This painting captures the stark solitude and endurance of life in Green Bay, Wisconsin. Born a Southerner, the winters I spent there were isolating and bitterly cold. Some say winter feels less like a season and more like an occupation. The structure at the center, a house barely etched into the frozen landscape, symbolizes resilience. It stands muted and worn, swallowed by snow and sky, yet still intact — a quiet defiance against the long, relentless cold.
In Green Bay, snow often arrives before the jack-o’-lanterns and can lingers past the bloom of early spring. Blizzards come not as surprises to natives but as part of the rhythm of life. They were always a surprise to me. With this piece, I sought to evoke the texture of that cold dance, the way snow muffles sound, how the sky can be the same color as the ground, and how time stretches thin in months of gray, while the snow piles up over your mailbox, your neighbor has to teach the Georgia Peach how to shovel a driveway, and your kids don’t understand why they don’t get snow days anymore. (School is more likely canceled due to extreme cold, not snow!!)
The palette is restrained, icy blues and sooty grays layered and scraped, much like the view outside a frosted window. This is not to romanticize winter, but a offers home as anchor in the heavy and still storm.
