Rick Janson Art Studio

We passed these sandstone terrace houses a lot while in Troon, Scotland. When the sun came out, it produced a dynamic diagonal across the honey-coloured facade. I knew I wanted to paint it, but wasn’t sure how to frame the image, eventually choosing to crop tight to the building with just a hint of sky above it and sidewalk below it. I also really liked the colour experience.

It was a late decision to invent the person in the window above the doorway. I felt that it needed a bit of life beyond the obvious implications of an image that shows all the marks of a structure made by humans. I’m still wondering if the insert was too much?

This is probably the closest I have ever come to painting a building brick by brick. When we look at a building, our brains usually don’t register that level of detail, and I’ve always felt it to be unnecessary to attend to such minutiae. When looking at a painting where the artist has painstakingly attended to every last brick, it makes the scene appear a little unreal to me — likely the nature of hyper-realism itself. But the uneven surface of the sandstone blocks led to some interesting textures and shadows. It was a constant struggle to determine how much I was going to capture, especially given this is such a small painting. For a small painting, it did take up a lot of my time as I searched for some answers around it.

This is the second painting of what will be a series of small squares that glimpse into our recent journey to the UK (mostly Scotland). The squares will be featured in my guest space on the Scugog Studio Tour in May, in addition to some larger pieces. I’ll post more details when we get closer to the date.

We had spent close to six weeks in Scotland, with a brief sidetrip to North Yorkshire to ride on the flying Scotsman between Grosmont and Pickering. I captured a lot of images on that trip with the idea of working on them back home in my “art hut” studio. Many of them I saw as paintings almost immediately upon encountering these views, including this one. I wish I totally knew why.

Being in Scotland in the fall, it becomes clear that not every day is going to give you crisply delineated objects framed by sunlight. “Of course its raining — it’s Scotland,” I recall Billy Connolly saying to much laughter. So when the sun came out, so did I.

Sunlight on buildings reminds me of the very start of my art studies in High School. Mr. Samatowka (who I have previously written about) set up some basic objects with a light source on them for us to draw. A circle, a cylinder, a square, a rectangle. It was a good exercise, and one I noticed that Tai-Shan Schierenberg uses to open his Masterclass series for wood-be painters. Buildings are usually of those shapes, and the light on them often reminds me of that exercise.

I’m presently working on the third canvas of the series. They feel a bit like oddball postcards of the kind of places we would normally just pass by. Undiscovered by tourists. Each trip to the Harbour Bar in Troon (where we were told to go on Sundays for their roast dinner) took us by these houses, making me wonder about the people who lived in them. The next painting in the UK series is of an alley that connects Portland Street to Troon’s North Beach, passing by the football grounds.

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