Waning Winter

The end of the cold, icy grip of winter is in sight. We may not know when the exact end will come, but we know it is on the way. Last week, just over a week ago, the temperatures here in flyover land were well below zero and there was nearly three feet of snow on the ground. Yesterday the high was above fifty degrees and the snow was receding on all sides.

Here is how Druid Hill Creed looked exactly a week before this writing. The snow was deep but somehow the winter colors seemed richer. Now the creek is running dark as Cuban coffee and the snow continues to shrink. Before long there will be buds on the undergrowth. 

"After the Big Snow," watercolor on paper

Next week, when the weather warms even more, my plan is to try an outdoor session or two. In the meantime, lets all stay warm.

Buiilding a Painting

A few weeks back the Des Moines Rotary Club invited me to host a fellowship of a dozen or so members, providing a brief talk about painting. The suggestion was that maybe a demonstration would be fun. But unlike that famous television painter who did a fairly large oil in an hour's time, I knew I couldn't paint that fast. Instead, via Zoom, we spent time on how an oil painting is made, using a slide show of one of my recent landscapes. 

The basic steps I use in making oil paintings are pretty straightforward. Much of the time I begin on a toned surface--mostly a very thin wash of earth red--then lay in the basic shapes of the composition. Whether still life, landscape, portrait or otherwise, these are the bones of the painting. The biggest shapes (in this case, sky, water, and trees) are next. These broad shapes are blocked in with color, varying where possible, but mostly just to get the areas filled.

Next come refinement of color and addition of darks to begin showing the light of the scene and the shadows. In the step photo below I've added greens to show distant foliage but used oranges yellows for the trees on the left, which have mostly dropped their leaves. The reflections and shadows are darkest in the left-center, next to the brightest yellow patch. The sky and water look too patchy at this stage and the trees have yet to take on bulk and shape.

In the final stages, smaller and smaller details begin to make their way into the painting. It's important to me to avoid picky details in every section, though, and I concentrate on putting any tiny details near the center of visual interest. It's critical to avoid overworking at this point. Smoothing the sky makes it more distant and smoothing the water shows the viewer show still the surface happens to be. The seemingly sharp reflections of the yellow grasses add to the illusion of stillness. The tree branches are unfinished and the distant treeline needs some attention.

In the final version, "November Morning" shows very still waters in late fall--the trees are mostly bare. Throughout this particular work a part of my focus has been to suggest and not pick out tiny details. In the yellow grasses, most of the brush strokes are fairly large but along the top surface of the grasses I added a few tiny spots of yellow. In the far trees I scumbled some dull greens into the tops to emulate the confluence of branches and left other small patches dull red-orange suggesting filtering light.

"November Morning," oil on canvas, 2021

Wonder

One of the best experiences you can have with art is the feeling of wonder--maybe transcendence is a better term. It's come for me in various ways. When I was a young boy, reading Robinson Crusoe took me out of my Oklahoma bedroom and onto a beach in the south seas. In adolescence, the wonder of a museum room full of sculpture and paintings by Frederic Remington did something similar by taking me into the 19th century West. Years later, in the Prado Museum in Madrid, I rounded a corner and came face to face with "The Descent from the Cross" by Rogier van der Weyden, a work dating to the mid-15th century that had been the subject of a college lecture, and feeling of wonder washed over me once more. 

Rogier van der Weyden, "Descent from the Cross," oil on panel 1435

 

At the time I was serving in the military and found myself in Madrid with time to spend, so I had gone into the Prado Museum, knowing little about it or about European art, but curious. Not twenty steps from the entrance I turned a corner into a fairly large gallery and there it was. A jpeg doesn't do this painting justice since it is enormous--about seven feet by eight feet overall--and the figures are nearly lifesize. It was originally a piece for a chapel but eventually found its way into the Spanish royal collection. Even in its own day this was a famous painting. 

