The Art of Maine in Winter

This winter I'm embracing the cold by painting it.

Warm vs. cool colors, tight vs. loose:

I have fun mixing the different colors and shades of the snow, which is not truly white from a colorist's perspective. I certainly start with white but mix in blues, grays and purples for shadows, and sometimes yellows, oranges and pinks for the lights. The warm lights against the cool shadows create the contrasts of snow...I think I have a long way to go to achieve this however, and my phone also did not capture the colors very well.

Each winter I enjoy flipping through this book I got several years ago at Port in a Storm, a book store in Somesville, ME that closed a few years ago. It is compiled and written by Carl Little, a Mount Desert resident. It features paintings of a wide range of styles...

...including "Fox Hunt" by Winslow Homer, which my parents and I saw at the Homer exhibit in the Portland Museum of Art last month. I recommend going to the PMA just to see their collection of Homer paintings...

...also in this book is "Afternoon on the Sea, Monhegan 1907" by Rockwell Kent which I saw in 2008 at the de Young Museum in San Francisco.

Bold contrasts are what always draw me to his paintings, and Monhegan's dramatic landscapes must have been the ideal muse for him. An American Modernist painter, he was also a writer and printmaker, and a transcendentalist and mystic who read Emerson and Thoreau.

"I don't want petty self-expression," he wrote, "I want the elemental, infinite thing; I want to paint the rhythm of eternity."

Kent lived and painted on Monhegan Island for five years in the 1900s.

Lois Dodd, an American abstract impressionist, is a contemporary painter I admire. In fact, I admit I would like to paint more like her. She lives in NYC and visits Maine and her paintings are also featured in Little's art books. Lucky us, the PMA is currently showing a special exhibit of Dodd's paintings, up until April 7. I cannot wait to see it. Below is "Snow in Cove" (1982).