Suggestions...

The other day I was hiking through the woods with a friend, and she mentioned how beautiful that spot would be as a painting. She suggested I should think about painting it. People often suggest things they think would make good paintings, but this was surprising because I had just been looking at the same thing and thinking, “that would make a great painting, but I’m not sure I could pull it off.” It’s near the top of a hike through the woods when the trees clear out a bit and the long shadows of tree trunks on the snow break up the verticals of the trees. Hearing my friend mention it as a possibility for a painting made me rethink the scene. I started planning how I might layout the image and we talked about what would make this scene interesting… how a scene like this could work. Normally I ignore people’s ideas of what I should paint, because I have very specific things that make me want to paint a landscape. It usually has to do with how the light is hitting the subject matter, and how the colors of objects play off each other. There will be some sort of spark to get me excited about it. This time my friend was seeing something interesting in the same place I was seeing something interesting. There was a certain movement through the landscape and among the trees, and a balance between the rhythm of the shadows and the repeating trees. And when painting a snow covered landscape there is a certain freedom in playing with abstracting the foreground into broad brushstrokes of luscious and colorful whites. The trick is to never actually use a clean white.

So the next afternoon I went back up the mountain with a camera and tried to get photos that caught a few different moods and ideas. It’s amazing how you can stand in one spot and see several different possibilities for paintings that would all make that spot look and feel different.

I got home and did a small color sketch and spent the last few days painting the following painting, which is 26×36”. It’s pretty much finished except for a little knit-picking I’ll do to make myself happy, even though no one else will notice it.