I said I wasn’t going to post these because it’s spring, but spring doesn’t seem to want to come to the Mid-Atlantic states, so I give up. I’m going to post my snow paintings.

I did these in December.  They are my first attempts at snow scenes.  This really challenges my ability to see the right colors, as I discussed in an earlier post.  I mean snow is white, right?  As it turns out, it’s not really white.  At least it’s not all white.

We were on the mountain for Thanksgiving in 2014 and on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving we got an early snowstorm.  It didn’t snow below about 1,500 feet, but at 3,400 feet we got about 10 inches.  It was a wet, heavy snow that stuck to the tree limbs.  It was beautiful.  I went out for a walk with my camera on Thanksgiving morning and took some pictures as the sun began to come out but before the snow started to fall from the tree limbs.  Our house is on a golf course, so it was easy to walk to some really pretty scenery that showed off Mother Nature’s work really well.

I did two small paintings from the photos I took.  One is of the pond at the base of the 7th fairway.  This was a beautiful scene but I struggled with the painting.  I like the trees and the snow, but I did not do the reflection on the surface of the pond justice.  To me it looks out of perspective, and of course the colors aren’t right.

The second painting is of a photo taken further up where a stream crosses the 7th Fairway.  This one I like better.  I stood and waited for a long time for the sun to come out so I could get the contrasting shadows of the trees and the brilliant snow where it was not shadowed.  I like this one better.

Now I promise, no more winter pictures for a while.

Many of the impressionists reportedly painted fast.  Of course in the age before decent photography, they often painted sketches of their subjects quickly before the light and other aspects of the scenes changed, and then they would repaint them in the studio.  Of course, these “sketches” are magnificent paintings in their own right.

I wouldn’t call myself a slow painter. I’ve never been a really patient person.  One of the reasons I started painting in the first place we to try to improve my patience. That said, I wouldn’t call myself a fast painter either.  Most of my paintings are done in multiple sessions each of several hours. This is especially true when I paint at our mountain house, because I’m there for a weekend and then gone for two weeks.  This is good, because I can put down some parts of a painting and then it will be pretty dry when I return to work on it some more.  However, it also spoils me because I can paint in layers, which is not a good option when you don’t have two-week breaks.

The other reason to learn to paint faster is that I will never be a good plein aire painter if I don’t learn to paint an entire scene in one setting. So to that end, when in Falls Church I’m going to try to paint entire (small) works in one session. The painting below was painted in about two hours from a photo I took several years ago on the North Carolina shore. (My friend Rodney tells me I need to do more waterscapes.) I confess that I had done a pencil sketch on the board earlier. I actually like this painting it a lot.  It’s best viewed at a distance, so the photograph may not do it justice.