Sketching a Snowy Mountain Range

Snow simplifies shapes...or does it?

Oh, my gosh! How would I paint this? Snow reveals a fantastically complex structure and loads of detail.

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I know it might seem strange, writing about snow when the temperature here is tickling the higher register of the thermometer. (Yesterday, it hit 82°F.) But the other week I went on a sketching trip to the San Juan Mountains in southern Colorado where a fresh spring storm had decorated the cirques and couloirs with plenty of it.

Landscape artists often speak of snow as "simplifying" the landscape. I believe they are talking more about your average, humdrum landscape of bushes and trees, hills and creeks. I agree that a blanket of snow hides the distraction of detail: twigs and pine needles, rock outcrops and odd bumps along the creek, are all smoothed out. Only the big shapes, the ones most important to a composition, are left behind.

But that's not the case with snow on mountains like these. Instead, the snow reveals the landscape in all its fine granularity rather than hiding details and simplifying it. It also reveals structure., which increases one’s understanding of form—which is a different goal from simplifying.