May was an incredibly busy month and I am only just now realizing that I have not blogged. I have been doing a LOT of life drawing and I organized two urban sketching events (see my tweets below).
I also finished another sketch for The Wrench (Ottawas only street newspaper for the homeless) and continued with my sketchbook experiments.
June, July and August are all busy too but I will put more effort into regular blog post updates.
Below, I have added some of my tweets and sketches from the month of May 2017.
I have been absolutely loving the multiple opportunities for life drawing in Ottawa this spring: The Atomic Rooster , Atelier Denu (Thursday evenings) and the Art House Cafe (Tuesday Evenings)
My Ottawa Urban Sketchers Bike mobile - Great Glebe Garage Sale
Urban Sketch - Great Glebe Garage Sale
Outline - Great Glebe Garage Sale sketch
Finished urban sketch - Great Glebe Garage Sale
And, as usual, there has been plenty of practice work and studies in my various sketchbooks. I do hope to complete some final pieces this summer for my new website launch. Stay tuned!
And the Canadian Museum of History loves artists and welcomes artists who want to visit on the free nights to sketch! If you have a Thursday evening free, grab your sketch kit and head over to Gatineau, Quebec.
I stopped for sushi at the Miso restaurant on Bank St in Ottawa and did this quick sketch while I ate a great bowl of miso soup and a platter of their vegetarian sushi.
I noticed the "Sunburst Building" sign for the very first time!
That is the best part about urban sketching. You always see things that you would never see until you pause to do a sketch.
I wondered why it was called the "Sunburst Building" and when I got home I did a quick google search which landed me on the urbsite page: http://urbsite.blogspot.ca/2013/03/from-pork-to-perfection.html. There is LOTS of information on this building at the urbsite blog.
The "Sunburst Building" in the 1940s
Source: City of Ottawa Archives (Dave Sproul Collection) via the Urbsite blog
"The building at 129-131 Bank Street appears to have been built ca.1910 for the Matthews-Laird Co., meat suppliers, with two floors of offices and workshops to rent above. By the 1940s the storefront was divided into two for L.J. Fraser Ltd., haberdashers and a shoe repair shop.
The building's ground floor exterior was given a not unsympathetic renovation in the 1980s which was then cluttered up by a cheerful mess of signs. The original store height is now divided into two cramped levels."
Why is it called the "Sunburst Building"? I still don't know. The urbsite - an incredible source for everything historical in Ottawa - ended their post with "For some reason, it is now called the Sunburst Building" If you have any idea why or how it received this name, please let me know in the comment section below.
Golden's new QOR (pronounced "core") watercolor line uses a unique binder called Aquazol® instead of the usual watercolor binder - gum arabic. The name "QOR" comes from a technical acronym meaning "Quality of Results."
The colors in my sketch dried quite vivid and strong and didn't lighten with drying. This is one of the main selling features of the Aquazol® binder. I would like to definitely try some more paintings with this sampler in the future.
My tweet today (above) about a building located in Centretown and record temperatures for Ottawa ( warmest November day since 1971!) resulted in a quick one-hour sketch session with artist Colin White on the Nepean St. sidewalks.
Recently boarded up, this Nepean St building will soon be demolished along with several others on the same block.
When you get a 21.2℃ day in Ottawa in November you have to seize the day "carpe diem" - even if only for an hour!
One hour urban sketch "Another One Bites The Dust - Nepean St."
Art journal two-page sketch (watercolour and ink)
I managed to make six sketches (some incomplete because we needed to get indoors to warm up our hands).
The sketch below of the Mercury Lounge was my favourite of the day because of all the beautiful orange! To sketch this, the three of us (Jaymie, Suvitha and I) sat nestled safely on a parking curb between two market vendors while the sun came out briefly. It was lovely!
"The Mercury Lounge"
Urban sketch by Cindi Moynahan-Foreman
P.S. If you are interested in seeing what other artists at SketchCrawls around the world did
on October 24, 2015, for the 49th WW SketchCrawl - visit this link:
Carolynn comes from an artistic Montreal family. Both her mother and father were artists. Carolynn's father Stephen ("Steve") Bloomer (http://stephenbloomer.blogspot.ca/) taught art at John Abbott College (CEGEP) in Montreal where he taught Laurie Foster.
