I absolutely loved the original “Snow” painting for many reasons. I love art with words and wanted to try my hand at it. This pushed me out of my comfort zone, I had to come up with a meaningful word, and “Snow” means so much to me. It is nostalgic in that I always played in the snow in Upstate NY when I was a kid, building forts, having snowball fights, ice skating and playing hockey while it was snowing on a dark winter’s night. It is magical and as I sit here, and we are getting a lovely snowstorm with big white fluffy flakes floating down, it is just magic to embrace. I found a font that captured the essence of what I desired and set about painting it onto a huge panel, (40″ x 100″). Once I had the image on there I was afraid to mess it up and over work the piece, (always a tendency for me). I kept it really light and bright with just a whisper of mountains floating in and out of the word.

Occasionally there is a painting that I love but doesn’t sell and I receive it back from the gallery with input from the gallerists on the comments folks have made and their opinion of the piece. That happened with this painting. It was very reflective and hard to light and didn’t really photograph well. You cannot see the reflective quality in this 2D image, (above). At any rate, it captured the essence of how I feel about being out in a wonderful snowstorm. However, as much as I loved it, I also love selling work to my collectors so I decided to embrace the challenge and re-work the painting into a new piece.

I started with the sky, trying hard not to obliterate the lettering. Then I painted in the mid mountains and lastly the foreground. I always like to have a threshold for the viewer to step over to create depth and space so in this piece that bit is lighter. As I worked on the piece, I realized a lake was starting to emerge in the center of the piece so I enhanced the suggestion of that, scrapping some of the paint away. I had just completed the big commissioned piece for clients in Victory Ranch, a neighborhood here in Park City that overlooks the Jordanelle Reservoir. I channeled that feeling into the lake and made it recede into the distance.

I am happy with both results and the gallerists are happy to be showing the revised version, “Drift”, in its’ more colorful form. It plays beautifully in my new series, “The Long Quiet”. Stop by the Summit Galley on Main Street if you are in Park City and take a look at the latest version of this piece! It is located right below the Town Lift.