New Hampshire Snow

9x12 inches. Linen canvas panel. Framed

View from the back of Sunset Hill House in Sugar Hill (Franconia) New Hampshire. Begun on the second (or was it the third) day of Stapleton Kearns's Snowcamp, January, 2013.

I put this away when I got home from Snowcamp, not liking the painting much. But over the months, it's grown on me. I did tweak the background a bit.

While I painted the scene, snow was falling fairly heavily and I hadn't rigged anything to keep it off my palette. Before long, my oils were grainy with tiny ice crystals. Working became a mushy challenge and I retreated to the hotel's covered porch at the back.

There is no roadway snaking back in the actual scene. It was put in after Stape trudged past and muttered, "Wicked stripe-y," meaning that each scene element was stacking up in horizontal ribbon after ribbon. 

Then, just a few days ago, I discovered that there probably was a road heading back that way. The original railroad hotel of the mid-late-1800s, long gone, was sited somewhere back there. The current Sunset Hill House was the hotel's Annex, with a mere 28 rooms, designed for those who wanted New Hampshire but not the crowds. The original hotel had 300-some rooms.

A note on the color - my camera loves blue, because camera sensor designers always dial up the blue in landscape photos. Who doesn't love a blue sky? But the sky that day was not so blue and neither were the mountains.