Cape Cods In Winter oil painting

A row of Cape Cods face an evening sun as their lawns start to lose the snow of winter.

A row of Cape Cod houses, most of them white, recedes into the distance to the left. The sidewalk runs in front of the houses and follows them up into the distance. A few ornamental birches stand dormant on a few of the lawns and a large pine stops the view in the distance. The snow has melted but snow piles still frame the walkways.

There was a painting idea that sat in my head for a number of years. I saw a number of houses in winter facing the sun in morning. I saw the view one morning a few years before I started painting. When I decided to start a painting using that idea, I needed the right location. The original idea called for a sunny morning. Since I work, that meant that I could only work it on weekends. Despite living in the Midwest, the chances of getting consistently sunny but snowy weekend mornings was not that good. Eventually, I surrendered to an easier location, a row of Cape Cods facing the sun in afternoon.

Despite what someone might think, winter snows are not always continuous. Winter is not always an eternal blanket of white, even if it seems that way. This painting was started in the week following Christmas. It had recently snowed and the snow was already melting. As long as I was painting houses, that really didn’t matter. I had until the trees popped their buds to paint.

At the time, this was my most architecturally demanding painting. House after house, white and with dormers on top and subtle variations in façade took time. But I also needed snow piles. In fact, the snows disappeared early and I had to finish the yards the following year. On that second year, the snow fell late and I didn’t do a lot of the snow piles until later that winter.

Usually, I find small details or a section of a painting that pleases me most about my work but in this one, it is the lighting I like. I generally like the way snow paints when it has shadows that reflect a clear, winter sky. The lavenders and pale ultramarines contrast with the golden white of sunlit snow. In this painting, the light and shadow fascinate me. Also, I do like the linear quality of the Cape Cods, an unrelenting sameness in the houses that attempt to find their own identity in small touches: a brick façade, a flag, a cluster of birches, awnings. We once despised this type of housing because of its sameness, but it does reflect how similar we really are.

This was one of the few paintings that I exhibited in a statewide show. I am a reluctant exhibitor. I have always found the demands of exhibiting much less fulfilling that the demands of painting.

Other works of Fine Art you may enjoy:

The Connections Of Mary Cassatt

Bend In the River, an oil painting

Silence In the City, a cityscape painting