Oil on canvas, stretched and ready to hang.

Signed on the front.

“The hard soil and four months of snow make the inhabitants of the northern temperate zone wiser and abler than his fellow who enjoys the fixed smile of the tropics. “
–Ralph Waldo Emerson

It has often been said that if the weather was always bright and sunny and the temperature a perfect 24 degrees (or whatever you fancy) that we would soon get bloody sick of it!

In reality, we find we need to take the good with the bad, the hot with the cold, and the dry with the floods. Where we are in the South West of France, we regularly get all four seasons (often in one day…), and the changes really get you closer to the presence of nature and the effect it has on you, which inevitably impacts your painting of the landscape. I think it is the changes in the weather that make for the recording of the painter’s experience of direct painting en plein air a more compelling result.

I painted this one in the northern hemisphere winter just passed at the edge of an area of National Park nearby. I enjoyed keeping this one nice and loose, and although there is more than just a hint of form of trees and snow, it is very much an abstract design and rendering of colour which is a direction I am keen to move towards.