One of my favourite works from the last couple of months of work has been the painting I made of the Sun Tower, a very old and super cool building in downtown Vancouver.
The building is on the edge of Chinatown, the Downtown East Side, Gastown and upper-scale downtown. It's in this weird melting-pot area that has beautiful old buildings, drugs, hipsters and exercise divas.
This painting is titled "Nine-To-Five". I work as a graphic/web designer during the days and the company I work for (MacLaren McCann) is located in the Sun Tower. This building houses a lot of creative and marketing companies.
The overall design of the building is what struck me to want to paint it, and that awesome coloured roof. I heard a story that the roof was painted that colour because the owners wanted it to look expensive, but since it isn't actually made out of copper, it wouldn't oxidize like the other cool buildings of the day.
The design elements are great. There is a common use of the these circular elements (I'm not sure the exact term for them) which are very organic, floral, ounded and highly decorative. Recreating them in this painting was a very enjoyable experience.
My colour palette for this piece is pretty representative of the actual colours. I always take liberties with expanding the colours at least a bit, so as to create an interesting visual. For this work I definitely wanted to maintain the look of the roof and masonry so that people would recognize it as the Sun Tower. Often I change the colours a lot, but here I've maintained pretty closely.
The building has a really cool view. One of the things I've discovered by working here is that you can get onto the roof, and then scale up the side of the tower via the fire escape (its one of those old zig-zag metal staircases). There's a pretty excellent view at the top.
When I was up close I got a very cool view of these details on the roof. Being so close to them on our adventure was awesome, as the little details aren't noticable from the street!
Overall this has proven to be one of my more popular pieces and I'm very proud of it. It looks great on wood panel and is currently hanging in a show called "City:Life" at the Pendulum Gallery in downtown Vancouver.
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