Ice Cream

As I was working on the Lemonade painting, I was also putting the finishing touches on a painting that I had started years ago. I'm not sure why it had not been finished, other than it had become a victim of one too many moves, and had for a while gotten lost in the shuffle. Working on the piece reminded me of the hot, humid tourist season in the little town of Bayfield, Ontario, where I had some of my work in a gallery. 

Home

This will always be home, although I haven't lived here for decades. Bought in the 1950s and owned by my dad, I can still go home. But not quite. This is a composite painting, taken from pictures dating from 1957 to 1973. The house and yard never quite looked like this at any one time. Paint and flowers change, shrubs come and go. In fact, the house is now all yellow siding with bay windows.
And yet.........this is the home of my childhood, of my memories. I can always go home.

Luke's Hope

My daughter Annie, see blog entry November 20 2005, met Luke a year after that portrait was done. Two years later, on a snowy stroll through Niagara-On-the-Lake, they became engaged.
By the end of that uncharacteristicly overwhelming week, Luke had also bought the home that they will share after the big day in August.
Luke is a great guy and perfect for Annie, but what to get a son-in-law-to-be for Christmas?

A house that was new in 1904, is now new again. New with the hope of a couple beginning a life together. New with the anticipation of family and friends and music and laughter and life. A house with a heritage, now a home with a future.

His gift was a painting of that hope.

Ghosts

I thought about the original owners of this home as I painted it. Did they often sit out on their wrap-around porch? How was their garden different than the one I was now painting? How different we are from the people of that era. And yet in many ways we are the same. We all reflect the values of the culture that we live in, and our perspectives are therefore different. And yet we are all human. Human strengths and frailties, and emotions; the human condition does not change. I am facinated by this concept. The houses are an echo of these people, now gone. So similar, so different. We learn from them by what they left behind.

When painting, I become very well acquainted the subject I am working on and all its little details. It is interesting, then, after a painting is finished, to revisit the site and have another look. I see it so much better after I have painted it. One fall day I took a slow drive by this home that I had come to know so well. I was in for a bit of a shock, however. The porch was a riot of garish halloween decorations. There were polyester cobwebs, cardboard skeletons, plastic witches and hollow eyed sheets where the flower baskets had hung.

This was not the essence of a people who had come and gone before us. This was a different kind of ghost. I quickly left.

Dundas

Of these six paintings of homes in Dundas Ontario, this one is my favorite. It is very likely the oldest one that I painted, probably being built around 1840. Dundas had high ambitions to be a great major city back when it began in the very early 1800s. By the time this stone house was built, international commerce had passed Dundas by, favoring the exploding city of Hamilton just to the east. Ultimately, Dundas was spared inner city decay, and it remains today a peaceful community of well maintained heritage homes.

Flags

I don't suppose that I am any more outwardly patriotic than the next Canadian, yet I found myself painting several homes with flags. There is a grace to them, I think. Even when they are hanging like a windless sail.

This painting proved to be an experiment in color selection. I used a lot of a pigment called Raw Umber in it, just to see what would happen. I learned that if you use a lot of dark brown paint in a picture, that you will get a picture with a lot of dark brown in it. The process of learning is filled with many great discoveries.........

Foliage

Foliage is painstaking work. It takes a long time to paint leaves in trees, leaves in bushes, leaves in little plants. Landscape artists don't seem to mind. Was I a landscape artist? I didn't know. Paint what you love, people would say. Well, to paint the house, you paint the foliage. They just seem to go together.

This porch actually belongs to the house in the last entry.

Late Summer

The days were hot and hazy under a late August sun when I took these pictures. In the cool fall days as I painted, the memory of summer lived on. I would be so engrossed in painting the lavish garden in this one, that I would be somewhat suprised when I would look up and see autumn out my window.

On the Street

I stepped out of the magazine and onto the street, with my camera in hand. It was time to take my own pictures.

I loved old architecture and Ontario abounded in it. Old, that is, by North American standards, very old by BC standards. The quaint cottagey Victorians especially interested me. There certainly were some fabulous features in the grand estates, but the more accessable, down to earth, modest places suited me better. I could imagine my ancestors living there. The plan, then, was to find a neighbourhood of good photogenic homes, and snap them up, so to speak, for reference material. Photography wasn't enough; I had to paint them.

It is an odd thing to do. Stopping in front of a stranger's home and analyzing the best angle; staring, really. Then pointing a camera at someone's private property and clicking. It was awkward. I felt that at any moment a suspicious, irate or even enraged occupant would come flying out after me. I could never do what the paparotzi do. Fears aside, I did it anyway, trying very hard to be discrete. As it happened, no one seemed to notice or care.

Of the pictures I took, six became paintings.

A New Start

With a second marriage, to someone named Art (!), and a relocation from B.C. to Ontario, I spent some time adjusting to my new life. Painting seemed a luxury I could not afford as I struggled to fit into a stressful career to which I was unsuited. When the opportunity to paint finally came, I threw myself into it. I bought materials and a drafting table, and read books and painted. I began once again to see myself as an artist. I started with heritage homes, and painted two. I made mistakes, and I learned, and I grew. The third one, the best, was only a sketch when we moved to a new location. Somehow with the move, I lost my focus and the sketch sat unpainted for two more years. Perhaps I paint to get in touch with myself, the way some people journal. I don't really know. But for whatever reason, one day I discovered the sketch, still on the drafting table in the attic, and now covered in dust, and I recalled the work I had put into it. I wondered if it could be salvaged. It was of a home from a picture I took one spring day in Niagara-On-The-Lake. The billow of the pre-confederation Union Jack flag simply had to be painted. And so I found my paints and brushes and finished what I had started.......Eventually, as the kids left the nest, I gained a studio. I put this painting on the wall of that studio as an encouragement. If something had me down, or I doubted myself, I would go to my studio and look at that painting. It somehow gave me confidence.