This painting was done following the third heavy snowfall of this particular month, and is nearly the same view of a painting I did a couple weeks previous to this one. This is a view of the “the Barn,” on the campus of Pendle Hill, a Retreat and Conference Center founded by Quakers in the late 1920’s, and located in Wallingford, Pennsylvania, a few miles southwest of Philadelphia.
The campus is a beautiful setting of 23 acres of forested areas, meadows, vegetable and flower gardens, a bamboo grove, a pond, and has hiking trails. There are over 140 distinct varieties of trees on the campus from around the world, and a few of them are historically significant. It is an uncommonly beautiful place and I highly recommend that you go visit, any time of year fine, and if you go during mid-Winter, it might look like this in the evening.
I was walking across the campus one evening during a late February snowfall and saw the lights in “the Barn” turn-off, and shortly later folks came out of the building and were walking away; it is that moment I attempted to share here. The view reminded me of my childhood in the late 1950’s and early 60’s when I became aware of the ability of snow to reshape the landscape, modify appearances, alter perceptions, and influence sound, among other things. Growing up in the country, I discovered that there was a quiet and stillness that seems particular to an evening winter snowfall. Sound is muffled or removed from the landscape, quiet tends to prevail. The only movement is often the slow, soft, falling snow. Colors and light are reduced in brilliance or neutralized into delicate and subtle shades of colors with similar grayed tones. Snowfall is an indifferent equalizer, cold to the touch and beautiful to behold.
In this painting I sought to suggest the fairly common experience of evening snowfall and with it convey the quiet, the stillness of activity and sense of time, the way the light and everything visible is diffused and softened, and how even like the landscape the building was dormant.