Winter Through an Artist's Eyes

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We have several seasonal paintings in our catalog to illustrate the splendor of winter. In your usual paint and sip session snow is rendered by using white paint or leaving sections of a white canvas unpainted. However, this is counter-intuitive to an artist's sensibilities.

Snow reflects the characteristics of many elements and forms, for example, light, structures or silhouettes. Time of day, external and internal light sources, sunlight or moonlight can temper snow to be any number of colors. Snow can be bright and luminous or at times even appear warm. This creates the mood and feel for your wintry landscape.

The Escher piece is a quintessential winter composition. There are strong contrasts and prominent silhouettes with defined lines against a crisp white layer of snow giving the piece a glossy and graphic appearance.

The Gauguin has a looser structure but defines a more colorful mood. The rendering of color gives the snow a warm softness. Yellows and greens, along with blues, give insight into his palette and his color choices.

Kindinsky takes it a step further by flattening the plane of the landscape while supercharging the snow with warm yellow and orange blended with cool lavender to structurally center the landscape against a a dark blue and black background. He even makes a bold choice to add green with yellow to give the sky an unexpected flash of brilliance.

So keep this in mind the next time you paint snow within a winter landscape. Light, color and form play a part in rendering snow in all of its moods.