A long time ago aboard a state ferry that may no longer be around someone mounted a display of black-and-white photos of Sitka in winter.
They were outdoor night scenes of wet houses and piles of slush, bicycles under an eave, lit by streetlights and illuminated windows.
The photos were as somber as they were starkly beautiful, conjuring up this time of year that is quiet save for the roll of rain on a tin roof, the slurp of rubber boots in wet snow, the occasional whistle of a tea kettle.
They were also jolting, as Alaska art so rarely captures the grim moods of mid-winter.
Kevin Reeves cleaned offices in Haines, but before leaving here for Seward he painted local landscapes, including downtown in winter. A folk artist, Kevin didn’t try to make this place look pretty. He painted what he saw: Telephone poles and old buildings, flat light, slush and gray skies.
My favorite is of Haines Highway near Pieadad Road, rain falling on snow, car headlights approaching in dim light. It’s a study in grays. Even in a blue-sky scene of Main Street facing west from Third Avenue Reeves managed to capture the leaden feeling a person can get here in February or March when downtown is empty and summer is far away.
Now hung beside my desk, they are remarkable paintings because they portray a brutal truth about this place and about our dominant season, winter: Even when it’s pretty, it can feel desolate and lonesome.
I asked local landscape artist Rob Goldberg why there aren’t more winter scenes in Alaska art. “Nobody likes to look at their walls and see winter,” he said. “They want to look at summer scenes. Winter for most people is to be tolerated. Summer is to be enjoyed.”
Paintings of winter scenes hang mostly in living rooms in Florida, Goldberg said.
I asked if part of the reason might be that capturing the grays and whites of winter isn’t technically more difficult than the blaze of colors you can find here on a sunny, summer day.
“(Winter scenes) just aren’t that dramatic to look at,” Goldberg responded. “It may be dramatic to drive through or to walk through, but people like colors, like ones you see in fireweed and glacial ice.”
Indeed, a recent New York Times story about snow scenes in art noted that the Claude Monet masterpiece “Magpie,” an oil painting of a snowy barnyard, was initially rejected from Paris’ Salon “for being too drab.”
My wife keeps “Winter Afternoon,” a notecard version of a painting by Susan Kraft, showing downtown Juneau from Star Hill after a storm. The painting captured our region’s wet snow sticking to electric lines and tree branches and the lavender light in the shadows as nightfall nears.
What “saves” Kraft’s piece, as it were, is warm light emanating from 100 or so windows in the scene, conjuring up cozy living rooms and families gathered around glowing woodstoves indoors, all smiles.
Similarly, Monet’s “Magpie” is sunlit, its subject and a nearby fence casting a long shadow on the barnyard.
The truth of Southeast Alaska winter is that we often thrill at the mere sight of a shadow. Many of our winter days are lit only by twilight, without contrast. Weeks can pass without a shadow. Reeves had the audacity to capture that weather and the emotions it brings.
Perhaps his art wouldn’t sell, but it fits here. It brings to mind something told me by an adult friend who grew up in Haines. She said that too many sunny days make her start feeling out of sorts.