Blanket of Snow (oil on canvas, 2011)

(Private Collection)
I painted this view of the old Schools barn, across the field behind my studio, last Saturday, January 15th, which I just realized was the five year anniversary of the day that we moved into our house here in northern Maine. Coincidentally, the first art that I did after moving in was a pastel drawing of the same subject. I can see this barn out of the window over my kitchen sink (where I probably spend more time, washing dishes, than I'd care to...) and it amazes how different it looks every time I see it. At different times of the day and during different seasons of the year and depending on the ever-changing northern Maine weather, the sky and field take on a multitude of different color combinations. I had some paintings in the house yesterday, preparing them for an upcoming show, and my daughter asked me what I'm going to do when I run out of things to paint. I pointed out that many of my paintings are based on the same subjects and that I could quite easily spend my whole life painting any one of them.

View from Ross Ridge (oil on canvas, 2011)

This painting is based on some drawings that I did standing in the snow at the top of Ross Ridge, looking east over northern Littleton and on into New Brunswick. I haven't had heat in my studio for the past week and working in the cold has forced me to work at a much faster pace, more akin to when I'm actually working outside and have to capture the image before the light changes. Not that I enjoy working with frozen hands, but the process of working in the cold gives the work an urgency, causing me to focus on the essential and minimizing the temptation to overwork the painting and fill it with unnecessary descriptive information.