tiny watercolors

When Patrick and I moved into our cozy 1-bedroom apartment last year, one of his biggest concerns was that the place was neither large enough nor well ventilated enough for him to be able to do any oil painting. Patrick loves to work big when he has the space (we have one 96" x 48" landscape of his that takes up an entire wall of the apartment), and his dream is to one day have a large garage or barn that will have sufficient space to paint, have a small ceramics and glass set-up, and an area to photograph everything. In the meantime, we work together out of our friend's glass studio out on the Island one weekend day a week, Patrick spends an extra weeknight in the studio making molds and helping with production work, and he's finally found a solution that, while not ideal, works well enough for now to solve the painting problem: he's scaled down his work and set aside the oil paints for a while, focusing instead on watercolors. The result have been tiny 2" x 2" watercolors of scenes from around Brooklyn, where we live, and the many places around Long Island that his work as an Apple technician takes him.

As you can see, Patrick has been masking off groups of 20 squares on a sheet of watercolor paper, allowing him to work on lots of small paintings of a specific place - the Williamsburg skyline, Fort Greene, Hampton Bays, Roslyn - at the same time. Some are done from memory, some from photographs, but put together, they represent tiny snippets of our varied landscape.

Brooklyn Skyline 2

Fort Greene 5

Williamsburg Skyline 4

Hampton Bays 7

Roslyn 4

Roslyn 5

Saltaire 14

You can see more of these paintings on Patrick's website, here. All images are courtesy of the artist.