*I wish you could hear how quiet this photo is.*

In the Studio: Add Another Sweatshirt

When writing in January, I feel like I should speak in whispers. The cold and snow have quieted the woodland hubbub, and I’m reticent to interrupt the peace around me with words. As someone strung rather tightly, who surrounds herself with music and color and creating, the absence of activity is a bit jarring. But I have grown to love this mostly cold, mostly dark, mostly colorless month. And that is thanks to painting.

When I returned to the canvas in the mid 2010s, I became a woman obsessed with figuring out what to paint. I began looking for beauty everywhere. Were thorns pretty? Were paint drips secretly divine? Was pea green actually gorgeous? I was looking for inspiration in every dirt pile and downed tree.

And then, January arrived and I began examining IT. Was it a cabin-fever month of being cooped up inside…or was it actually a chance to hunker down in old sweatshirts and paint guilt-free because I’d been snowed in anyways? Was it dark and colorless or cozy and nuanced? As I turned my new eyes to the sparse landscapes around me, I began seeing colors. Rocks and tree trunks are the neutrals during the rest of the year when sitting next to colorful leaves and flowers. But in the winter, when they are all you have, your eyes adjust, and realize myriad colors those grays and browns hold. And snow? It’s not white. It’s a refracting series of changing colors depending how light and shadow hits it. And winter light? The sun sits low in the sky longer in morning and night, casting everything in citrus streaks made more pronounced next to desaturated hills.

What used to be a month of melancholy for me still is, but it’s a melancholy I enjoy now, like a Bon Iver song or a Fairfield Porter painting. And if I find myself craving hot sun on a pine-scented mountain trail, I’ll just paint that very thing, and in the process get to relive it for a few warming days.

—JF