It was your dad who introduced me to sketching in markets from life -- at John Abbott he took us downtown to rue St. Laurent once, I think. He'd get so excited about everything, it was catching!
He LOVED markets. The fish market – Waldman's –was a place he was particularly passionate about. Everything was pretty high-key there; the bright lights reflecting the wet shimmering textures, the silvery blues and greys, the brightly staring eyes of the fish and the wonderful human characters (we loved to see the men and women dressed in rich furs and buttery leather boots picking their way amongst the muddy buckets and sandy crates full of live sea creatures, and the salty, scale-covered guys in toques.... Well I guess I need to pack my sketch book and hie myself off to a market!!
More Quotes
Montreal artist, illustrator, art teacher Steve Bloomer
I am adding these quotes found through online research following the sketchcrawl and Laurie and Carolynn's comments about Steve Bloomer 's love for markets.
Steve Bloomer's market love inspires me and echoes my feelings when I visit or sit in a busy market place like Ottawa's Byward market, or the Windsor market of my childhood, or the St. Lawrence market of my youth.....
Carolyn Bloomer wrote,
One place that always inspired Steve was a market. He was drawn to the colour, shapes, noise and teeming humanity found there; the repetition of pattern in the displays of fruit and vegetables, and the way their colours changed depending on whether they were in the shade or exposed to the sun. He studied the people: their demeanor and attitudes, sometimes bustling about, sometimes in watchful repose. He had a particular fondness for fish markets (and he could identify every type of fish!). He appreciated the mounds of crushed ice, and the many stacked, silver fish shapes with their still-shocked expressions and their glistening scales; and also the different types of people there. He loved the juxtaposition of plaid-shirted men wearing hip-waders and people in full-length mink coats tip-toeing around the wet floors in their expensive leather boots.
The ambience of these places — the pride of the vendors and their camaraderie, shoppers jostling each other to get closer to the produce, people pushing wagons and pulling shopping carts — all this was Steve’s raw material for the story that he’d then set about to tell, with lines, shapes and colour, on paper or canvas.
I plan to sketch the ByWard market throughout this winter. The ByWard Market vendors work all year round, outdoors, no matter what the weather!
At the market, there's always a story to tell, as Steve would put it, just waiting to be told "with lines, shapes and colour on paper or canvas".....
I thought it would be lovely to close with a video of Carolynn Bloomers ceramics...as a way of thanking her (and Laurie) for sharing the wonderful story about her father Steve Bloomer's love of markets.
Now that the cooler weather is returning to Ottawa, I was reviewing some of my urban sketches from this past spring and summer. This one was one of my first when Ottawa was just coming into spring and I sat in Minto Park watching folks come and go from this busy, beautiful house.
Both buildings that I chose to sketch on Friday are located on Nepean St. at Kent in Ottawa.
Quinn's Row
ink sketch
255 Nepean St., Ottawa, Ont
Mixed media 30 minute sketch
I was surprised to find a old 1938 photograph of both of them (below) and the two buildings, 255 Nepean and Quinn's Row, haven't really changed that much at all in seventy-seven years.
On the left: 255 Nepean St. and Quinn's Row, Ottawa - 1938
Quinn's Row is located in what was working class Ottawa and the present day Heritage Ottawa plaque on Quinn's Row reads: "A clssic and simple design in clapboard this row was built for Patrick Quinn and is the only surviving 19th century working class terrace in Centretown." "This four-unit row house was owned by Patrick Connelly Quinn and likely housed some of the labourers hired to build nearby Saint Patrick’s Basilica.It is the only 19th-century, working-class row house to survive in Centretown. "
"The first record of housing on this site occurs between 1889 and 1890, but Quinn’s Row is styled after other 1870s homes. This raises the question, was this row house newly built on the site or moved from another site to this one? Many believe it is the latter."
"Patrick Quinn immigrated to Canada from Ireland as a very young man in the 1850s or 1860s. He ran his own construction business and owned a number of lots and houses in Centretown including his own home on Gloucester Street. "
"In the 1980s, the Centretown Citizens' Community Association was successful in obtaining a heritage designation for Quinn's Row."
