Here's a few assorted cityscapes from the past year or so that I've gotten around to painting or sketching.



Passing through Paterson, New Jersey, I had the chance to observe some of the crumbling urban decay it is being plagued by. Boarded up vacant buildings and gang graffiti are heavy throughout the once formerly vibrant manufacturing city. It was like every street corner had a story to tell.


A scene from downtown St.Catharines. Older architectural buildings mix with early morning warm winter light for a misty-like quality.


Oil study of some really unique old buildings from a lookout point in Porto, Portugal at sunset. I was in awe of the variety of textures and crumbling bricks. View more art at jasondwyer.ca

More and more I find myself enjoying painting just as a process and less for the end result...studies rather than completely finished details I don't have the patience for. No sense in spending time on something you aren't going to be into in the end anyway. An interesting surface is just the ticket for this type of painting to add an extra unexpected element and help with the rough feel.

This is a quick oil painting of some building tops in Paris, done in a few hours... it would have been cool to do it on location, but then it would seem like work while on vacation! Plus, I'm pretty sure you'd get trampled. I painted on chunk of nice wood I had left over from some cabinet doors and was sure to let the tone show through, to help with the old yellow colour all the buildings are in the city. Though I went with a taller vertical composition, I find it more interesting cropping in, getting rid of a bunch of extra windows.

This tall painting has been hanging around since June 2014...that's what initial progress photos of it I took say. I guess I just wasn't sure how to finish it up. Based on some of the unique buildings in Paris, the initial idea was to let things happen in a casual way. I wanted to do a painting more about colour and texture and less about detail. Sort of abstract, sort of not.

I chipped away at it over many sessions, using a palette knife to apply paint and scratch back into it. Only towards the end did I do any work with a brush. I find it difficult to experiment and get unique textural results in large areas of flat colour, so that was the challenge. I think it took me so long to finish since it was more about the process than anything else. Throughout the work I had to continue to remind myself not to focus on details. Overall, there are some good zones I find interesting to look at, and a few that really bug me, where I probably fixated too much on what my actual photo looked like.

Row houses are a great source of unending artistic inspiration. They just kind of stack up together nicely in unusual shapes and colours, randomness hard to naturally recreate. And every place has it's own style too.


I took a shot at painting some bright coloured rows of the buildings lining the canals in Amsterdam...a pretty popular subject in all the souvenir shops. Split into two sections, the underpainting is just loose square shapes of acrylic blocked in. Then overtop of that, I created a bunch of texture by dragging oil pastels over the toothy board. And I threw in a twinkly Van Gogh sky just because.

Sometimes a painting drags on. Especially if it's a larger canvas, and especially if you don't like the direction it's gone. There's always one that sits around for months while you chip away at it.

My most recent battle has been with a painting of some old buildings I call Property, which only within the last few weeks have I started to consider finished. At 36x48 in size, it wore me down over a period of about four months. I worked in layer after layer, starting in oils and then shifting over to acrylic. It didn't seem to matter what I did, it was just turning out much duller than expected. Too tentative...it happens a lot on a big surface...smaller brushes just don't produce enough energy. I made the decision to work back into the painting with house paints and a large brush, dripping and spattering until it felt right. It was a tough choice considering it wasn't really a bad painting and there was the potential to ruin it, but since I didn't like it anyway, the risk seemed worth it. Overall it's a stronger painting and I'm trusting my gut.