I’m excited to share with you my latest painting! Over the weekend, we had a quick sneak peek of spring: two sunny, 50°-60°F days! They were gorgeous and I tried to milk every minute outside I could, but I headed to the gym today with an outside temp of 17°F. So I’ll be painting winter scenes like this one for a while longer.

This painting is of a scene from our first winter in Fairfield, Connecticut, after we moved from Texas. This was our biggest snow yet, and my husband, oldest son and I drove over to a nearby hill to sled and afterward we headed to the beach and built a snowman with shells for features and arms made of driftwood.

I love the body language between the two figures. I’m really interested in the story that two bodies can tell without the details of facial features. These days, we’ve gotten much better at reading body language without seeing more than a person’s eyes on their face. But the body can say so much. In this painting you can see the collaboration between the child and the adult.

With every impressionist landscape painting I pursue, I’m trying to get more and more loose with my strokes and create the look of rushed simplicity like Van Gogh or Monet. Much like Dolly’s expensive attempt to look cheap, I’d say making a painting appear effortless takes a new level of effort that following the reference photo does not. It’s so hard to make it look loose and not fill in all the gaps!

I am pleased with the looseness of this painting and the vivid colors. In my paintings, I want to illuminate the places and spaces where we live and the way we live in them. I think Fairfield, Connecticut is a magical place for children to grow up with a beautiful backdrop–I want to show the beauty of the everyday ordinary we get to enjoy on canvas.