Snow/fog/rain 2

College St. 

In spring 2011, I took the Toronto School of Art glazing class with Tina Poplawski. This one was my favourite. I was on College Street on a Saturday morning and it was raining. Deep in the corner of a photo was a distorted image of a car. Starting from that, the painting technique is to create a monchrome background and thousands of thin layers to get to an image. It's more evenly coloured in real life... Size 12 by 12 inches

St. George cold

This was my second success in the glazing class. It was a bitter, snowy, dark winter morning and my photo was nice and blurry. The painting captures the flatness of what we see in winter in the dark as well the inherent fuzziness of looking through a snowstorm. I think this was aperfect image to use for this technique of building up layers with patience (which I don't always have...). Size 12 by 24 inches

Snowy night on St. George

It's amazing what you can see just outside your door! During a winter storm, I went out to catch the action and what caught my eye that night was how the snow was reflected by the street lamps. The big flakes really caught the light, and so many of them were swirling around the lights. The photographic image was areas of intense light surrounded by intense darkness. I painted this one in Tina' Poplawski's fundamental acrylics course in winter 2011 using fabric mounted on canvas. I chose a dark orange toned fabric and then mounted it at an angle I thought felt right. I will be continuing this technique! Size 18 by 24 inches

Queen's Park in a foggy snowstorm

Snowing on Saturday night and Queen's Park is empty. In my source photo, in which I emphasized the snow covered land rather than the trees. Then, with Tina's encouragement and techniques learned in class, I took an extended journey to create layers using different techniques. I crackled the snow, then glazed it with orange tinted paint, then extended the trees with drips, then added the mass at the bottom and finally dripped on white dots. What does it all mean? I don't know but the journey was a lot of fun and the final product holds your attention. As an aside, I believe as a painter that I am too attached to the photographic images I use and try too hard to reproduce them closely. Well, for this one, I started moving beyond the image and letting my imagination add what feels right. It's definitely different, but I enjoy this painting and hope that I can keep moving in this direction of using photos as starting points rather than something to copy. This painting did not photograph well though, there is much more of a green tint (background colour) to it rather than the orange/brown that showed up (top layers). Size 24 by 30 inches