– Jeanne Mackenzie reporting –
In this series, plein air painter and instructor Jeanne Mackenzie takes a look at new paintings by contemporary artists and points out why they succeed as painted images. This week, Barry Koplowitz’s “Frozen Lake New Galena.”
Lead Image: “Frozen Lake New Galena,” by Barry Koplowitz, oil, 9 x 12 in.
What an elegant painting, where less is more. Although a predominately horizontally formatted piece, the varied shapes of the distant trees give you cause to look at it as a hill with multiple layers moving up from the shore. The foreground snow is the perfect foil to lead you in to the interesting and more textural shapes. Notice the change in value and temperature of the frozen lake. It is a horizontal plane, and thus picking up its light source from the cool sky. This gives it that bluish tint and is a wonderful contrast to the warmer, angled plane of the terrain.