What I had learned years earlier and half a world away suddenly flooded back. The scene is the removal of Jesus of Nazareth's body from the cross. The lifeless body sags. At that moment his mother has fainted, her posture an echo of Jesus, as is the knee of the man reaching to support her and the bowed head of Mary Magdalene on the far right. You can always identify Mary by her blue robes in Christian iconography. The space of the painting is shallow and the corners of the work make it look almost like a box. Many comment on the detailed passages--folds, tears, and so on. The size, the brightness of the palette, and those stored bits made my scalp prickle with recognition, appreciation, and yes...wonder. It was unforgettable. In the decades since it's been my great good luck to experience wonder before great art many other times. 

I wish that for all of you.

Another River

Even though the year 2020 was a tough one because of pandemic and politics, it was a great time for painting outdoors. I've posted quite a few of the sketches and other works that resulted, but just ran across on that didn't make the cut until now. Although the covid crisis kept me away from the Saturday sketch group, for the most part, I did manage a few outings. On one of them we went over to the east side of the Des Moines River, to the Botanical Center. I set up on the river bank and did this watercolor in one of my sketchbooks. 

"Late Fall, Des Moines River," watercolor, 5x10

Snow in Silver

The past several days along Druid Hill Creek have been unusually cold and unusually snowy. This morning the mercury hovered below zero at daybreak, and a new inch of snow had fallen overnight. The next several days are likely to be the coldest in several years, with high temperatures staying in the negatives. Although it would be great to be someplace warm, we're seasoned northerners and simply hunker down when these clear and icy days come at the end of the season. 

"Winter Woods," silverpoint on panel, 2020

Here is a group of silverpoint drawings from almost exactly one year ago, when the snows had accumulated across the creek. The drifts weren't as deep as they are now, the early February 2010 was plenty cold and bleak. Silverpoint is a medium that fits winter like a polar sweater--warm-toned lines and hatching in a monchromatic world. 

Although I haven't returned to metalpoint drawing for nearly a year, these make me want to get out my stylus. 

"Spruce in the Snow," silverpoint on panel, 2020

"Last of the Snow," silverpoint on panel, 2020

Missouri Valley Impressionists Show

"By the Creek," casein on bristol, 11x14

The Missouri Valley Impressionist Society is a regional organization that has been around for a decade or so. Membership in the Society is open nationwide although it was founded to enhance and emphasize impressionist and realist art in the nine states comprising the watershed of the Missouri River. This year my casein painting "By the Creek" is one of the sixty paintings in the exhibition. The 2021 Membership Show is online, owing to the pandemic. 

The show will be online until 9 May, so follow the link above or here to see the variety and quality of the show. 

Deep Freeze

A big winter snowstorm barrelled through flyover land yesterday--30-40 mph winds, heavy snow--followed by polar air that froze a lot of us in place. Current forecasts predict more than a week of single digit high temperatures and lows below zero here in Iowa. 

It seems fitting then to post this big oil sketch from January. "Snow Day" was inspired by news reports of a huge blizzard elsewhere, but it clearly applies here along Druid Hill Creek. 

"Snow Day," oil on panel, 2021

Winter Watercolor - Groundhog Day

One of the things that's easy to do from a snow-bound studio is stand at the window and splash down some watercolors. A little over two weeks ago we had an epic snowstorm--not like the one in the northeast US a few days ago, but close. Afterward I painted the view downstream on Druid Hill Creek from a north studio window and posted it here. 

Although we haven't had another comparable snowfall, I wondered what we might have in store before winter begins to shuffle offstage. One of last year's sketchbooks was useful to review. Last year almost to the day, the creek looked a lot like it did after the big snowfall. When it isn't frozen solid the creek flows dark as coffee and the banks are pillowed in several inches of snow. The bare trees make a tangle against the pale colors of winter. I looked ahead to mid-February of last year to see what the world might look like in ten days or so.

Late January, 2020, Druid Hill Creek, watercolor on paper

February 15, 2020, watercolor on paper

Late February, 2020, watercolor on paper

I suspect the groundhog saw his shadow. Anyway it seems to me that the best we can hope for is bright sun and cold days through the rest of this month, before the sun gets warm in March. That is, six more weeks of winter.