Hello everyone! I am super excited to be able to share with you my latest collection. It is a mixture of abstract paintings and impressionist flowers that I just couldn’t let go of in Autumn. Winter has always been a special time for me. It has been a time of reflection and deep creativity as we move into the darker half of the year. There is something about the longer nights and darker days that allows my creativity to deepen and grow. But as the darkness deepens, we also move back towards the light as the Winter solstice happens. These ideas were brimming at the forefront of my abstracts this year. The darkness moving towards the light was a focus in these pieces as I moved blacks, dark greys with titanium whites and golds.
“Winters Lights” “Winter’s Flower” “Winter Solstice”
Winter on the West Coast here is so different from how the rest of Canada experiences winter. We rarely get snow, rather our days are filled with a looming grey and a lot of rain. While this rain keeps our land green, it can be a change emotionally to hold space here in the Winter. My way of coping has been to focus on the beauty that there is in the changes of the seasons. That includes the bare trees, mud-filled “grassy” areas, the fallen leaves, the decay. And when that is exhausted I look for the glimpses of the coming light as I have in these abstracts.
“Winter’s Tree” “Autumn Rose I” “Winter’s Rose I”
After the abstracts I felt compelled to move on to more concrete images and once again that meant more flora in my life. I saw the most unusually coloured tree in an image from another part of the world I began to imagine it as a “true” winter tree and what that would look like here against our West Coast skies. And of course there were still lingering Roses in peoples gardens (if you could imagine) so I retraced my steps back to Autumn and created some Autumn Roses. Even in November they held most of their colour with only some of their petals falling off and others turning yellow. And then what would all of this imagining be without a dreamy Red rose in Snow. Last year we had a tremendous (for the Coast) amount of snow and while fears that there would be a repeat this year ended up not materialising I couldn’t help but wonder what a vibrant red rose would look like in a dreamy blanket of snow.
Don’t worry, I still have a lot more Roses and botanical lushness planned for my Spring collection!
Happy Solstice and Happy Holidays everyone! May your Winter be merry and bright.
Melissa Critchlow
