Carl Judson - Guerrilla Painter Notebook

Snow

The plein air painting tradition isn’t
confined to the warmer seasons. The Impressionists painted year-round under some pretty awful conditions and are well known for their often gloomy and overcast,
snow-covered scenes. Rockwell Kent painted many snowy plein air landscapes in the Adirondacks, Maine, Alaska, Tierra del Fuego and even Greenland! Admittedly,
it takes a hardy and dedicated soul
to venture forth all bundled up to capture winter’s effects with oil paints the consistency of stale
Jell-O.

Mostly, I avoid these discomforts by painting winter scenes from the snug comfort of my pickup with my pochade box on my lap.

Morning Thaw
Buckeye, CO
Carl Judson © 1997
Oil on burlap, 7½" x 13".

I often paint snow on dark surfaces. I guess it’s not surprising that laying the “snow” over the dark “ground,” just as nature does, is one way to produce a convincing effect.

When using a dark ground, I sometimes scratch or scrape through the “snow” to indicate or enhance details, like the fence posts and bare patches on the road (above). The tree line in the distance was defined by repeated scraping through and smearing of the sky colors over the dark painting surface until I got the sense of place I wanted.

Here (below) I used a rust red ground. I think this 20-minute sketch is one of the most effective snow scenes I’ve done, and I
haven’t figured why it worked so well. The only rust red in the scene was the brick house on the right, but the reddish glow over the rest of the painting, oddly, gives the sense of the late afternoon snow squall heavy enough that I had to turn my wipers on about once a minute to see anything.

Spring Storm
Fort Collins, CO
Carl Judson © 1999
Oil on linen, 6" x 10".

Birthday Blizzard
Livermore, CO
Carl Judson © 1997
Oil on linen, 7½" x 10".

A heavy early snow got me out to paint on the county road by my house (above) before the snowplow came by. I was looking
west toward the mountains.

The next afternoon, after the snowplow and a warm “chinook” wind, I parked at the bottom of the hill, looking east to capture the bright effect of the red mud and yellow road signs contrasted with the escalating values of the cool blues of the snow, the shadows, the sky and the rivulets of snowmelt in the road (below).

Afternoon Thaw
Livermore, CO
Carl Judson © 2004
Oil on linen, 7½" x 10".

One of the things I enjoy about snow is the potential for very subtle painting. Here (below) I used a carpenter’s pencil dipped
in thinner to add the structural elements.

Above right, an early snow was all
melted except patches on the pile of shelled corn temporarily stored in the open following a bountiful harvest.

The urban snow scenes that appeal to me are frequently bleak and melancholy. This one (below) remains one of my favorites. I was quite early for a meeting in Laramie, Wyoming, and was able to do this sketch while waiting.

A fine painter of small nighttime paintings that are full of snowy melancholy is Mike Lynch of Minneapolis. He paints these in his car at night using mini flashlights attached to the sun visor (see
New American Paintings, Number 29, September 2000, pp 90–93, The Open Studio Press, Wellesley, Massachusetts).