Winter

Winter was the first painting Peter Blume made in a cycle of the four seasons (1964–1989). It originated in a drawing he made off the coast of Sicily of, as he put it, “a magnificent cliff that came right up out of the sea.” This gradually morphed into a windswept snowscape, a scene of survival among birds in winter. Blume was a dedicated birdwatcher and drew the birds during many hours of feeding and observing them in his backyard. The memory of that original sketch from the warm Mediterranean Sea reverberates in the sense of churning among the snowdrifts that swell in the distance.