Winter Painting : Alan Bain comments

I love painting in winter, but it does present a few complications! The obvious ones; temperature, depth of snow, snow blocking the roads usually travelled, open water mostly gone, trees overwhelmed with snow, are really what winter painting is all about. When everything else fails I paint in my truck. I’m left-handed so I sit in the right hand seat, and my palette is set up between the seats. (The others have removed seats from their vans, and they can sit in the back with a sliding door open.) Brandy, my Beagle, understands the changeover. When I get out my driver side, she grumbles, then walks over my palette and settles down in the left-hand seat. She drinks from my painting water, and once spread freshly squeezed out Indian Yellow all over both seats.

And on the other hand, there is a brand new quality of light, a whole range of crisper shadows, and gorgeous contrasts, and everywhere longer views that just don’t exist in a leafy world.
There is either absolute silence, or sounds are transmitted muted and mysterious. The whole bush takes on a dark/light attraction; branches etched with snow, pines drooping under snow loads, Shadows helping round the snow shapes. And every view always has depth, we don’t have to search for the stream or road or street to provide us with perspective, the bush is open in every direction.











Every January, and again towards spring, I paint in and around Algonquin Park. Charlie Spratt, Paul Thrane and I usually camp in a motel at one end or the other of the park and venture days into the park to paint. This past year, in January 2008, fifty yard fog, horizontal rain, and winds bringing down trees and power lines. 2007 Minus 26 (-26C.) was the warmest! 2006 my Suburban went off the road down a 60 ft. embankment, buried in 4 ft. of snow. $3600.00 damage! 2004 really heavy snow on the way up, melting the next day, beautiful misty landscapes perfect for watercolour! But slippery, slimy roads that called up real driver skill. 2003 Used my new GPS unit to venture on logging roads way back inside the park. Not supposed to be there, GPS said I was about three miles away from Hummingbird Lake! No hummingbirds though!
But we keep going back! The challenges are far outweighed by the attractions of winter bush.

Alan Bain
January 2009

Alan J.T. Bain is a plein air painter who paints the vast silent lands of the Canadian boreal forest and has travelled extensively both as a geologist and as a artist across the Pre-Cambrians of Ontario, Quebec, Newfoundland and Labrador. Bain is an elected member of the Canadian Society of Painters in Watercolour (CSPWC) and elected member of the Society of Canadian Artists(SCA).