I just recently started following a twitter account that posts photos of Canadian paintings. It’s called CanadianPaintings. The reason I started following it is because it’s posting some amazing paintings of snow in particular. We can all stand to better appreciate Canadian art in general, but right now I’m in it for the snow paintings.
Here are some of the ones that I find particularly intriguing, in no particular order (reverse chronological):
I find the different depictions of the snow very interesting. It helps highlight how variable different types of snow are, from the very bitter, bitingly cold drifting sand-like snow to the slightly melty packable mound snow, to the light dustings and the spring thaws. Seeing how the different artists chose to color the shadows is instructive and illuminating. The white of the snow is different in every single one as well. The light at different times of day makes a difference to what kinds of light and shadow you’d see (not just the direction of the light source, but the yellow-ness of the light). Monet famously went to paint his haystacks with many canvases, and sat there all day to capture them faithfully at different times, moving from canvas to canvas so that the light was always properly captured. The light at 5 am is not the light at noon is not the light at 5pm, and the shadows are all quite different as well in depth and color. The reflection from the sky, whether the sky bleeds into the horizon or not, overcast or not, it all matters to the colors and shadows, the light and the dark. And that’s just the snow.
Revelry Reverie 