Easel Rest...Keeping Warm!

"Along the Southeast Corner Fence Line"

oil painting - © Bruce A. Morrison

(click on imagefor a larger view)

Finally finished my latest painting on the studio easel and am now working on starting the next, framing work for clients, trying to clean up this place and...oh ya, and keeping warm!

There's a lot of winter discontent out there, we all hear it, but I'm really kind of scratching my head.  I do remember winters like this AND worse.  I was younger then and trudged right through the sub zero temps and high winds...Iowa has always had high winds in the winter.  We never used to talk about wind chill either, or if there was an awareness of it I'm sure it was just the adults who talked about it.

But now the Weather Channel has "names" for winter weather fronts, and all the news anchors shout out the winter "ravages" like dooms day announcements...I still just scratch my head and think its so much unnecessary hype.  Its always been cold in the winter here, and besides - everyone else is getting lucky with all their snow and we've just barely scraped up enough to call the ground white now.  

The only bad thing I can think of here is without a good snow cover this winter - so much frost has gone into the ground that it has been a mess for wells freezing up and pipes bursting...that's never fun!   We're very dry in our area and with frozen ground, there's little that's going to replenish it come thaw, as the majority of moisture existing can only run off and not soak in until the frost is gone.

But I've been keeping warm in the studio with a spring painting, born from an idea last spring.  It was a pleasant morning on a new (for me) piece of prairie and woodland...always fun seeing a new landscape for the first time!  I took a photograph of this scene along the SE corner fence line of the property and almost imediately thought it spoke "painting" to me...I wasn't sure but it reinforced itself later as I viewed files here in the studio.  It had to wait for other work to be done here during the summer, fall and first half of the winter; but now its complete, still drying on the easel.

It needed few changes to move from the original file to the canvas...sometimes you find a scene that just really suits your feelings about what you want to paint and all the elements are there just as you'd like them to be.

Hope winter has been good to you!  And I do apologize to the SE part of the country for belittling this winter...they would certainly disagree with me!