See The Winter, Taste The Snow, Feel The Cold

And here we are at stage 2 of the big project. After I Am The Eye In The Sky was such a big success almost five years ago on a glass fridge shelf I thought I’d go one step further with two more glass fridge shelves and have all five senses experiencing the winter landscape through the glass.

This is the first of two paintings. The three drawings stuck to the back are See The Winter, Taste The Snow and Feel The Cold. I cut out some pieces of paper the size and shape of the windows I wanted and stuck them to the back of the shelf with masking tape as a guide. I sanded down the front of the shelf everywhere I wanted to paint on, then painted on three layers of watercolour ground, leaving it to dry overnight each time. And after removing my guides and taping the charcoal drawings to the back of the shelf, that was all my preparation done.

For colours, I chose French ultramarine, quinacrinone magenta, burnt sienna, burnt umber and potters pink, looking for purples, dark neutrals and granulation effects. Sepia, cadmium yellow and white gouache joined the crew later on when I needed some opacity.

I worked from the back to the front, starting with the sky, using all five of my colours fairly randomly. This surface was pretty forgiving about adding multiple layers, so I went to town a bit. I even dabbed at the sky a little bit with kitchen paper to create some very wispy clouds. Next I added the treeline, again using all five colours randomly. I included some cadmium yellow in places for a little greenery, picking the cadmium because I was worried that transparent yellows might end up getting lost. I wasn’t planning on filling the whole horizon with trees but hit a bit carried away. I was in the zone.

Next was the hillside. Once again, I used all five colours randomly. I tried to “sculpt the hills” with my brushstrokes and to let the blue, the burnt sienna and the magenta dominate the hills in different places. I put in several layers of colour without creating mud. At one point, there were some white bits showing around the windows: I sorted these out by running a wet brush through coloured areas and into the white. After each layer of colour, I would spray the painting. There was a lot of granulation going on but I don’t know whether this was due to the spraying, my colour choices or the dabbled texture of the shelf surface.

Then it was on to the foreground. I put in a tree whose branches looked like extensions of my fingers in Feel The Cold. I started with sepia for its opacity but then dropped in all my other colours for some harmony. And I added grasses along the bottom using all my colours straight from the tube.

Everything looked good but, as you can tell from the names of the charcoal drawings, this was always intended to be a winter landscape, so I added snow using white gouache. I started the tops of the hills with pure white, then dry rushed marks down the sides of the hills. I lost some interesting colours that were in the hills but was still happy with the result. I spattered white spots all over the sky, added some snow in the big tree and the background trees and then, just to create more ambiguity, added snow along the top and bottom of the three windows. And that was me done.

This painting is half of the See The Winter, Taste The Snow, Feel The Cold, Hear The Wind, Smell The Reindeer diptych. I’ll save my closing thoughts for when I post the whole collection.