Great Snow Paintings

Does anybody know of any great winter paintings?

I've got some ideas (George Inness, and Aldro Hibbard come to mind), but I would love to know what folks out there consider their favorites.

As it happens, I've been asked to write an article on killer snow paintings for the Mass Humanities weblog. I'd love to know what you think should be included. In other words ... Please Help!

Here are a few immediate picks to get things started.

Casper David Friedrich, Cairn in Snow, 1807

Louis Remy Mignot, Snow Scene, 1853-54

Albert Bierstadt, The Snow Mountain, 1863-68

George Inness, Home at Montclair, 1892

Muhlenhaupt, Title?, 1890

Childe Hassam, Boston Common at Twilight, 1885-86

Bruce Crane, Title?, c. 1900

N.C. Wyeth, Snow Platform, 1906

Walter Launt Palmer, Snowy Landscape (look at that light!)
- Thanks to Mary Eickson!

John Henry Twachtman, Winter Harmony, 1890-1900

Aldro Hibbard, c. 1920

Eric Aho, February, c. 2010

Any other great snow or winter paintings out there? Please chime in.

Tranquility Amidst Chaos: An Interview with Kathleen Jacobs

Kathleen Jacobs is a Cape Cod artist who paints self-described "reconstructed landscapes." Her process is rooted in a sense of place, but it also engages a sense of time... In her work, the natural world is ever-changing (and, significantly, understood to be diminishing), and her painting process reflects this.

Kathleen Jacobs, Herring River, 48 x 48 in o-linen

Jacobs paints by "layering, editing, deciphering," and rebuilding - intuitively taking apart and recombining the elements of a landscape she understands to be in flux: "tranquility amidst chaos, and order within randomness.... my compositions have evolved to become reconstructed landscapes...memories or placeholders that investigate the orderly natural forms that are around us."

Her work will be on display through October at the Kendall Gallery in Wellfleet, Mass., which exhibited a selection of her new larger-format work this summer in a show titled, "Reconstructed Landscapes – A Reconsideration of Nature."

Kathleen Jacobs, Marsh Pods, 2013

Born in St. Louis, Jacobs spent most of her childhood in Western Mass. and many summers in Wellfleet on the Cape. She moved there a year ago last May to become the marketing and events coordinator at the Truro Center for the Arts at Castle Hill. 

CV: Your work, as I understand it, is explicitly tied to the process of perception isn't it? What is the relationship for you between painting and perception? 

KJ: Observation is the beginning for my intuitive exploration in my current painting process. In my work I record my response to the rapidly changing landscape that I've watched diminish and transform.  Land, sky, trees and water...in the landscape there is a natural order.  

I search for balance among imbalance, tranquility amidst chaos, and order within randomness, layering, editing, deciphering --- reorganizing and reconstructing - my compositions have evolved to become reconstructed landscapes...memories or placeholders that investigate the orderly natural forms that are around us. Shapes of saturated color next to tonally mixed neutrals mimic the tranquility and beauty that nature displays for me.  

My paintings are simplified images, distilled compositions that are my response to nature’s rhythmic grace, where nothing remains fixed. Whether because of on going real estate development or change due to natural causes as tides erode shorelines, the landscape is always in flux. And since our relationship with the environment is integral to our survival, it makes sense that the alarming threats to our environment today contribute to my insistent need to reconnect, decipher and revere the natural world that still exists.

CV: What educational experiences, mentors, or influences played an important role in your development?

KJ: I attended the University of Massachusetts where I received a BFA in Painting and Art History. I received a full scholarship to attend the University and worked with artist Richard Yarde,  an amazing painter- primarily a water-colorist and a man with enormous integrity.  Sadly he just recently passed away, but when we worked together he instilled in me to work from what I know and to put in the time needed to discover my own process of working.

I had a very supportive learning experience at UMASS from all of my professors including painters Michael Coblyn, Hanlyn Davies and I worked with Robert Sweeney at Amherst College. I earned my Masters in Fine Art in Visual Arts and Painting from the Art Institute of Boston, Lesley University and worked with Rick Fox, Katy Schneider, Maureen Gallace, Stuart Steck and Barry Schwabsky. Rick Fox taught me to trust myself and helped me to realize that it's a matter of trusting in the process that allows for unexpected things to happen.

CV: You're making larger paintings now - what was your process in getting there?

