Light in Winter

---

Montreal artist Shari Blaukopf braves serious cold to capture views of her city all year long.

By Austin R. Williams

Shari Blaukopf loves to paint winter landscapes, and it’s a good thing given that she lives in Montreal and gets plenty of opportunities. “I love what snow does to any scene, especially a cityscape,” Blaukopf says. “I think snow generates a lot of atmosphere. It sounds cliché, but anything with snow on it looks nicer. Take a fire hydrant; a fire hydrant covered in snow is really beautiful.” Because she’s always looking for scenes with a lot of contrast between lights and darks, a snow scene, by its very nature, suddenly makes everything more compelling. “The white shapes break up everything into more interesting compositions,” she says. “And when the sun comes out, and there are shadows on the snow, that becomes even more pronounced.”

Blaukopf studied art seriously as a teenager before largely giving it up for 20 years as she raised her family and pursued a career in graphic design. During her student years, painting outdoors in winter wasn’t part of her regular practice. “I used to dread painting in the winter,” she says. “I never painted snow.” Then, about seven years ago, when she got back into sketching, she discovered that she loved it.

The Great Outdoors

Blaukopf’s paintings are almost all produced on location. She keeps her materials in her car, often stopping to sketch in the morning on her way to work. She generally shies away from subjects that are easily recognizable or decidedly picturesque, preferring instead to paint the things that are seemingly unspectacular—roads, houses and trees, often in Montreal’s older residential neighborhoods. Far from being mundane, these subjects offer fascinating and unexpected patterns of light and dark shapes to those who take the time to look for them.

The artist credits her painting with helping her to discover her native city in a way she never had before. “I’m always looking for contrasts in values,” Blaukopf says. “I often go to a cemetery not far from my home, which has a beautiful road with trees on either side. It’s so beautiful in the winter—all those dark shapes in the light. I also love painting trees in the winter, or bicycles stuck in the snow, or outdoor staircases, which are a Montreal icon.”

Although she loves working outdoors, not every painting Blaukopf produces is done on location. “If I see an amazing scene as I’m walking my dog, I’ll take a photo and come back to the studio and paint it right away,” she says. “I try to do it immediately, while the atmosphere of the day is still in my head.”

The Color of Snow

We sometimes discuss winter as if it were a uniform chunk of time. The cliché phrase “dead of winter” takes this misconception further, implying a total, moribund stillness during these months. This isn’t the case, of course, and a location will likely look quite different at the beginning of a season than it does at the end. “Early and late winter are very different,” Blaukopf says. “The colors of the shadows on the snow change. When it’s warmer, everything is softer, including the shadows. When it’s really cold, the shadows are very blue and very sharp. I never noticed this until I started painting in the winter. When you’re painting and really looking, you see a lot more.”

Montreal’s winters are snowy but also sunny. “You can pretty much count on snow in Montreal from November until the end of March or the beginning of April, so that gives me five or six months to paint snow,” Blaukopf says. “My favorite time to paint is whenever the sun is shining, creating those strong shadow shapes. But even the gray days are gorgeous. I’ve learned to mix so many beautiful neutral colors from the sky in the winter.”

The artist often uses a limited palette, and she might produce those beautiful neutral colors with just one transparent color for each primary: ultramarine blue, alizarin crimson and Hansa yellow. “I’m always thinking about color harmony, and by limiting the palette, I get more harmony in the painting,” Blaukopf says. “I mix those three colors together and get a beautiful gray,” she says. “If I want the gray warmer, I add more yellow to the mix. If I want it cooler, I add more blue.”

Blaukopf may only use a handful of colors to paint an entire composition. “I can paint practically any scene anywhere with three or four colors,” she says. “On a sharp day, I’ll use alizarin and yellow. But on a foggy day, I’ll use more opaque colors—cerulean blue, yellow ochre and cadmium red. They’re muted—I can’t get those same dark colors, but I don’t want that. I want that foggy, cloudy wintry day.”

The Tools She Carries

Blaukopf isn’t overly particular about her equipment, and aside from a few extra layers, the tools and supplies she uses in January are, by and large, the same she uses in July. This includes a small enamel palette, a sketchbook, water bottles, a few pencils and pens, and a single travel brush. “Some people add vodka to their water in winter to stop it from freezing, but I don’t know about that,” she says. “If I need vodka to keep my paint from freezing, then I think it might be too cold for me to be out there.”

One seasonal difference in her kit is that Blaukopf prefers to use rougher paper during the winter to better produce the texture of snow. Rather than use a sketchpad, she’ll work with a homemade sketchbook made with cut sheets of Arches or Fabriano watercolor paper. 

She usually uses the white of her paper to represent snow, although on a slushy day, she’ll gray it down. To capture the texture of the snow, she uses a drybrush technique, which—in conjunction with her rough paper— produces a textured snow effect.

A Sense of Urgency

To be sure, painting in the cold weather does accelerate the creative process, but for this artist, speed and directness are key to producing a lively and memorable image. “The great thing about painting in the winter is that you learn how to be efficient with both your tools and your painting process, because you want to get it done quickly,” Blaukopf says. “Painting in cold weather teaches you to do the big shapes first, then finish the details quickly. No matter how beautiful the scene is, you have to get it done in an hour, because you simply can’t stay warm any longer.”

For any artist living in a chillier climate who wants to paint on location—and wants to paint more than six months out of the year—painting in the cold becomes non-negotiable. For Blaukopf, this seasonal reality ensures that she has plentiful encounters with the snow-covered landscape—supplying her with one of the most reliable sources of creative fodder.  

---

About the Author

Austin R. Williams is an arts writer and a former editor of Drawing and Artists Magazine.

Meet the Artist