Winter is slowly relenting, notwithstanding its customary uproars. Though snow keeps falling, it now melts soon after falling to the ground. As it does, it becomes gray and brown.
March is a month of grays, as if winter was fading out, and its colors are too. On cloudy days, the whole color range seems to become a nuance of gray. Yet even in this chromatic austerity, nature offers a lesson of abundance and variety.
As a painter, it’s an opportunity to deepen my understanding of neutral colors and values. In painting, values are the relative lightness to darkness of a color, for example a very pale brown to an almost black brown.
This is an exercise in subtlety, in appreciating the bare beauty that is unfolding before me. As winter is departing, it seems to be washing out all colors before nature sets itself for their comeback in the great renewal.