Rainbows in Winter

Rainbows in Winter

2020 is here and with it snow, rain, melting, more snow, and more brown on brown landscapes peering back at me from the windows of my house. I'm thinking that I now know what Monet was really up to and it wasn't exploring the effects of light. It was pure laziness. It was the inconvenience of physically dealing with the weather (umbrella? No umbrella? Cold today? Snow? Wet? Wool suit or linen?) and dragging all that that equipment from here to there. Of course, he had servants, but still, its the mentality of it. One just gets tired. Though Monet worked on location he actually did quite of bit of his painting in his studio. So, here I am painting the scenery outside my studio window and getting bored with what I'm seeing and with the results of my efforts. They are all beginning to look alike. Oh, pooh. I need to pull a page from the Monet Manuscript and change up what I'm doing. He painting the same grain stack multiple times. Here I am painting the same darn trees multiple times.

My solutions:

1. I can slavishly slant the color palette of each painting towards a particular hue. Let's say the color of the week is red. Here we go, mixing reds into either everything or only discrete sections, exploring their tertiary and complimentary colors. Do-able and fun, but a little superficial, maybe.
2. I can focus on color combinations, going in the direction of Pierre Bonnard, exploring different hue relationships, using the specific landscape in front of me as scaffolding for this type of work. This one is even more fun. If you have a background as a decorator, you're all set.
3. I could regress totally and treat each day as a stylistic journey into the past, being an uber realist one day, cubist another. A cubist tree might be kind of interesting. But, what do you do with the finished work? It's not really your style and definitely not salable. Oops!
4. I could focus, not on color, but on design. I have a long abused and unfinished copy of “The Artistic Anatomy of Trees” by Rex Vicat Cole. It's extremely dry. You'll want to add a mixer into it. It's also in black and white, so I did some research and posted the color versions of the works that I could find on my Pinterest site. It's one of those books that you need to work your way through and do some self-designed exercises for each chapter, otherwise you'll never remember the concepts he is trying to teach.
5. And last, to return to a variation on my first solution, I can look more deeply into each window scape, and go full on impressionistic, seeing the underlying hues in that particular light on that

Or maybe I'll just rotate through these approaches or combine them all together. It is the challenges in life that bring growth. For me this winter, it is the boredom that is forcing me to grow some, by exploring more facets of the scenery around me. I am by nature, somewhat journalistic in my approach to landscapes. I tend to paint what I see. With my watercolors, I work in series and it is the second and third iterations where imagination and creativity bring sparks of insight into the finished painting. My watercolors work up faster than my oils. I can do several watercolors in a couple of days. My oils are another story. Each one is more of a commitment. Heck, being an artist is a commitment in itself. Good thing the winter is long.