Rick Janson Art Studio

This was another moment on my travels when I realized I was looking at a future painting. Sometimes you just know. Across from the National Portrait Gallery of Scotland in Edinburgh there is a bridal shop in an elegant building that echoes the formality of their wares. Next to it is a tangle of foliage that sits almost as a counterpoint to the business taking place.

Lately I have been playing with the idea of making buildings look like they are an architectural elevation, the art adding in all the extraneous life and light that is absent from such technical drawings. There is an app on the iphone that allows you to manipulate the image to essentially straighten it up. There are often some anomalies when doing this, but they can be corrected if the point of the photo is to provide a reference to the painting.

This is not the first time I have tried this. A few weeks ago I posted an image from Troon of a 1905 building on Portland Street. Same story. Straighten and paint.

While the complexity of the 1905 painting showed lots of evidence of human scale, I felt this painting needed some bodies in front of it. I could have made them up, but waited a moment or two for a couple to pass by, waiting until they reached a point that would fit my composition.

I do this a lot when when scouting material for future paintings. Sometimes it is comical. I see someone approaching and raise the camera… then they fail to appear. When I take my eye from the viewfinder, the person is standing just outside the frame waiting for me to finish. How polite, but what they failed to realize was that I wanted them as part of the narrative.

Some people get quite cranky about it, others are nice, and if they bother to ask, are flattered to be part of my endeavour. One time I was in Ajaccio, Corsica. After taking a picture of a large number of people strolling along the main (and very public) shopping street, an elderly woman came up to me and insisted I delete the photo with her in it despite the fact that she was a speck in a broad crowd shot. There was no way she would have been identifiable. I showed it to her, then deleted it to avoid a scene. This does raise the thorny question of how far the right of privacy extends? Does everyone need a permanent shield from being in somebody else’s photos? Could get interesting at the Disney theme parks. In Wedding Dresses nobody would recognize the couple depicted on the sidewalk. In a 16 x 20 painting their faces are represented by a blob of paint. Usually what I am looking for are broad gestures or a sense of movement, as is the case here. There is no question they are strolling.

I often like to add figures into my work to give both scale and life to the image. I don’t set out to make portraits of random people (although I wouldn’t be the first if I did). I can’t imagine a celebrated artist like Jason Polan drawing people at random in New York or Tokyo then running after them with a legal release form. And if he dared ask beforehand, he would lose the spontaneous nature of those drawings.

When I first considered painting the bridal shop, I saw a shaft of light hit diagonally across the left side of the building. We were having lunch in the cafeteria of the gallery, and there was no time to run outside and snap a photo before the sun retreated again (this is Scotland, after all). I thought it possible to reinvent it without a visual aid, but instead decided I didn’t need it. It would have unnecessarily complicated the image. Instead I had fun with the texture of the stone building.

I often takes pictures of work in progress, often just to get a perspective of what I’m working on. My studio is so small you can’t really stand back. Instead I take a photo. Sometimes I post them to show my process on social media. I posted this one several times. When the finished painting went up, it was sold within 24 hours. I guess that is one less painting for the Scugog Studio Tour next month.

Last week I attended a meeting of the Oshawa Art Association where it was show and tell day. I did bring my 1905 painting (convenient to bring at 12″ x 12″), but also handed around the draft of my upcoming book, which the printer tells me I should be receiving next week. One member saw the website on my book and decided to take a look. She initially thought I was hacked because the first image she saw was by Modigliani, not me. It got me to thinking, that while I almost always reference my gallery paged in the text, it would be better if I visually promoted it on my BLOG pages. To lead with Modigliani was rare, but I thought making the connection to my gallery pages needed improvement. You’ll notice a brand new banner starting today. Just click on the image and you can avoid all my palaver.

As usual life is hectic. This afternoon I am taking two paintings over for a jury to look at for a show at the Robert McLaughlin Gallery (and its pissing rain). I am in contact with my printer over delivery of the art book, and now need to run some stickers with the ISBN number on it, because, well, that ISBN arrived more than double the time I was told to expect and subsequently missed my print deadline. I’m still trying to finish another three paintings in time for the Scugog Studio Tour, although I am feeling confident I have sufficient stock for the space I am sharing as a guest artist. There is a 24 x 24 of Port Perry that I am urgently trying to finish in time for that event. And having sold the Wedding Dresses, I have one more picture to frame and ship within the next week. Phew! Nobody said this was going to be easy.