Day 598

I'm finally reviving my daily work. Well, twisting my own arm to revive the daily work.

I've got a bunch of paintings produced over the last year or so that were done under the daily painting rules I'd established, but where I just couldn't bring myself to deal with the problems of getting them posted. Hence this blog. Hence still having to force myself to get started on doing the dailies again. I'm hoping to accomplish this by scanning and posting the older work, getting back into the rhythm, and getting my home studio (gutted by my move to the outside studio) back into shape for painting, at least on a small scale.

So....winter. Snow. I loathe them as the objects of shoveling, coldness, wet feet, and general annoyance. Unfortunately I love them as a source of imagery. Falling snow is better than fog for emphasizing the dimensionality of landscape. This is a painting of the same four or five trees I tend to return to in Jacobs Point marsh, only with snow and semi-frozen surface slush all over the ground. 

I've been looking a lot at the work of John Henry Twachtman, in particular his winter landscapes. I have always loved his painting Arques la Bataille, from the
Metropolitan Museum  of Art in NY, but lately I've become enamored of his later paintings of winter scenes. I love the way he manages to dial down the detail and contrast while not removing the focus. The paintings also feel...crunchy, in the way snow does. I'm sure it has to do with the spare, dry way he applies the paint (so different from the way he does in Arques la Bataille) and it's something I want to understand better. Hence the daily.