Old man winter has hit in Tumbler Ridge - and as the number of daylight hours decrease my painting hours increase as does my time to get a bit organized. I have been posting images I painted over the spring and summer in my blogs. Last week I pulled up four paintings done using a reference photo of a snowy mountain with beautiful striations giving the mountain character.

I had chosen this mountain image to practice negative painting, allowing the white paper to be the snow, and to develop my style. Artists interpret a picture, choosing what to include in a painting, the details to paint, and what to leave as simple shapes or shades. This is easier for me when I have been to the site experienced the image as my style leans towards expressionism, so I painted four images before getting the white peaks and striations the way I had envisioned them. At that point I put the pictures aside happy, moved to other things and forgot to note the name of the mountain.

When looking at this picture some have said it's somewhere in Tumbler Ridge and maybe it is. The mountain was my key focus and I remember choosing to paint dark forests of pines mixed with patches of green. The snowy mountain transitioned to rock and dark patches which I decided to paint in blues reflecting the sky.

The fact that I remember the process, and yet forget the name of the mountain says a lot about why I paint. I paint almost everyday, not to create amazing pieces of art or even images I can show others, but just to for the process. I think I have said before that I chose watercolour because it is cathartic. I tend to paint very wet, allowing the watercolour to move and blend on the page, gently guiding it by choosing where I wet the page. I also paint to break the rules. In daily life we are always conforming in some way to what is expected of us in any situation, at home and at work, but when I paint I allow my own sense of adventure and exploration to decide what colours I choose, how far from reality I will depict the scene to convey the message and arouse the emotions I hope to capture.

And then I am also a scientist - seeing painting as an experiment in colour, movement, texture and shape. It is one of the reasons I will paint more than one attempt at an image, not to meet some expected perfection or standard but to see what else I can do with paint and paper. Instead of throwing away the images from my process I use them as learning tools, seeing what I did that I thought would work and did (or didn't), refining my style with techniques that were interesting and worth doing again. And because each person's idea of beauty and value is subjective - these images are worth sharing.

The beauty of watercolour is that the glow of the white page is visible through the paint, but this doesn't mean that is always the outcome. In the above image my paint striations flowed into each other and left nothing white. So plan B, use watercolour like an acrylic medium painting thick opaque lines of gouache and adding salt to create the sandy texture of the mountain lines. The white is a different tone than the paper, and when painted on in full strength right out of the tube covers everything with a blue/white glow of its own. There is value in this, as the mountain has more texture and almost jumps off the page.

Below are some of the other versions of the painting that I did trying to see if I could find the balance of light and dark, experimenting with purples for shadows in one and yellows to show the sunshine on the peaks in the other. I had not noticed the difference in the greenery, the shapes and shades yet so the midgroud is less intense, less detailed. Yet if had to choose my favourite sky? It would be from one of the first images, where the clouds are fuller, the sky lighter.

The experiment was how to create white mountains against a light cloud filled sky without the mountains needing definition by paint strokes or the sky needing to be blue where it meets the peaks. Could I have kept going, tried for a fifth and perfect painting - maybe. But the goal of painting would have changed from enjoying the process to trying to meet some expected standard - and that would have sucked the joy from the process.

I would love to hear from you.

What image do you like best?

What does it evoke?

What mountain does it remind you of?