The Naked Silo

15" x 22", watercolour, 2000 It's been pretty cold here in Toronto these past couple of days and I wanted to think about warmth and something sunny (even though it *is* quite sunny right now...) and a nice field of sunflowers seemed like an image to warm me up today. This represents the letter S and is number 19 in my Sunflowers series. The model, once again, is Aisha (click on the tag below to see more paintings featuring her).

20" x 26", watercolour on Yupo, 2009 I wanted to try something different with this one by employing an ink outline as I would if I were painting an ink painting. The sensation of the brush gliding smoothly across the surface was pretty amazing, considering not only the roughness of my usual watercolour paper, but also that I'd done quite a few paintings on Yupo by this point. Normally on Yupo, if I lay down some colour in watercolours that I don't like, I can wipe it away easily as though I'd never done it at all, but I didn't know if the same would be true for ink, so (rather than experimenting on some scrap) I tried very hard to control the brush and not make any terrible mistakes. I did experiment on some scrap in the initial R&D phase to see if the ink would dry completely and allow me to paint with watercolours over top. I really like how the erasure of the paint helps give definition to the cracks in the skull --and the spatter technique...

20" x 26", watercolour on Yupo, 2009, private collection My show at The Pilot Tavern in Yorkville has been held over for the duration of January. Details are at the bottom of this post. This painting isn't part of the show, but was commissioned as a result of seeing my watercolour cars on Yupo at the SpeakEasy Drawing and Painting show at the Gladstone Hotel back in the summer. When commissioned, I was curious to see if I could pull of a painting of a late model car in the same style as all those classic cars I'd been doing, seeing as this technique on Yupo gives the picture a sort of patina of age. And on top of that, the car is grey(!), so I gave it a little boost of colour from that blotch in upper right. There is one more car in the show that I still don't have a good photo of. It's a red MG that I couldn't figure out the year of. I think the painting came out very well, but it's too dark in The Pilot to get a good archival shot, so...