Skip to main content

33 on 33: Day Twenty-six

Through the overgrowth
Of the underbrush
Shone a fossil tooth
That I must have dropped
Very long ago
Which reminded me
How we wound up where we are now

–TMBG, "Canajoharie"

It sounds kind of monumental when I put it like this: it took me 26 days to reach Picton.

Named for Sir Thomas Picton (who was a big jerk according to the account of his career in the New World) and known as the town where John A. Macdonald managed a law office for his uncle, Picton is Prince Edward County's largest municipality and it's postal code (K0K 2T0) encompasses such a large area that even Small Pond Arts is considered to be within its limits.

Welcome!

I initially planned to be at the roundabout on the outskirts of town, the junction between Highway 33 and Sandy Hook Road, but parking close to it wasn't an option and there isn't much to see there, anyway. Conceptually, painting in the middle of a landscaped roundabout is a great idea, but the painting wouldn't have been interesting. And I would've had to use a certain Yes lyric instead of the usual They Might Be Giants quotes.

The banners on the lampposts in town were designed by my friend, Carl Wiens, world class illustrator and cycling enthusiast, who also just happens to live in Picton.

The west end looking east.

I don't think anyone calls it that, but the pic above is part of the west end of Picton with the centre being the stupid 5-way intersection by the Tim Hortons, I guess. It's hard to tell when Main Street is only about seven blocks long. This is also where I set up today (in front of the Metro) for my 33 on 33 project, but the subject of my painting was the reverse angle with the intersection at Lake Street in view. Here's my Map of Progress (Picton's gonna have a lot of overlapping dots)

Cute, but too leafy.

I almost painted this quaint little thing, but all that ivy was too much for me to wrap my brain around so I did a street scene instead.

Where I am now.
(photo by Judith Burfoot)





Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Axel Foley's Chevy Nova (1/25 scale model)

Multiple tributes, here. I remember first seeing  Beverly Hills Cop  on video at my friend Chris K's house, 'cause his family had a VCR and we'd watch tons of movies (and record music videos) together. The summer of 1984 was a special time for us (having created a strong bond in school since Grade 6 a few years before), going on biking adventures around the 'burbs and into the city, etc., and home video played an important role from then until I moved to the opposite end of Scarborough just before we started high school. We liked the movie a lot, both of us fans of Eddie Murphy from his  Saturday Night Live  days. I don't think I'd seen the movie since then (it would have been 1985, probably summer, since the movie came out in late 1984) and I became curious to see if it still held up. It did. It does. I found Murphy as charming as ever and the comedy (and even the action) holds up very well and its very re-watchable and very entertaining.  Beverly Hi

City of Angels

17" x 11", watercolour and digital, 1999 Ah, City of Angels . I thought I was getting cool film noir but got a cheesy musical instead (Google it if you must). Still, it was fun to make the poster and associated images, mostly because the research consisted of watching real films noir and buying a great book on movie posters of the genre. I made tons of sketches and a few digital mock-ups. For the final poster above, I made three separate watercolour paintings (one of the couple and one each of the two black and white heads) and composited them in Photoshop, where I also added the text. In true movie poster fashion, I wanted the actors names to be the top two names, but I lost that battle and had to use the characters' names instead. It looks fine, but it implies that "Kingsley and Stone" are the lead actors in the show. Oh, well...it's only community theatre... By making the "angel" above half black and white and half colour, th

Small Pond Arts Puppet Wagon (1/24 scale model)

I dreamed up the Small Pond Shipyard for my fanciful scratch-built sci-fi airship creations (which still only exist in sketch/Photoshop mock-up form (and boxes in my closet) for now), but more and more ideas kept coming ( this wind turbine , for example, will be part of a rather elaborate diorama I'll be working on this winter). But the Puppet Wagon was a sleeper surprise, to be sure. [Really, though, I don't know why I was so eager to build this right away since I was planning to slowly develop my modelling skills with simpler builds first and the work my way up to more complicated projects.] Not all parts were used/needed. Most of these ideas have come from watching modelling videos online, and when I saw a review of this sweet little Japanese "Ramen Shop" food truck by Aoshima (right-side drive!), my brain started making jokes about customizing it to the weird food truck ideas I'd been posting on Facebook. But the more I thought about what the co