I spent one week on Dartmoor for Christmas, and one morning I woke up to that wonderful sight: snow. The hills and the woods had taken new, paler hues, as if they someone had applied over them a wash of white paint. Snow was spattered among the grass in the garden. It was a beautiful day, with the sun shining and the mist slowly vanishing.
I walked to the open moor, with my camera. There the snow was much deeper, shaped by the wind into rippling waves. The air was bitingly cold and smellt of frost. Snow has a special scent, just as it has a special noise when you walk accross it which to me evokes holidays, mountains, and sheer, childish joy.
I made my way up the hill. Frozen puddles glistened in the sunlight. As I reached Kestor, a great pile of granite rock that dominates the surrounding moor, the air became even colder, coming from the high moor. Clouds gathered and snow began to fall again. I went down the side of the hill and spotted ponies, huddling behind gorse-bushes. The snow was falling harder but I took picture after picture, thinking all the while it was the perfect setting for a painting I had long wanted to do.
I find snow fascinating, especially the way it absorbs the colours of the sky and the clouds. Blue shadows, glints of yellow. Reflecting light itself. And I had been wanting to paint a scene of Dartmoor under the snow for a long time, but I try to always use my own references and I had no references of my own of the moor under the snow, only vague memories of a couple of winters, several years ago, when I had seen it.
This did not stop me from attempting to paint snow, only I did from imagination. This was the case with my painting "On A Wintry Day."
"On A Wintry Day" 30 x 30 cm acrylic on canvas board
"Blizzard" is different because I painted it very soon after the snowfall. I was able to use my photos but also my memories which were still very clear. And the feeling that the snow had evoked were still with me, so I tried my best to recapture them on canvas. I wanted my painting to show the bitterness of the wind, the sharp, icy snowflakes swirling around, the blue shadows spreading as the clouds gathered. And the pony trudging through it all, kept warm by his thick winter coat.
It was a challenging painting and involved many layers, as you can see in the video below, but I enjoyed painting it, just like I enjoyed walking through the snow that day.