In Transit

5 x 5 ink with watercolour

Date: 11 September 2009

Location: Ottawa, Carlingwood Mall parking lot

18:30  We have parked the "rig" (2001 Mercedes ML, hauling Boler trailer) here while Fred and Adam take Adam's car to deliver the hatchling Painted Turtles from Algonquin Park to the Storeys for a filming project. After the rush of packing from home, it is nice to havea "breather" in which to look around me with the eyes of an artist.

At first I thought I'd be searching for a scrap of something wild. The young Maple trees that have been planted for future shade didn't look terribly interesting at a distance, but before I got around to investigating one of them, a movement caught my eye. A woman in a pink coat was waiting, rather restlessly, for a bus, standing here and there in and out of the long glass bus shelter, reading the sign that lists the busses and times, so I thought that if I began a sketch of the scene, with a grocery store and apartment buildings in the background, that perhaps I could capture the lines of her as she paused again at the sign.

As I laid out the lines of cars and buildings, a gaggle of girls appeared at the bus stop, talking and gesturing, leaning on the newspaper boxes, so I sketched them into the scene in ink, before turning to the cars.

19:45  I was just about finished with the white car when it drove away, my eyes running after its tail lights. Just as Fred and Adam returned, with chinese food, the sky suddenly became suffused with pink streaks and a hazy purplish blush, so i got out my watercolours, and the sketch became a painting... partially. I stopped short of trying to capture the three or four minutes of glory for the apartment building as its windows glowed orange at the quickly sinking sun, as it would have distracted from the colours of what is happening

at the bus stop.