It's snow joke - the winter scene is no more

Like many others before it, the winter landscape is history. Five minutes ago, we took that final trip that many artists know only too well to the trash disposal. There was an honest and concerted effort to make something with at least six re-do's but in the end, it just didn't work.

It's a larger canvas than  I'm used to working with and in the past this has been known to psych me out. Why - I really don't know! Larger canvases seem to inhibit my creative ability although I have a larger floral landscape that is hanging in the dining room. Florals are a favorite as are trees and pastoral scenes but I digress.

In the beginning it was my intention to make something entirely different than a winter scene. Living in a climate where winter lasts too long, a snow scene isn't exactly a popular image (although hockey is). Having taken a liking to using palette knives, I decided to limit my shades to white and black with touches of silver. The addition of silver paint was used to accent the mountains - I'm big on mountains - and that worked nicely and the main focus was a bare-branched black tree. Using the palette knives for the tree really gave it a 3-D effect and thinking back it should have been left that way but nooooooo. Somehow, the canvas looked bare, like it needed something more...something to give it a filled look.

The decision to paint spruce trees was not wise. I'm not good at making spruce trees and in the end, the lower part of the canvas was wall-to-wall dark grey and black spruce trees. Visually, they look like curved sticks jutting out of vertical line. After six attempts, a half of a container of white paint and the canvas surface displaying failed attempts,  it was time to cut my losses.

Rather than share my artistic boo-boo with the condo residents, I placed the canvas in a large plastic trash bag and placed it inconspicuously beneath a pile of boxes in the recycling bin. Still, all is not lost. I've already started working on a summer landscape on a smaller canvas. Big is not always better and smaller, at least for a while, anyway, seems to be a good fit. There are still two larger blank canvases of which one will be used to create an abstract painting. Maybe. If I'm lucky and the stars are aligned.