Winter Landscape Art –Prints at Imagekind
Winter landscape art is a part of the overarching genre of landscape art that became
popular in Europe during the early fifteenth century. What sets winter landscape
art aside is the ever present element of the winter season. When viewing such art,
one might be treated to a scene of soaring mountain tops, their peaks glistening
and the snow on top glinting in the weak sunlight of winter. There might also be
depicted a rather forgotten looking barn in the distance, its roof covered with
snowdrifts and its creaking doors slightly open as if to welcome the bundled up
sledders on the faraway hill to come in for warmth.
While almost always showing scenes filled with snow or racked with a winter storm,
winter
landscape art is
very versatile in the emotions that it can leave a viewer with. One might feel a
strong sense of solitude while being drawn into a sparse and forlorn forest in which
all of the thin trees have lost their greenery. Where thriving leaves have once
been, a white blanket of cold, smothering snow now resides. A pack of rangy wolves,
their winter coats deflecting the worst of the cold, pad noiselessly through the
stillness of the woods, leaving only their tracks in the thick snow. One can imagine
their lonely howls piercing the silence as they hunt for whatever food they might
find hidden in the snowbanks. The photographer, Ansel Adams, has captured moments
of solemn and still forests enduring in the middle of winter and turned them into
beautiful winter landscape art. The snow that he captures in his pictures also creates
beautiful shadows along the ground and creates strong emotion the viewer.
A winter landscape artist can also convey a sense of winter warmth, comfort and
happiness through their work. Such winter landscape art may show quaint cottages
nestled between glittering snowbanks and lit up with warm light from within. Thomas
Kinkade, a painter who often works in winter landscape art and is also sometimes
termed “the painter of light”, uses a welcoming light from with houses and cottages
to create a sense of comfort and warmth. Sometimes, one might see a scene of winter
ice skaters on a small, local ice skating rink who, one can imagine, will later
join family and friends inside one of the well-lit homes with smoke curling invitingly
from their chimneys with the promise of a comfortable, warm room.
Whether depicting people playing in the snow, making snow angels or sledding down
a snowy hill, or showing majestic snow-covered mountain tops with hungry wolves
roaming the blanketed forests, winter landscape art is an important part of all
art. The frozen rivers and lakes, the snowed-in valleys carefully juxtaposed with
a gray sky filled with heavy winter snow clouds, all of these things are important
to capture as they are part of life every year for many people.