Fields of Winter

In many holiday seasons I drive my family back and forth between New England and the Midwest - nearly 1,000 miles each way, much of it on the New York State Thruway. Navigating through and around the potential for bad weather, especially in the lee of Lake Erie, can often be a challenge. This year's trip outbound gave us sleet in the Berkshires (which did indeed look "dreamlike on account of that frosting", as James Taylor would put it) and then a blustery but dry snowfall between Albany and Buffalo.

One of the prettiest parts of this journey in winter is around the towns of Herkimer and Mohawk, right where one would exit for Cooperstown and the Baseball Hall of Fame. The Erie Canal runs parallel to the highway here and the valley opens up to rolling hills gridded with evergreen forest and farmland to the north. With snow on the ground, and one eye on the road I can let my other eye memorize the high-contrast features of the land, and recall the wonderful snowscapes of Russell Chatham - one of my favorite contemporary landscape painters.

This year I've put in a little more than a week's work to try and capture something of the allure of this scenery for me. I used hastily snapped phone photos of that drive for reference, adapting freely.

 I started with pencil value sketches, combining features and altering them to end up with this 7"x10" sketch:

I then tried to move up to a half-sheet (15"x22") to see if I could capture the same sort of thing. Very similar at first glance. Some parts worked as well, others less so:

 The second close-up detail shows (to me) how I almost always stiffen up when I move up in scale, and how my free and loose style doesn't benefit from operating in fits and starts...

Later I tried another scene back at 7"x10" again. There is still lots to learn about making flat light on snow work!

Imagination and Memory

Sometimes imagination is as useful to me as memory - both can be wonderful aids to breaking through the two-dimensional picture plane of the photographs that are often my source material in the winter months. A place I've never been, if it's the right kind of place, can invite me in and make me want to explore a landscape, to capture something of it's essence. Even if I don't know what a place sounds or smells like, and even when I have no idea what's just over 'my' shoulder with these static points-of-view, a pleasing combination of colors and contrasts arranged by nature 'just so' (or manipulated by me to alter the view a bit) can still work it's magic.

For a couple of weeks I've been working with photographs of the national parks of Wales:

There seems to be a bit of New Zealand in these views to me - a folded landscape with deep clefts - and the presence of moving water gives them a built-in sound that's attractive too.

In February, we're off to Joshua Tree National Park for a day, so I've been researching hikes and landscapes we might want to investigate if we can. This view of a sometimes dry reservoir called Barker Dam had wonderfully dark late afternoon shadows coupled with the golden glow of sunset on the rocks, but it started with a drawing that nailed the depth and motion of tumbled stones. Some days things just work - even if the drawing was dashed off in the front seat of my car while waiting for the kids to get out of school:

As always, clicking on any of these gives you a larger view...
Clay

Winslow Homer and Prout's Neck, Maine

I recently went on a roadtrip up to Portland, Maine to see the "Weatherbeaten" show of Winslow Homer's work related to his home in Prout's Neck. The museum has just finished restoring his studio building, which they now own, and had put together several shows to celebrate: one of his work, one of his circle of contemporaries and local plein air painters, and an exhibit of commissioned photographs.
Portland Museum of Art Weatherbeaten exhibit

Terrific CBS Sunday Morning segment on the studio and Prout's Neck

I had been studying a monograph of his watercolors from an earlier show at the Art Institute of Chicago (Waterolors by Winslow Homer: The Color of Light). It was a real treat to seethe watercolors up close (or as close as they'd let me get) and I now have a much better understanding of his mastery.
Link to details of Breaking Waves at AIC

After the museum and lunch, we made the 12 mile trip down to Prout's Neck to see what we could see in the late afternoon light.
Google map of the area

It was a magical day, though a bit gray, and I'm so glad I got to share it with my family and my mother who was in town for a visit.

So far, the experience has resulted in one painting. Though our day was calm, I tried to capture a hint of Homer's raging surf through a bit of artistic license...

Truisms

So far on my watercolor painting journey I think I've learned the following:

• You cannot achieve good painting without good drawing, but you CAN achieve bad painting with good drawing.

• Good paper is more important than good brushes which are more important than good paint

• Eyes make the painter, not the tools; but good tools can sure help the eyes

• Simplify, simplify, simplify

• Do not be afraid to fail, but learn when to stop and how to wait.

• Gravity can be your friend. And also your enemy.

• A "breakthrough" painting can almost shame much of your earlier work, and it can take a long while before it has worthy company.

• Practice does not make perfect. But it sure helps.

Sometimes you have to go for it

Working from a photograph on a chilly day I tackled a shaded hillside in northern Victoria, Australia. Mostly I was trying to catch the shade under the trees, the atmospherics of the distant hills, and to give some sense of the steep perspective as the hill falls away at the viewers feet.

At this stage, I was fairly happy but I knew that I needed to make a few adjustments. The next hill over was too brown and warm for the rest of the painting (especially in this photo). I didn't feel the shadows under the trees were strong enough. And I knew that I had chickened-out instead of including the scattered flock of sheep in the reference photograph.

So after strengthening the shadows I did a bit of research looking at how other painters have tried to show distant sheep with just a few strokes, then held my breath and went for it.

 

I'm still not thrilled with the brown hill... but the sheep seem to "work". They're small.... but they're sheep! 

This is 9" x 12" on Arches 140 lb cold press, entirely painted with an Isabey 2/0 Squirrel Quill Mop brush, except for the sheep which needed something smaller and stiff. A teeny bit of gouche for the sheep whites. This second photograph is more true to the actual color.

Boston from Buck Hill

We had a glorious warm autumn day yesterday, so I packed up the field gear into my backpack and headed off to the Blue Hills Reservation in Milton, MA. This wonderful network of trails, ponds and hills is within a half hour drive and offers surprisingly grand vistas for a spot so close to the city, so close to the coast here.

I chose Buck Hill, taking a brief but very steep and rugged leaf-covered trail straight up from Route 28. Suffice it to say I was reminded of my own sloth, lack of exercise and even mortality on the climb up. At the very least, I was rather grateful the trail wasn't any longer!

I don't have much in the way of photos here: just the painting (9 x 12) and a documentation of what I was looking toward. When I started there was still a bit of haze and/or fog hovering over the city presumably due to temperature inversions of some sort, but there wasn't a cloud in the sky. We're already a bit "past peak" for many of the fall leaves - they came and went in a hurry this year!

Optics

The difference between the way a painting looks at arm's length (the way it's made) and from across the room (the way it is often viewed) can be truly mysterious and sometimes astonishing, even to the painter.

When I stand back to look, I'm often looking for nebulous qualities. Things like "Does the painting hold up?" or "Is that detail lost?" become just as important as judgements about color, shape, composition, emphasis, and whether or not I've successfully conveyed what I set out to convey.

The recent paintings below are deliberately shown small here to give you some idea what they look like from across the room. They're all less than 9" x 12". But if you click, you'll get a better sense of how they look to me when I'm painting...

The bottom one is a first sketch attempt at depicting a complicated and colorful scen along the Charles River in Newton, Massachusetts. Lilypads, turning leaves, reflections, forest shadows... these are all significant challenges for me and up close I didn't think I was getting them down in a coherant way. But from across the room something magical happens - I had caught more than I thought!