KJ: I worked with Maureen Gallace, who is the Painting Chair at New York University and was recently in the Whitney Bienniel. Prior to her influence I was working entirely outside, from life.  She asked me to question and completely reconsider my process.  I started making paintings from the work I do outside and that opened up my work completely. 

I worked primarily on a small scale in order to concisely think about structure and composition of a painting.  I've since started to work on a much larger scale, such as 48" x 48" - using larger brushes and more paint.  I like the feedom of working with my entire arm while painting and realized it's just a matter of scale in terms of size...the same things apply to make a painting whether it's small or big, the challenge is the same.

Kathleen Jacobs, Cahoon's Edge, 10" x 10," oil on birch panel.

CV:  Can you say a few words about what you are working on now and where you're headed in the near future?

KJ: As I progress with my work now, I want to continue to make larger works from my paintings that are pushed to a greater point of distillation, as in Cahoon’s Edge. I am reducing my compositions to eliminate any obvious signs of a tree, field or horizon line. In doing this, I am exploring whether it is important for me to keep a trace of the landscape- is it needed because of the meaning it holds for me?  I am also exploring how important it is for me to retain a clear sense of structure and form within my paintings.  I am influenced by so many painters including Matisse, Richard Diebenkorn, Agnes Martin, and the concepts behind Luc Tuymans' work have made me realize it's important for me to try and convey something more than just form and structure --- I work with the hope that others will take away much more meaning from my work.     
  

Kathleen Jacobs, Hamblin Hollow, 6"x6," oil on birch panel

Hamblin Hollow - (a place near my home) exemplifies my exploration of the divide between representation and abstraction, and somewhat symbolic of how we all traverse that boundary between our connection and disconnection with the natural world.

At this point, painting the landscape directly from life would be difficult to abandon for many reasons. In the spirit of the Romantic artists and philosophers, in nature I experience the sublime, a self-forgetfulness and sense of well-being in the presence of something extraordinary, and incomprehensible.

In Hamblin Hollow, the imbalanced structure of the composition of simplified shapes, rendered in soft, closely related values are meant to be calming, as in my previous work. With extremely simplified bands of color indicating ground and sky, the painting is still a landscape, but is void of green, with an angular object in the foreground left vaguely described. There is no indication of a light source.

After many months developing and analyzing my landscape painting, I can say with confidence that I am not just interested in painting pretty pictures. The concepts behind my paintings are complex and numerous. As I paint outdoors, even now with the understanding that my ability to truly experience "untouched nature" is impossible and the natural world is becoming more bleak, I am still grateful for what does still exist, for what is natural, for what is not created by humans but by a force beyond our understanding. When I paint outdoors, my curiosity is fed. And I feel hopeful, as did Thoreau:

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.‎" (Walden 87)

"Seeing like an Artist" with Charles Woodbury in Ogunquit, ME

As faithful readers know, I've been posting articles here in an arbitrary way about early 20th century landscape painter Charles Herbert Woodbury. I first became interested in Woodbury when I discovered he'd founded a once-influential plein air painting school, and indeed an entire artists' "colony," in Ogunquit, Maine, which is one town over from where I used to live in Cape Neddick, ME.

I've finally collected my thoughts on old Charles in a single place, in an article titled Painting in Verbs: Rediscovering the Art and Teaching of Charles H. Woodbury published by the Mass Humanities Council's blog, The Public Humanist.

Woodbury painting in Kittery, ME.
I used to live in Kittery too!

Having basically lived obliviously right where Woodbury painted and had his school, I was surprised by how much history I didn't know - close associations with Edward Hopper, national renown, 4,000 painting students over 40 years, even three books now out of print but full of spark and insight. 

It was all so interesting to me, largely because today there are relatively few traces in Ogunquit, where it all happened. 

As I delved into his forgotten books and unpublished notebooks, Woodbury began to emerge as an unsung hero of contemporary landscape practice who early on championed some of the basic tenets of plein air painting as it's known and loved today: Woodbury's entire philosophy of painting and teaching revolves around the now-familiar notion of "seeing like an artist." 

In his gem-studded Painting and the Personal Equation (free ebook here), Woodbury presents a little manual on active observation and perception and a working formula for capturing sensations with fresh, non-fussy painting (techniques that my own students have explored in my workshops). 

The book also provides a revealing walk-through of the exercises and assignments he used in his "Art of Seeing" school. I will be bringing some of these techniques and exercises in "seeing big" and "painting in verbs" to a week-long workshop I'm going to co-teach in Oqunquit, within view of Woodbury's still-extant 1898 studio, along with Todd Bonita during the week of September 23. 

