Tag: afternoon

A Late Winter Afternoon

When I lived in upstate New York, the winters were marvelous! Hardwood forests and pine trees all worked together to create a magical land of light and shadow, rolling snow banks, and winter streams frozen and thawed and frozen again. The skies, too, were amazing in their coldness of light that could reflect so brilliantly on the snowy landscape.

As an adult, snow as a place to live, work, and travel in no longer holds much allure – great to visit, but don’t ask me to wade through it, chisel ice off my windshield, or shovel it just to get out of my house. Still, the memories of those magical winter days in deep winter always hold a spot in my heart for their crisp and intense beauty.

10×14″ Arches Rough, watercolor limited palette of umbers, quin gold, ultramarine blue, and a touch of titanium white gouache.

Ivy and Woodpile

Woodpile & Ivy

With the esposo off to Disneyland with a few old co-workers of yore, I am home alone, unsupervised, and bored. With that said, what else is there to do except get out with the camera, no dogs, and go for a brisk walk in fine, cool, clear winter weather?

I stayed fairly close to home and thought it would be fun to look for things that are part of my daily life and try to see them a bit differently than I might if I was just out for a casual stroll. Looking and seeing, taking time on the small bits of my environment, always give me a lot of pleasure. And this is one of the things I “found” – a bit of our neighbor’s yard. The light was gorgeous – later afternoon, but not quite evening – and by cropping to a square and enhancing the image a bit, I really liked what happened.

Taking time to look and not having a leash or two pulling me along, much less pulling me off my feet, was fun. Suburbia is quite boring at times, but other times it produces a lot of great visual gifts. I got a few today, and that makes me rather happy.

Skating Pond

I was never any good at skating, but I did try it out a lot when I was a kid. We moved from a really cold place in the midwest to a warmer climate on the east coast, leaving rural farmland with ponds and lakes for a bit of suburbia in New Jersey. Every year the neighbors would get together and scrape the snow off the nearby lake, test the ice, and create a skating pond. We were never allowed to go by ourselves because of the chance of falling through the ice, but it seems there was always a dad or mom to supervise a dozen kids in snow suits, wipe away our tears, keep us generally under control.

Watercolor, 9×12, 140# CP ArtBeek paper.