'Context' - A Blog
'The Thorn and the Old Machine' - A recent winter painting with the great but subtle colours of the season.
The Brief Beauty of Now
01/01/2021
Appreciating the colours of winter
Hitting the shortest day of the year is a marker in the calendar. It seems that us humans crave light. I suppose in recent years we have come to understand that feeling the sunlight on us is not just a pleasure, it’s a necessity. We know now that we need it to synthesise vitamin D and that it has a key bearing on our mental health.
For some reason the short days always seem more tiring. When working outside, it wasn't usually too hard to find the stamina to work into the evening in summer, but at dusk at four in the winter one felt exhausted. It took a certain kind of resolve to decide to work on, at sharpening tools or repairing things in the workshop after dark.
Even though my painting work is all carried out inside, mainly lit by electric light, I still find the same rhythms apply, working late into a summer evening is still a pleasure, in winter it can feel quite a chore.
Winter’s light is, however, not without its own charms. On the brighter days, the sky seems to move almost straight from the beauties of dawn colours into the similar, but different hues of sunset. Winter has its own colour gamut too. Winter is the season of browns, violets and greys. Not the all assailing bright and complex greens of spring, or the heavy, slow yellows and deep greens of summer, and furthest cry of all perhaps from the electric reds and yellows of just finished autumn.
Winter is the subtle season and the best end of winter is definitely the front end. The tail end, come February, is a test of stamina anyway and colour-wise is the equivalent of a horribly overworked palette. A palette where all the colours are slowly tending towards the same insipid browns, crying out for those first injections of spring leaf to excite things again, or for an exciting sky to briefly relieve the monotony.
But the beginning of winter does have some perennially great, but subtle colours. The browns are still beautifully variable, modulating between subtle magenta tones to deep ochre hues. There are still the last startling vestiges of brilliant autumn colours left here and there which can create vivid punctuation points to provide focus and contrast in a painting. And the gentle but constantly minute by minute ‘purple-pink’ changing skies of this time of year offer much beauty for those who are prepared to take the time to study their intricacies.
For me the most striking part of these gems of this time of the year is their transience. There are moments where the low sun lights up a wall of mist in a valley, catches a reflection on a distant damp farmhouse roof, makes a flaming copper beacon of the last leaves quivering in a light breeze on a nearby beech, all set against a hazy grey-purple sky fringed with electric orange edged clouds. Seconds later, all of it is gone.
One is left standing in the enveloping evening mist with the sound of a distant dog barking for company, scarcely believing the breathtaking beauties of the moments before even existed.
For some reason the short days always seem more tiring. When working outside, it wasn't usually too hard to find the stamina to work into the evening in summer, but at dusk at four in the winter one felt exhausted. It took a certain kind of resolve to decide to work on, at sharpening tools or repairing things in the workshop after dark.
Even though my painting work is all carried out inside, mainly lit by electric light, I still find the same rhythms apply, working late into a summer evening is still a pleasure, in winter it can feel quite a chore.
Winter’s light is, however, not without its own charms. On the brighter days, the sky seems to move almost straight from the beauties of dawn colours into the similar, but different hues of sunset. Winter has its own colour gamut too. Winter is the season of browns, violets and greys. Not the all assailing bright and complex greens of spring, or the heavy, slow yellows and deep greens of summer, and furthest cry of all perhaps from the electric reds and yellows of just finished autumn.
Winter is the subtle season and the best end of winter is definitely the front end. The tail end, come February, is a test of stamina anyway and colour-wise is the equivalent of a horribly overworked palette. A palette where all the colours are slowly tending towards the same insipid browns, crying out for those first injections of spring leaf to excite things again, or for an exciting sky to briefly relieve the monotony.
But the beginning of winter does have some perennially great, but subtle colours. The browns are still beautifully variable, modulating between subtle magenta tones to deep ochre hues. There are still the last startling vestiges of brilliant autumn colours left here and there which can create vivid punctuation points to provide focus and contrast in a painting. And the gentle but constantly minute by minute ‘purple-pink’ changing skies of this time of year offer much beauty for those who are prepared to take the time to study their intricacies.
For me the most striking part of these gems of this time of the year is their transience. There are moments where the low sun lights up a wall of mist in a valley, catches a reflection on a distant damp farmhouse roof, makes a flaming copper beacon of the last leaves quivering in a light breeze on a nearby beech, all set against a hazy grey-purple sky fringed with electric orange edged clouds. Seconds later, all of it is gone.
One is left standing in the enveloping evening mist with the sound of a distant dog barking for company, scarcely believing the breathtaking beauties of the moments before even existed.