Landscapes

On ‘Winter Landscapes'

This exhibition is rooted in 'up north', which for many years was how my family said ‘going home’. Growing up ‘up north’, along the highway, is how I define myself, because it never really left me - the two lane blacktop, going to somewhere, coming back from somewhere, moving from one town, then to another, maybe back again. Maybe that’s too simple, but all these years later, my time along that highway is condensed, a few years here, a few there, broken only by the long strips of fields against forest that connected these dots of towns. I loved, and still do love watching the forest play by as I watch from the car window - the movement of the treeline has a certain visual cadence that lulls one into an almost hypnotic state…well, it did for me, though it was always me who did the moving, peddling fast when I was young, or in a car, young and older. I went by these scenes often, and then, sometimes I would go into them.

The forest of my childhood was a safe place for me. I wonder now at how I would walk, often on my own, crossing a field or a meadow, the railroad tracks, and step into the quiet of the trees. For me it was stepping into another world, unecumbered by the weight of ’things adult’. I loved the quiet of the woods and how I was unafraid. I didn’t go too far, but far enough to be alone, completely alone. I would make myself small and squeak along rabbit trails. I would spend time there playing some kind of house. I loved how the pine needles carpeted the forest. I loved the canopy above me. I loved the nature that was hidden there. The place had presence. For me the trees were an escape from what was the normal chaos that was my early childhood. I went there when I needed to get away, alone, and then too with my siblings, to play.

In the wintertime I kept closer to home - it was cold and I thought the woods, blanketed in snow so beautiful and deep, asleep, waited for Spring to come...and for me. I like that in these paintings the snow covers any evidence of human activity, blanketing the breach of space that leads up to the treeline. The snow, a barrier, somehow amplifies the idea that power lies up there in the trees, and holds it safe. 

I rode my bike past these scenes many times, hands free, or in an already vintage car, going fast. I never tire of the forest, the woods, the trees, and in painting them I like to think I capture a bit of who I was back then. The wild and raw that Mother Nature was for the likes of Milne, and Thompson, and Harris, instead gifted me something serene, a calm place, seemingly suspended in time. Magic.

Up North, my up north, is a place where, in the trees I could find peace for myself, as I do now in the painting of them.

Holly Farrell, February 2025