Wyoming Winter. 32 x 48.

1. In spite of the fact that I would study it to the point of
temporarily blinding myself, I used to have the very devil of a time
describing a shape when I tried to paint snow. At a loss, I sought
help from two redoubtable snow painters, Robert Lougheed and John
Clymer. They had the kindness to point out to me something that was
obvious in their painting but difficult to see in nature and
absolutely beyond Kodachrome, namely, that snow lying flat on the
ground and not on edge to the sun is not "ey-squinty" white. It is
just off-white to gray, and only at the edges of footprints or ends of
roofs—places where the sun strikes at right angles—should the snow
be painted white. I went home with that nugget and ran amok. I could
describe every hollow, bulge or fold of a landscape under feet of
snow! I remembered a scene from my flying days, and I constructed
this aerial landscape. I had wanted to paint it for years; I just
never knew how.
2. Quote from Profiles film:
What the ability to
move about in the air has done to painting landscape is to give people
the same kind of intimate real notion of what they are painting that
heretofore was limited to people painting figures, interiors, or
architectural scenes. It lets us paint larger objects with a
convincing reality because we understand them convincingly. We've
flown all over them. We've seen them in different lights. The air
age has changed landscape painting considerably.

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