)

 I've been working on a larger piece this week. It's in oils because I "oil primed" my larger canvases this last summer and now it restricts what medium I can put on top of it. (lesson learned!) So it's rather slow going waiting days for the layers to dry in between. At this stage I think I will scoop up the colours on my pallet and store them until the layers are dry enough to glaze and scumble. And do corrections and details.




Monday, November 18, 2019

A Warm Winter Day, Le Plateau Mont Royal, 8x10 oil on board

This is a redo of a painting I did a while back.There were just some things I didn't like about that painting. I had struggled with it and had done several compositional changes and eventually they started showing through the sky. Which was a titanium zinc mixture mostly.
Zinc is highly transparent white but most of the paint manufactures add it to titanium.  The manufacturers  say zinc makes the paint warmer and more like lead white. So they add zinc to titanium for the buyer's own good. (I suspect zinc is cheaper than titanium...at least you need to use twice as much for the same coverage.) Plus zinc is not archival in oil paint and will eventually cause the oil painting to fail.
So I bought some lead white from Kama Pigments.  Kama is a Montreal paint manufacturer that makes artist quality oil paint in small batches. Very nice! And a great place to buy pure pigments and archival mediums and supplies.
Sorry, I wanted to add the before painting but couldn't find it.


Saturday, November 16, 2019

1154 Le Plateau Best Transport, egg tempera, 8x10

When I was in school nobody rode a bike in the winter. The brakes just don't work properly. Now it's a common mode of winter transport. It really is the fastest.

Monday, November 11, 2019

1153 Aylmer Street, 8x10, egg tempera

Sold-Saskatchewan

A friend of mine once lived in that red brick building. The apartment was only about 200 square feet (And half of it was the bathroom). In spite of it's tiny size there were numerous "large cubby holes" hidden in the closets and cupboards. (The cupboard over the kitchen was built on top of the bathroom ceiling and could have concealed a family of four!) The place had a small icebox(instead of a fridge) which was defrosted every Wednesday (somehow through a pipe from the basement of the building). It was the 1980s, so it was quite unusual for buildings to still have iceboxes. We used to attend free recitals at the Pollack Hall.  Then we would return to the apartment to drink compari and soda and make dinner in the tiny kitchen, while saxaphone music bellowed from a window across the lane. Those were truly romantic and wonderful times.

Tuesday, November 5, 2019

1151 Parc LaFontaine Fun, 8x10, egg tempera

Here's a Parc LaFontaine sliding scene.  Don't you just love sliding?  Before they invented those plastic slides we used to slide on a big piece of cardboard. We used to put five or six kids on a big enough piece.  What fun!

Monday, November 4, 2019

1152 Parc La Fontaine, 8x10 egg tempera


Here's a painting I'm working on. There's still work to be done on it but this is half way through.  Considering omitting the light post and maybe adding some more figures. Will sleep on it.  



Sunday, November 3, 2019

1150 Lane in the McGill Ghetto, 8x10, egg tempera

Here's a curious lane in the McGill Ghetto.  (Always a gathering of young people there). I always liked the jumble of structures in this lane.
That grey structure in the background attached to the house and braced is the remnant of an old shed.  They removed the bottom part and braced it. Sheds, once a common part of most houses in Montreal, but the city outlawed them in the 1980s due to many arson attacks that started in sheds.  Sheds used to house the boiler and oil tanks for the heating system. Our boiler was dated 1903 in the 1980s and it was still working fine.  Those hot water radiateurs were so nice and efficient. Great for drying mittens. They don't build things like they used to eh.

1538 lacing Up