Ocean Waves by Woodbury

I'm going to be giving a free talk/lecture on Woodbury and the Ogunquit school at the York, ME Art Association on Saturday, September 7 from 7-8 p.m. and again on Monday, September 9 from 8-9 p.m. at the Manchester Art Association in Bedford, NH. It's an overview of Woodbury's life and work with an emphasis on how the "art of seeing" philosophy informed his work and how it can inspire today. You can download the slideshow as a PDF here.

All of this isn't intended to teach people to paint like Woodbury, of course. But the spirit of Woodbury's views provides jumping-off places for precisely, I think, what so many artists are looking for: inspiration for fresh, non-formulaic seeing and painting. 

It also feels like paying respect to one's predecessors. And really, it's just great to be painting outside in a place as beautiful as Ogunquit and to be "doing art history" in a way that treats it as a living thing.

An Exercise in Expressiveness

I recently had a chance to try out some new exercises with two different groups of painters in classes on Cape Cod and at Star Island. The site of a practically untouched 1870s hotel, Star Island is part of the Isles of Shoals, a group of rocky yet beautiful and timeless islands lying 10 miles off the New Hampshire coast.

A painting of mine of the cliff known as
"Miss Underhill's Chair" on Star Island

In one exercise, the challenge was to paint a wholly expressive, abstract interpretation of the environment. The exercise started with a meditative walk in which we tried to be wholly present and to soak up impressions and "notice what we noticed" - a flash of color, the sweep of a cloud, the jut of rock or a root.

Next we returned to the studio and purposely did not paint anything that looked like the location. Armed only with our fresh impressions and memories, we specifically painted not what we saw but what we felt - not our ideas about what the physical place looked like but non-objective, expressive corollaries of the sensations we received from being there.

The point was not to make a masterpiece but to tap into something genuine. Even if the painting "failed" as traditional Western art, it would succeed in its truth and each artist's painting would truly be his or her own.

As it turned out, many of these paintings were not only expressive but also extraordinarily "good" paintings - exciting and surprising works conveying palpable moods and unique perspectives.

Finding and expressing one's heart's truth in painting is a mysterious, blindfolded affair; so much of it comes from parts of us that are inaccessible to rational thought. But we can control what we don't do - we can refuse the rational mind's insistence on what makes a "good composition," we can get around the rule of thirds, the rules of perspective, color theory and proportion.

I think it's probably a good idea sometimes to slip out the back door of the expected and the received and see what happens. 

Mid-Ocean

Charles H. Woodbury, Mid-Ocean, 1894. Berkshire Athenaeum, Pittsfield, Mass.

This is Ogunquit, ME artist Charles Woodbury's "salon painting" and the one that made his name. I'm posting it because I promised to in a previous post - and also because it rocks. 

This painting is owned by the Berkshire Athenaeum, Pittsfield, Mass.'s public library. Woodbury painted studies for it right off the stern of a steamer that he took to Europe with his wife Marcia Oakes Woodbury a few years after they were married. 

The entire conception of this work was something new. Most marine paintings included some land or some ships; Woodbury suspends the viewer midpoint over the waves. He would use this compositional device many times over the course of his career. It allowed him to treat his theme in a more modern, abstract manner than his predecessors, who wouldn't have thought of composing the canvas with a freedom inherited from  Japanese woodblock design.

Woodbury was trained as a mechanical engineer, so he understood the physics of wave motion and water swell. "Don't just paint a thing, paint it doing something," he said. But it was the influence of French realism that allowed him to see past the romantic visions of the previous generation's Hudson River marine painters. It was Realism, Barbizon, and Impressionism that told him it was alright to paint just what a passenger aboard a modern steamship could see simply by leaning off the rail. 

And yet Woodbury was, at his best, a poet in paint as well; how else could one see to suggest the effervescent trace of human presence vanishing on the surface of the mighty forces and moods of the ocean as they have always been and will be forever more?

The Damned: Notes on Becoming an Artist, Part 1

What is painting? To be a painter is to enter into an infinitely chaotic conversation between yourself, the work, and the world. The problem is compounded because each of these elements takes multiple forms at different times. 

Looking, thinking, painting. Self, work, world. In practice, it’s apparently impossible to separately identify and define these terms: beacons blinking on and off in the fog.

