Winter on My Mind

Winter was on my mind when I got the idea of creating a few digital paintings of snow. Since the Pacific Northwest rarely, very very rarely, gets actual snow that lasts, I begin, around this time of the year, to get a fixation on the idea of snow. It's not that I particularly want the real thing-- at least not to last-- as it definitely gets in the way of anything else, not to mention can lead to power outages and floods when it melts. Still, I love the idea of snow in winter. Perhaps idea is where it belongs and should remain.

Before Christmas I began doing digital paintings of snow. It kept growing with one leading to another. In some ways, digital art is low key, no pressure and provides a distraction from any other pressures. For this project, I found previous photos and images that I had created earlier but now turned them to winter scenes. They represent places I had been or my imagination, They are my reality and my dreams.

Somewhere along the way I began to think about doing a slide show with music. If I had finished this before Christmas, that would have been easy. A lot of snow music revolves around Christmas. To make it easy wasn't going to happen as I didn't get really into creating these until the week after Christmas.

When I had finished the digitals, I tried a song which seemed okay but wasn't really what I wanted. It was a beautiful song but just okay for this concept. Then came a piece of music that would have been (note the tense) totally perfect-- Barenaked Ladies holiday album which I found in doing a search for the song I wanted. Their version was on Amazon. I bought the mp3... and only then discovered, despite saying it wasn't protected, it was.

I (Farm Boss too) spent way way too much time on it before giving up and accepting it wasn't going to work-- ever. If you've heard them singing it, just try to imagine it with the images. After looking for the CD, I realized it was a lost cause after Christmas and with so little time before New Year's Eve. So, the following is the only version that is going to exist at least for now.

The music and images are about the nostalgia we feel when one year ends, when we think of the ones who have been in our lives and no longer are, places we have been and loved, when we look back just for this moment before we turn our gaze and dreams forward.

Auld Lang Syne

[For anyone who doesn't have the speed to watch the video with music, I did put the images online-- Slide show of digital paintings for Winter on my Mind . It then dawned on me maybe I could add the song I wanted to my art blog. Lo and behold, it was on Project Playlist. I put a few of my digital images there and you can hear what I had intended to the above slide show and yet might manage someday-- Rain's Art Gallery