Snow Camp 2023

I was fortunate to attend Snow Camp with Stapleton Kearns in February this year. This is three days of eating, drinking and painting together in cold weather located in New Hampshire.

In his words, he wants to teach you about the luminescence of snow. Some of our painting landed in days of snow fall but we did get a some clear time with the snow and landscape. Temperatures for this paint out ranged from 3° with the days warming up to a balmy 18°. Out west I find most painters using a system that includes a camera tripod with pochade box others using a French easel. What seems to be the easel of choice in the northeast, Maine, New Hampshire, generally New England is the Gloucester easel. Currently made by Take it Easel.

In our workshop of twelve painters, roughly half were using the Gloucester easels. Now having been around them and seeing Stape painting on them, I can see the draw though for many of our painting locations, this easel wouldn’t fit the sometimes-confined spaces we find ourselves in. However, I did find the easel to be quite stable (when assembled properly) and able to take quite large surfaces. I didn’t mention that we were expected but not required to paint large. 16×20 was the standard size and 11×14 was for the most part minimum for many. Paintings of this size can be tiring, and you soon find out whether you’ve squeezed out enough paint or not. Smaller canvases were used for exercises in the morning. I did fine with my STRADA easel.

My mast system easel easily handles painting boards of 16×20. The day I took this photo it was snowing quite heavily. Eventually filling up my mixing surface and turning everything into a rice like texture. The painting did survive though and it will hopefully be posted soon on this site for sale.