How a painting left an artist's life

Story and art contributed by John Pohl.

Last month, I wrote about Booting It To Wellington, a painting that had found a home with a person who liked it so much that he has promised to leave it in his will to my children.

No other of the few purchasers of my paintings have gone that far, but the buyer of Carré St-Louis indicated what he felt about my painting by where he hung it.

This is part of the story of a painting that has left my life. The rest is my own memory of the painting: how it came to be, and how I felt about it.

Carré St. Louis is an old square that faces St. Denis St. near the Sherbrooke métro in Montréal, It has a gorgeous fountain, surrounded by what seems to be a lot of wrought iron fixtures. The square, a park full of mature trees, is itself surrounded by old stone-faced row houses topped with pyramids and turrets.

The painting is based on a sketching session with Pointe St-Charles’s Outdoor Art Club, at the only location I ever visited with the club outside “greater Pointe St-Charles.”

I should note that the Outdoor Art Club is an elite group of rugged artists who sketch the neighbourhoods and parks of Pointe St-Charles, venturing into adjacent districts of Verdun, Griffintown and across the Lachine canal into the Atwater Market area. They do this rain or shine, cold or hot, throughout the fall, winter and spring.

You may have seen us drawing in a gale, the rain slicing into our faces, our hands gripping our pencils and brushes even as the wind rips pages out of our sketchbooks. We barely notice that our easels have blown across the street and are hanging in the power lines. With one hand holding a torn scrap of paper fast to the sidewalk, a brush clamped between our teeth, we add fine details to our architectural sketches.

The day we sketched at Carré St-Louis was not like that. It was cold but warmed slightly by the sun, comfortable enough that passersby sat on benches and a kind of wall near one edge of the square. I became interested in a row of houses with roofs that resembled turrets with the points chopped off.

In the painting I made from my sketches and photos, the peaks of the roofs are heads atop broad-shouldered blocks of granite, differentiated by varying shades of orange. I did not see these buildings as figures when I painted it – the images appeared as I was writing. The windows of the stone-faced buildings become even more obviously sentient.

The monolithic orange buildings are contrasted by the shaky lines of the bay windows, the monotone blue cars the two-headed streetlight and the tree branches against a uniformly grey sky.

In the foreground, three women sat on the wall and chatted long enough that I was able to draw the way the one figure I included was sitting.

The painting took shape over several months. I gradually simplified the cars, and the sky – once a mess of colours and tree branches – became a resting place for eyes bedazzled by all the details and lines.

This painting now hangs in the home of my friend David and his partner Reisa in Morin Heights. They didn’t articulate what attracted them to this painting, but it is the first thing a visitor sees when entering their house.