Aspens in Snow, Late Afternoon Oil on Panel 36″ x 48″

On By jonathankeeton

This is from a walk in the Sangre de Christo Mountains above Santa Fe just as the winter day was ending. I started this in the winter of 2021 and only recently finished it here in Portugal. The sun was just setting, and illuminating only the top half of the aspens. The scene was reminiscent of a couple of paintings by Neil Welliver, who is an artist hero of mine. It took a long time to finally feel like I finished this piece. Here are the steps along the way – kind of a long road.

This is a the sketch over a grey blue primatura, with some notations for where the sun would hit and the dark patches on the aspens trunks.
You could see the mountain peaks lit by the sun behind the stand of aspens. I indicated that light, and then started working left to right on beginning to put in the aspens.
This is a lot of work later, but only the merest beginning still! Around here was when I realized how big a job this would be.
This is quite a bit later, but the painting still feels kind of crude and not ‘there’ yet.

Around here I decided to see how it would feel with the falling snow, and this is where the painting was when we moved to Portugal. When it arrived with everything else in the shipping crate, I put it up in the studio once the studio was finished and would look at it every time I came in.

Here the foreground is more filled in and it feels more like a place. I had been putting branches in the distant trees a little whimsically, thinking how much would it matter if I made them up? But at this point they seemed really phony to me, so I painted some sections out and then put them back, paying more attention to what was there. There were little gaps and irregularities that I had missed that I them painted in.
The sky is lighter in places here, and in addition to making the crazy branches in the back more accurate to what was there, the highlights on the snow covered mountains are also more accurate.
Here’s the final painting. The falling snow above the line of sunlight needed to be brighter, and the snow falling below that more blue. Lots of little tweaks here and there before it felt finished, three years later!

Leave a comment