A peculiar fascination with the color of snow

First, the most recent Sebbie painting, "Sebbie and the Tortoise". That's a map of the Galapagos in the background (I had fun breaking out my school watercolor paints to make an "antiqued" map) and the inscription on the map reads: "HC SVNT DRACONES"--Latin shorthand for "here be dragons". It's an inscription found on at least one ancient map, but the myths have built up around that. I included it more as a testament to human imagination and curiosity than as an belief that dragons live off the cost of the Galapagos--we went and explored those places anyway, even though the maps warned of dragons! Or perhaps we went looking for dragons? Either way, I'm pretty sure those are some of our redeeming qualities as humans. 

I've been working on other things in the studio: portraits, which are currently at a thankless phase and so aren't being publicly aired just yet, and a series of snow shadow paintings. I've always had a peculiar fascination with the color of snow in shadow, but never really tried painting it. We've had, and I understand the whole world has had to hear about it, a lot of snow in Massachusetts this winter, and perhaps that's what finally got to me: I've been trying to paint snow shadows. They're difficult to capture; the color blue is elusive (even photographs of the paintings, I discovered--they're all wrong, but as best as I could get). I seem to be stalking a particular tree, or at least, I keep coming back to it--it's a beech tree, a favorite of mine, but I'm not sure it that's what keeps bringing me back to it. At any rate, I'm sharing a few snow study/paintings here, despite the terrible photographs. I'm looking forward to spring, now, though, and painting flowers again.