The Landscape of Painting

Winter Paintings Are Depressing, or So They Tell Me

Winter Hillside | Stephen Springer Davis | 2010

I don’t know, of course, what your winter has been like, but where I live we got slammed with something like 80″ of snow starting in December. That’s really weird because we rarely get any snow. But in honor of this precipitation, I’m posting one of my few winter paintings.

In my experience, no one ever buys winter paintings. Galleries hate them consequently, and discourage me from including any in shows. I’ve over-ruled the owners in the past, thinking I must be wrong, but the result is always the same. I’ve talked to visitors at my shows about what they do and don’t like, in a general way. (This might be a good time to read my post about the Perfect Painting) Generally visitors have said they don’t like winter scenes because they’re reminded of, well, winter. That means freezing temperatures, the high cost of heating, scary driving, missed work. For non-skiers, who are probably the majority of us, winter is bad news. But sometimes a scene with snow is pretty anyway and has to be painted.

I’m not so tough as to paint en plein air in the winter. It’s uncomfortable enough to paint under a hot sun. In the winter I will strictly take some pictures and do the painting in the comfort of my studio. Did I mention I hate winter?

Tags: landscape painting, oil painting, plein air

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 9th, 2010 at 1:48 pm and is filed under Current work, oil painting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.