Gerhard Richter, Ice Berg in Fog

Antonio Lopez-Garcia’s work teaches us that art emerges from what is closest to us - the small epiphanies of everyday life, the glimpses into larger things. I just looked up from these notes to see my six-year-old son perched atop a stool and when I saw the smooth, swanlike angle of his head and neck, I felt mortality, the fragility of life - a very small glimpse of the beauty and sorrow of humanity. 

Kenneth Blom, Portrait, 2000

Nothing matters except the articulation of that feeling (I wonder, must it be that image as well? Or can something seemingly unrelated embody that feeling “instinctively?” I suspect something like this is going on in many of my landscapes). 

To be an artist is to be constantly tantalized by the fruit you can almost see, touch, smell. But the truth is that you’re blindfolded, and every time your fingertips seem to touch the tender rind, it sways beyond your reach. Go ahead, form a coherent theory about what you’re doing and why! And watch as the bottom of every conceptual framework you apply falls away beneath you. And there you are, standing at the easel for another day. 

Roland Petersen, Spring Picnic, 1963

Looking, Thinking, Painting

I have a friend who knows far more about art than I do, to whom I occasionally show my work (when I get up the nerve). He recently managed to soothe my oft-times fevered brow with some brief encouragement and the words, "keep looking, thinking, and painting."

Landscape by Bruce Crane (c. 1910)

"That'll happen, anyway," I thought to myself - but his words kept coming back to me with increasing gravity. Looking, thinking, and painting. 

Actually, what else is there? Doing just these three things with intense passion, thoughtfulness, and dedication are precisely what's required of a good painter. 

Richard Diebenkorn, Cityscape, 1963

From here, there are many different ways to go. Personally, I tend to think a lot about painting (why I love art history and why I write this blog). It seems to me that the purpose of painting is not simply to produce a more or less "faithful" copy (faithful to what, exactly?) of something (a particular tree in a particular hilly field, or a particular cityscape in California, for example). We have cameras for that. I believe with Charles Woodbury that “a picture is a thought or feeling expressed in terms of Nature.” The rest of that sentence reads: “The method is a matter of the moment….Clear sight, clear thought, clear expression; the thought should depend on the sight, and the expression on the thought.” Sight, thought, and expression = looking, thinking, and painting = "observations, concentration then application," so said Frederick Waugh as well.

You probably already believe, as I do, that painting has more to do with seeing than with technique. Let's face it, the technique of painting is much easier to learn than the lifelong task of knowing oneself. I think one of painting’s amazing qualities is how it “opens our eyes” to our role in creating meaning via the links between "sight, thought, and expression."

Winslow Homer, Artists Sketching in the White Mountains

I'm turning this over in my mind because I'm going to be teaching a plein-air workshop at Crawford Notch in the White Mountains next week (Monday & Tuesday, June 17 & 18). Mindful that it’s probably not possible or even desirable to consciously control the whole process while immersed in the act of painting itself, this three-tiered foundation will be our premise and our guide. Seeing with fresh eyes is the essential first tier; thought, the subjective response, follows from the initial perception; technique serves to express the artistic experience.

Titian, Rape of Europa (detail)

I get more excited thinking about teaching people to use painting as a means of heightening perception, deepening self knowledge, and becoming a more fully realized person than I do thinking about teaching technique. 

Brice Marden, Vine, 1992-93

Do you teach technique or artistic seeing? A little of both? As we all know, it’s entirely possible for students to follow the principles of freedom and self-expression and to produce failed paintings, concluding (almost certainly wrongly) that they have no talent. The reason for this, I think, is that painting, like any creative act, implies an audience (even if only of one), and therefore one must balance the freedom of personal expression with technical means and with a related aesthetic (e.g. "loose," impressionistic, realist, tonalist, semi-abstract, etc.), a manner or style either consciously chosen or inherited. 

Antonio Lopez-Garcia, The Dinner, 1971-80

Alternately, many students of painting believe they are “learning to paint” when they are merely learning the techniques behind a particular painter’s aesthetic. I don't want to teach technique or a particular aesthetic approach, but I do want to teach students how to make "good paintings." Am I wrong to sense that this depends on something separate from, maybe prior to, technique? I want  my students to be very happy with their paintings, but I want them to really be their paintings.

A RAVISHINGLY SEEN and painted landscape by John Singer Sargent

What are your thoughts on teaching and learning to paint? What do you think of the idea of breaking it down into "clear sight, clear thought, clear expression" - looking, thinking, painting?