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A frosty forest scene that looks like it was painted with frosting.
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“Someone once said that what makes these kind of paintings great is you could eat them. It looks like icing,” said Jeff Willmore, the London painter behind Winter Woods, a 17.8 by 17.8 centimetre oil painting on panel that was selected for the front page of this year’s Christmas Eve print edition of The London Free Press – a long-running annual tradition for the newspaper.
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Willmore was staying with friends at their cottage in eastern Ontario in 2011 and was inspired by the woods he saw through the window. He grabbed his oil paint, went outside and got to work.
He chose to use a palette knife, not brushes, to capture the scene.
“I purposely reach for the palette knives to dumb myself down, to make it harder,” said Willmore, who finished the painting in about an hour outdoors.
“It’s a bit clumsier, you can’t get fine details. It’s more challenging, but the painting reveals itself as a more honest effort.”
Oil paints almost have a mind of their own, said Willmore, a painter for more than 40 years. Dabs of the thick, slow-drying paint can be easily moved around and blended with others, using the palette knife as a mini-trowl, he said.
“It’s creates an immediacy and roughness that keeps the painting’s sketch-like quality. It’s not a polished, realism kind of look. It’s more of an impression of the landscape.”
While pops of colour can be hard to come by in a typical winter landscape, Willmore didn’t let it stop him. The painting has bright hits of blue, pink and yellow accenting the white and neutral forestscape.
“I try to be more inventive with my colour than what nature presents me with,” Willmore said. “I look for a hint of colour, and exaggerate it.”
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