A Studio Painting from plein air paintings

Being primarily a plein air painter, I don’t do many studio paintings. One of the reasons is that I have limited time to devote to my passion. There use to be a time when I could go out and paint no matter what time of year it was. Now its come to the point where I can’t tolerate the cold anymore. I guess age is creeping in. Because of this, I find that I’m not painting outdoors during the winter months, so I set a goal to start to develop studio paintings from my plein air work. My goal is to use the plein air paints that I completed, and develop a more finished type of painting.

St. Paul’s in Garden City, NY is one of my frequent painting subjects. It is a historic building in Garden City, that was a boys school in its hey day. Unfortunately now it sits empty and the community is divided on what to do with the building.

Over the years I’ve done many paintings of St. Paul’s. However I never did the building after it snowed, so I decided to created a snow painting. The following are the plein air paintings I used as reference for the completed studio painting:

St. Paul’s Winter oil on linen 12" x 18" by Noel Darvie

St. Paul’s oil on linen 14" x 18" by Noel Darvie

St. Paul’s Clock Tower oil on linen 16" x 12" by Noel Darvie


St. Paul’s Summer oil on linen 14" x 18" by Noel Darvie

Below is the finished painting. It was a good exercise because it forced me to be creative and imagine what the scene would be in the snow.

St. Paul’s Winter # 2 oil on linen 14" x 18" by Noel Darvie