#30×30, 2025, Day 12: Chinese Gate

Here’s a speedy 8×8″, of the Chinese pavilion in our Montreal botanical garden, during the festival of lights last October.

My goal was to see if I could do it mostly in watercolor – not holding myself back in any way. You know, not concerning myself about accuracy or detail :) Because this time, I know I can fix any issues that arise with gouache. (Hah! That’s some confidence :) But I think it worked out in the end!

So; here’s the Before/After. The ‘pure’ watercolor on the left, and the gouache ‘retouch’ on the right. You might notice a color-cast in the sky – that’s just some kind of iPhone camera thing – the sky is actually untouched from A to B.

So let’s see; looks like these are all the opaque touches:

• The red light bouncing off the doorway – especially where it backlights the stone lion.
• The orange light on the steps, helping to re-draw that geometry. (Steps are such a pain!)
• The hot-whites in the spotlights under the eaves. I reserved some of them, but had to re-state a few.
• Some corrections on the pillars helping define the structure.
• Cutting around the confusing figures coming though the gate. (Still confusing, but hey).
• Poking a few sky-holes in the tree mass on the far right.
• Tiny but important tweaks to indicate the shape of the lions’ heads. (Ears in particular).
• Some work in the shadow on the ground, that ultimately I wish I’d left alone.

So; what do I want to say about this? I guess it’s this: The ability to make corrections lends a great deal of confidence! < Go figure, right?

I am seeking a kind of bold, ‘effortless’ painting that conveys a scene without too much reliance on detail. I want the work to look ‘direct’; in the moment; impressionist – but also to be abstract.

And of course – I love contrast! Bold color and dark darks. I don’t think I’m a very subtle person :)

So – given those goals, I’m pretty exited about this one! I wish now (of course) that I’d painted it larger.

Side note: Because of the ‘silhouette-y’ nature of this image, I was thinking very consciously of the way the French artist Marc Folly paints shadows. Here’s a video of him at work. It’s in French, but he’s hilarious in any language, (you’ll see what I mean) and you can easily follow what he’s doing.

And here, just for your curiosity, is the cellphone snap. So you can see how bad I am at perspective.

~m