Sketches of Winter Revisited

Lines of Defence

Long Shadow

Inky Shadows

Sketches of Winter may be my most distinctive portfolio. When it was launched in 2007, I’d seen nothing like it. Then a couple of years later I saw similar images in Lenswork magazine. Damn, I thought, I did it first. I had a successful show of the series at Open Shutter Gallery of Photography in Durango Colorado in 2009 and one at the Cache Gallery in Fort Collins in 2010. Margi Dudley of Open Shutter thought the series was unique and told me that she knew the images were hard to create. They did in fact require careful timing, right after heavy snow, and laborious post processing to render truly black and white images. And the white had to be nearly but not quite paper white.

Snow Fence

Duet

Harbinger

Recently the Sketches of Winter series re-entered my internal conversation. That’s partly because it’s, well, winter and because I just published the article Wonderland in Shadow and Light Magazine. I sorted through dozens of winter images throughout December and posted many on my blog before selecting the most representative ones for Wonderland. And each of the four Wonderland posts in December included at least one Sketch of Winter.  

As I enjoyed a far-ranging end of the year wrap-up with Rob Nightingale at his Wilder Nightingale Gallery, our thoughts turned to the winter doldrums in this poor snow year in Taos. We brainstormed ways to kindle a mid-winter spark. First, I tossed out the idea of a show of older photographs at a deep discount. The idea stunk. So I took my foot out of my mouth and said, “Wait a minute! I have a better idea. Let’s do a Sketches of Winter show. I know you’ve hung a few from the series but I’m not sure we ever did a full-fledged show.” Rob was excited by the concept and asked, “Are they already framed? I said that they were. He replied, “Let’s do it.” So, we’re going to mount a short Sketches of Winter show from February 17 through February 25.