Big Snow...painting scenes from the neighborhood

Big Snow   Watercolor   20.5 x 13.5

Home is full of soul.  Home is visceral...you feel "home" in your gut.  In order to establish a commitment to any artwork, I must feel an emotional connection.  After all, an artist spends countless hours, as well as blood, sweat and tears, bringing the work to a grand finale.  I am not one who can just plop myself in front of a scene and work away.  It has been known to happen, but it is rare.  This barn scene, done after a huge snow storm, is a scene less than a mile from my home, and one that I pass every time I go anywhere at all.  It is not pristine.  I did remove the road from in front of the scene, but the dirty snow is there.   It is real. It is viewed from the shopping plaza across the street.   I kept the "sparkling whites" toward the rooftop of the barn....it seems an ascension to me.  Just as I felt it in my gut.

Eyes to the Skies...

Big Snow   watercolor   20.5 x 13.5

For the past several days, we have been under a severe snow advisory here in northeast Ohio. The skies have been violent and winds severe. Most of the Midwest has been blasted with snow. Here, nothing so far....except extreme cold. We have dodged the snow-bullet temporarily. However, there are several weather systems just south of Lake Erie. Our friends just 50 miles away are shoveling out a foot of snow from their driveways. As they say here in Ohio, "Don't like the weather? Just stick around for five minutes." We artists benefit from our constantly changing environment. "Big Snow" was painted last January from a scene at a horse farm just up the street in Brimfield Center. The huge piles of snow were dirtied from the efforts of snow removal crews. The sky was tumultuous. The only pure white snow was on the rooftops and yards. I wanted to shift attention in this painting to the sky. I used pure color in the counter areas around the clouds and used muddied neutrals in the foreground. "Big Snow" is currently on exhibit at Hudson Fine Art and Framing.