Rick Janson Art Studio

Its a big day here. My first monograph is being delivered this afternoon. The 58th Annual Oshawa Art Association show opens tonight, of which I have a painting in this group show of about 90 Durham, Region Artists. And I need to make significant progress on a larger Port Perry painting (24″ x 24″) for it to be completed and sufficiently dry for showing at the Scugog Studio Tour May 2-3.

My goal for the studio tour was to have eight new “smalls” (12″ x 12″ paintings) ready. The last of the eight was finished yesterday — a painting based on a view from the Scotrail train between Dundee and Dunblane. The day before I finished up a painting I had been struggling with from Pickering UK. A ruler helped figure out where the alignment went wrong. The nice thing about oil paint is it is very forgiving. Make a mistake — no problem, you just adjust and paint on. Fixing the alignment of the windows in the painting made all the difference.

In recent days it has been a parade of vehicles to the house with materials for the upcoming studio tour. At one point three display easels were dropped off at 4 am by a delivery vehicle. I tend to wake up a lot in the. middle of the night, and actually saw the delivery driver on my front steps. At 4 am it can be a bit disconcerting to see someone standing on your front steps. The next morning there was another box with plastic literature holders (for my price list and my portraiture pitch). Later that afternoon the last box of frames I had ordered. In the next few days I have to start thinking about how all this stuff loads into our vehicle, and whether or not I may need two trips to the site I’m sharing with two other artists.

I’m also planning for what’s next. To date I have had two generous individuals interested in working with me on portraits — see the previous post for details should this strike you as something fun you’d like to do. There is very little obligation on your part and it helps me expand into a (relatively) new genre for me. And if you like it, you may have a new piece of art for your home at a nice price.

I also have another image I’d like to get started on. It is from France when I went swimming in the Gardon River at the Pont Du Gard. The Pont Du Gard is a famous Roman aquaduct — it is important enough to be on the back of the five euro note. I loved the casual experience of the swimmers (including me) against such a dramatic backdrop. I’m hoping to get this done in time for the RMG’s 55+ plus competition later this year. The theme of the show is “That Summer…”

The last of the small paintings — Between Dundee and Dunblane — is a departure for me. I sometimes get complaints that I’m not a true landscape painter given my penchant for portraying architecture, often populated by a stage set of people and bicycles. Some people might just call that an urban landscape, but I digress. My art is not always easy to pigeonhole. I was taken by the colours in this painting, but regret that the horizon falls somewhere towards the center of the picture. I tried moving it one way or another, but I think in the end the land and sky operate in complementary blocks. The composition reminds me a little of some of Mark Rothko’s work. Funny how this push and pull between the abstract and representational always happens with me. Part of what does make it work is the use of complementary colours — the heavy use of orange and blue. While this fits more comfortable within the landscape genre, it does feel very abstract to me.

The second painting finished this week is of Pickering, UK. When we travelled to Yorkshire last autumn, many of the place names sounded very familiar. If you head west from where we live in Oshawa, Ontario, you run first into Whitby, then a little later Pickering and Scarborough. All of those are taken from their Yorkshire cousins. We were in Pickering prior to taking an antique steam train — the Flying Scotsman — from Grosmont back to Pickering. It was among the first runs of that train along the North York Moors Railway. Hundreds of people lined up beside the track to get a glimpse of it in operation. Unfortunately, being in the train made it hard to see, well… the train. But we did have a good time beforehand in Pickering, wandering through its impressive but compact High Street. It also has an incredible church with wall paintings that are definitely worth seeing. I took a lot of photos there thinking they would make good painting subjects, especially with the long light that was illuminating the buildings. I had initially drawn out this subject well — I use the grid method for placing my subjects on the canvas — but somehow the top two windows in the eves didn’t align with the windows below. When I double checked, I realized that this was not an anomally of the building, but an anomally of my painting. While the building had obviously undergone many changes over its life, the windows did still line up from top to bottom. A ruler fixed the problem, and suddenly I felt the painting worked. I do like the composition on this one, with the human activity low down on the canvas. Oddly one of the elements that I think really helps this image is the orange cone on the bottom right hand corner. For some reason it feels like a punctuation on the image.

So… if you are in Eastern half of the GTA and at loose ends, come join me tonight at the opening of the OAA Show at the Robert McLaughlin Gallery in Oshawa. We’re promised light refreshments, a cash bar, and music. It should be a big crowd given the number of participating artists. Tourism Oshawa has also been promoting the event on Facebook. If you can’t make that, come see me the first weekend in May on the Scugog Studio Tour — it will be the most work I have ever shown in public. Details of where to find me are here. You can also get information on the full tour by clicking here.

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