Crystal Snowscape

Part of David Guinn’s Seasons series, the artist took advantage of two walls to create a scene with two different street perspectives. The idea for snowscape came from a Pieter Breughel (1525-69, Flemish) painting entitled Hunters in the Snow. The soft, organic shapes of the trees, based on the trees in the Breughel painting, were added to balance the hard geometry of the rest of the composition.

Although Guinn plans the basic structure of murals ahead of time, he likes to invent on the wall, saving decisions about the exact shape and color of his faceted squares until he is actually painting them to absorb the neighborhood colors. Guinn added the skier because he felt the composition needed an emotional center. Guinn lightened and warmed the colors at the end of the central street in response to the building colors nearby (orange and yellow).