Snow Day!

I have loved snow since I was a child, nose pressed to the glass, anxiously watching the flakes as they flutter to the silent ground, desperately hoping against hope that school would be canceled. It's a conditioned reflex. I know this from my graduate school psychology classes. Like Pavlov's dogs we sit and when we hear the bell, we salivate, but this time its not a bell, its a white piece of fluff imbued with our childhood hope, that this was a day when all our usual responsibilities would be canceled and we could spend our time sledding, sipping hot cocoa and doing nothing that resembled work in the slightest.

Many people think that art is not work. But, alas, there are many aspects of my craft that resembles the work-a-day world of the rest of you. We also have repetitive tasks, clean up duties which may takes hours, planning days (which are actually fun but often frustrating), schedules to meet, personal goals to worry about and worrying about how we will meet the next bill. And snow. We too have snow. When I paint snow, I am like a method actor who assumes the persona of the character he portrays. I am again transported back to a much younger me, the one who worried less and played more. So this is when I play. This is when I point a brush, meditate and place a pure white dot against the dark stain of a wooden barn door, open to the weather and awaiting the farmer's attention.

I am getting all sentimental about the snow, but I do love painting it, but I find I rarely plan a picture around it being a snow scene. It seems like such a sentimental subject to paint. It's not like I'm working on velvet or anything, but the long blue shadows, the two birds low on the sky to the right of the picture, and the smoke coming out of the chimney easily descends into the realm of cliché. Edward Hopper, in his paintings of lighthouses, walked right through that and came out the other side, fresh and unscathed. Connection is key. You must walk a fine line between just “painting what's there” and tapping into inner feelings that may indeed be nostalgic and wishful, but then you return to the present and just look at your topic.

I can do snow scenes “like nobody's business”, but I tend to do them in batches. I also use them as a fix it trick for work that I am stuck on. That painting that I am scratching my head over, looking sadly at muddy spots, poor design placement, smudgy rather than expressive skies, failed textures and ambiguous markings needs some strong Rx in the mix. Snow is the perfect fix. Out comes the jar of gesso (my favorite snow medium) and in comes the raw northern air from Canada, gale force winds sometimes, single flakes artfully placed on others. It obscures and covers the various boo-boos that plague a work, until that work is again filled with the hope of my childhood, pristine beauty, sparkles of ice and steep hillsides of snow. Then I am happy.