Dead End, pastel on prepared board, 8 x 12 © Bernadette E. Kazmarski

Stark Winter Sun on a “Dead End” Street

Dead End, pastel on prepared board, 8 x 12 © Bernadette E. Kazmarski

Dead End, pastel on prepared board, 8 x 12 © Bernadette E. Kazmarski

I love snowy winter scenes, blue morning shadows or brilliant sunsets, snowfall, surprise bits of color. Winter has long been my biggest inspiration for landscape painting.

And I also love a row of houses in the sun without snow, the bare trees, the long shadows, and this dead end street has so many familiar elements. The street light, the telephone pole and lines, the bare tree and the hill beyond, the flag, all are markers of a place I’d recognize and probably see in small towns anywhere. The houses have been there well over a century, and being at the top of a creek bank have flooded several times, seen lots of people moving through, kids I went to school with, friends of my parents who grew up there long ago. Now in brilliant winter sun the dead end houses stand like old friends sitting together to watch the sunset with their blank window eyes that have seen much of life, the long shadows of the houses and buildings across the street reaching to touch them as the sun drops toward the horizon.

This scene caught my eye, and the story developed, on winter afternoons for years as I drove past, slowing down to approach a traffic light. One year I decided what I really wanted was to paint it, snapped a quick photo, and drove on.

I painted this in pastel on a masonite board to which I added one or another pastel ground, and used mostly my softest pastels which work best on surfaces like this. The original is framed in a 1-1/2″ solid wood antique silver frame with no mat. Digital, giclee and canvas prints are available.

I participated in Leslie Saeta’s annual “30 in 30” painting challenge in January 2017. This was my painting for day 4.

Read my wrap-up of all my paintings from this painting challenge.

See all the art from this and other painting challenges on Creative Challenges.

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Click here to purchase Dead End.

More art like this

Visit my My Home Town gallery for more paintings of small town streets and scenes.

Visit my Landscape Artwork and Waterscape Artwork galleries for local landscapes where a mix of streets and houses sometimes appear.

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