April Snow

Littleton NH had nearly a foot of snow yesterday, so I decided to head up that way to see if I could find some to paint. When I left home, it was 50 degrees and sunny. By the time I got to Franconia Notch, it was 35 and snowing! I ended up at "The Rocks," a Christmas tree farm owned by the Society for the Protection of NH Forests in Bethlehem, NH. Even though I've been a member of the SPNHF for years, I'd never been there. What a place! There were a million things to paint, but I finally settled on a view of the front of the stone house. My choice was due partly to parking availability. I can take the heat, I even like the cold (!), but no one can paint plein air in wind as blustery as it was today. So I painted in the car. My painting isn't finished, and it ended up way too warm, probably because of the reddish underpainting, but I'll show it to you anyway. It's still in the pochade box, sitting on the car. I'll post the finished version at some point. I'm also posting a photo of the part of the building I'm calling the garage, just to show the snow that was falling as I was walking around looking for subject matter. What a great day!

Oldies

I was gathering some artwork together for an upcoming show* and came across some drawings that I'd done years ago in Brighton, England. Here are a couple, slightly off-kilter in spots. The beach, which appeared often in paintings a century or two ago, was too stony to walk or sit on (what happened to all that sand?), so I opted for the town's cozy buildings as subject matter. These are pencil drawings, each about 5" x 7" or so.

*The show, Ebony and Ivory, will be shown at KAZA in Concord, NH next month. I'll post more about it later.