The More Things Change

Every year I spend some time reviewing past work and blog posts, mostly because it's hard to remember exactly what I was doing yesterday, with last month being utterly fuzzy. A year ago is out of the question. This time I took a look back over several Januarys. There was a lot to catch up on. 

"Fallen," casein on panel, 2017

Nearly every January in past years has included notice of the weather--usually snowy, often quite cold. Sometimes the landscape outside my Druid Hill studio was simply a subject of opportunity as I tried various mediums or techniques. At the end of 2016 I was investigating casein, for example, so in January 2017 I made a landscape of the woods across the creek using casein paint and posted it. The subject was a fallen tree on the far slope that had caught my eye. The painting has a generally warm tone because December had been almost snow-less, which I lamented about in the body of the post.

"Winter Light," oil on panel, 2018

But in January of the following year, a couple of weeks later, we had had plenty of the white stuff. and I had reverted to my favorite medium, oil paint. I did a landscape of a house farther up that slope opposite the Druid Hill Studio, but by then the snow was almost a foot deep. From the warmth of the studio window you could see how the early morning sun set the tops of bare trees aglow. One of my favorite works.

A mixed media painting (acrylic, gouache and watercolor--above) a year later shows the creek dark as coffee under overcast skies. The water is actually frozen, with a blue hazy surface. The cold, snowy weather was once again the norm. 

"Winter Storm," wc on paper 2020

In 2020, just before the pandemic, I posted a retrospective of that January and once again mention a "snowy and cold") month that drove me indoors. A lot of that month's works were watercolors, including a small work (above) done during a particularly "white" snowstorm.

"January," wc on paper 2022

Finally, here's a very recent watercolor sketch (above) on the coldest day of the year so far. The snow is now about 5 inches deep and with clear skies the temperature plummeted overnight. Brrrrr.

 

Reviewing one's work once in a while seems to me ought to be a routine for most who make things, especially because it's useful as a memory but also because it might just trigger new work.