I guess I am switching around because I wrote about this painting in my personal blog (mccauleyart.wordpress.com), but I want to talk about the final touches on it here because it is part of the series of mountain paintings I wrote about a few posts back. No need to check the other blog, I’ll put the image up on this post.
I walk Chocho, our one year old English bulldog, down into the fields below our house. There silence reigns. The snow–I hate to say this but–it glistens, sparkles, as snow does in strong light. As though it were a mirror in white of the night sky. It brings depth to everything which is odd when you realize how it is all surface covering everything. It moves me deeply.
And so I wanted to capture something of that as best I could. In my blog, I tell how it had two appearances, first just pretty much black and white. Way too stark. Then the black areas in dark green. And still too contrasty. So I gave the forests a wash of white paint to distance them and soften them. To catch them as they really are with the feelings they engender. I also wanted to capture the winter itself, particularly the starkness, the emptiness, of the winter land. Bare bones. Cold. Great simplicity.
McCauley Unnamed Winter Day
This is a difficult painting to photograph, and to show against a white background, as I am doing here. It needs a dark wall behind it, I think. But here it is in its final version, the third in the mountain series.
With the Sangre de Cristo mountains hovering above our village, powerful and dazzling, it is surprising that it has taken this long for me to decide on doing a series. And we have, across the valley, the Jemez Mountains as well. Different. The Sangres are glacial mountains, the Jemez volcanic, each range very different in affect on those of us living in their presence. I expect to do about twelve to fourteen pieces over the next weeks and months. I have to say that it is like painting God. That big. Wish me luck. However they turn out, the process itself, just the attempting, is all-engrossing.
