Love of Winter 1914

George Bellows made this painting, Love of Winter, with oil on canvas, and right away, you can see he's having a lot of fun with the paint itself. It's all about the process of laying down these brushstrokes, thick and juicy, to create a scene bursting with life. Check out how Bellows uses short, choppy strokes to build up the snowy landscape, there's a real physicality to the way he applies the paint, you can almost feel the cold, crisp air and the crunch of snow underfoot. And that hazy light, it's like he's captured a fleeting moment, a memory of a perfect winter day. I love the variety of marks he uses, they’re almost like musical notes forming a melody, and if you look closely at the figures in the foreground, you can see how he uses color and brushwork to give them weight and presence. Bellows's work reminds me a lot of other painters like the Canadian artist David Milne, who was working at the same time. Like Bellows, Milne embraced the materiality of paint and the endless possibilities of color, and neither were afraid to leave things a little unresolved, reminding us that art is a conversation, not a lecture.