Whether it is a pristine blanket of just-fallen fine powder or the gray and gritty remains after a few days of salt, sand, and dirt, snow is a reality of winter with strong visual qualities.
Even if your eyes are tired of seeing the white stuff here in mid-February, the Drawing Room's "Snow Day" exhibition in East Hampton is worth a visit to reconnect to the scientific and aesthetic wonder of the snowflake.
Wilson A. Bentley's turn-of-the-20th-century photographic studies of snowflakes offer an intriguing introduction on the entry wall. The crystalline structures are breathtakingly complex and mesmerizing. They offer much to think about in terms of nature's infinite variety as well as what remains the same in each one, the hexagonal underpinnings.
Bentley was an amateur meteorologist who came up with his unique way of documenting these structures in 1885 using a feather, a microscope, and a large-format camera out in the Vermont elements so that the flakes wouldn't melt before he captured them. One of the images on view was published in a piece Bentley contributed to the Annual Summary of the Monthly Weather Review during the winter of 1901 to 1902.
It would be easy to go on and on about these achievements, how the nine images look as crisp as the day they were taken, how some resemble cathedral rose windows and how all seem to echo patterns seen elsewhere in nature. Yet there is much more to appreciate and enjoy here in the way painters took as their inspiration mass accumulations of these molecules in piles and drifts at the beach or on mountains.
Some scenes are local, such as Jane Freilicher's multiple snow seascapes. Others look local but were painted elsewhere. Still others, such as a pastel by Jennifer Bartlett, a part-time resident of Amagansett, were inspired by mountains in far-off locations like Sun Valley in Idaho. Lois Dodd, once married to the East Hampton artist Bill King, offers paintings of the Delaware Water Gap and a snow-blanketed cove.
Fairfield Porter's view seems to be of his own Southampton backyard. When the snow is not depicted at the beach, it is, like his, in paintings featuring skeletal trees awash and highlighted in white. Those forms appear in many of the works here and remind us how influential and popular that structure was in early modernism.
Kathryn Lynch's more contemporary views are abstract but recognizably naturalistic. They are enticing but hard to enter, and feel at some remove. These are captured window scenes, not from out in the environment, if these emanations exist at all in real life.
Included are some jewels by Charles Burchfield, Jack Bush, Aubrey Levinthal, and Hector Leonardi, all proving that there are many ways to depict or refer to snow. Everything is thoughtfully installed to heighten the appreciation. With so much white in the room, even subtle color contributes a visual pop.
To winter-weary viewers, the works could seem like more of the same. But the show is also a reminder of the beauty and spectacle of winter in ways that prompt curiosity and delight, maybe enough to get us to spring.
The exhibition remains on view through Feb. 27.
