The coastal marshes of the Ipswich area in Massachusetts, with seasonal moods and subtle shifts of light and climate, offered unlimited possibilities and were a perpetual attraction for Kenyon. They could be approached in their panoramic sweep, at their edge, or with eyes directed down at one’s feet. 
The old photograph here shows Kenyon standing beside a stream, sketchbook in hand, looking out over a portion of the marsh. The sense of isolation that is captured in this photograph was clearly what he sought as he bicycled or hiked about the area seeking subjects to paint. It would seem that he was never disappointed.
Winter on the Marshes captures the sense of the damp winter chill of the site. Here he has lowered his vision to deny the uneventful sky, with barely visible splinters of blue sky to focus on the row of shivering trees and their reflections in the foreground pools. A few snow-covered haystacks huddle along the base of the windbreak that demarcates the limit of the marsh, and these distant rounded forms are repeated in the snowy hummocks in the foreground. The white paint that gives shape to these forms was painted last, not only defining the forms but giving a sense of weighty snow lying on and about them.
While the foreground with its pattern of snow and water is the primary focus, the screen of trees that delimits this focus also intrigues one to see beyond it. Without foliage there is little to restrict one’s vision, and as a result, the sense of chill spreads pervasively. What this painting also catches is the sense of things pulling in on themselves as if for protection from the gloomy cold. In so doing, the haystacks, hummocks, and lone house add to the sense of loneliness-a loneliness that was an aspect of the painter’s world that he carefully protected.
HR Kenyon – all rights reserved
Kenyon’s means are very simple and effective, and are the painterly equivalent of some of his drawings, like Field Stones. In both the above painting and this drawing there is a summary notation of shapes showing Kenyon’s ability with paint in the one and line in the other to see through the inherent clutter of his subject to the essential, giving each a sense of presence. In the drawing, its size and subject might well suggest a decorative vignette, but the image has instead a striking breadth and power.
Marshes is limited in its focus to the near foreground in a manner similar to the above drawing; however, in his painted oeuvre, such an investigation as this of what was at his feet was rare. The background is broadly painted to keep it general and recessive while he concentrates on the complications close at hand. Here grasses, some spiky green, others yellow, dry and brittle or matted down, create a carpet surrounding a stream from which the fagged limbs of an unkempt shrub rise in the foreground. The color is not bright, but that seems appropriate for this depiction of one of the marsh streams caught at the leading edge of spring on an overcast day. Kenyon captures a freshness through his descriptive touches and pockets of nascent green and pools of water that hold promise of a coming fullness, even to the contortions of the bare-limbed shrub.
Interestingly, summer, which would seem to be the most amenable season for a plein-air painter, seems to have held within it a sense of fulfillment that did not suit Kenyon’s temper. Spring with its potential was very often a subject, but it was a potential tinged with the melancholy of the preceding season. The bleak, lonely world of winter fascinated him, as did autumn with its blaze of color forecasting demise.
Kenyon’s primary interest continued to be roaming about, no matter the season, with either pencil and pad in hand or painting kit at the ready. The hundreds of drawings Kenyon produced, except for those that are contained in sketchbooks, are without order. Seldom did Kenyon date them or note the location. There are some stylistic changes and notations, however, that allow one to speculatively place them in his career. Although pencil was his favored medium, among his late drawings are some done with charcoal pencil that have a new breadth, Field Stones for example. The rich darks possible with charcoal led him to experiment, and he did a series of studies of a large farmhouse, one of which he carried to a greater degree of finish than the other (catalogue no. 39). It too has a strength and a sense of bigness that belies its size. He used the charcoal to exploit the contrasts of a snow-covered situation with a balance of expressiveness and delicacy. The cubic simplicity of the buildings is tempered by the writhing mass of limbs of the trees that are similar to those found in many of his paintings.
HR Kenyon – all rights reserved
In his painting Ispwich in Snow, done not far from Kenyon’s back door, barren tortured limbs form a linear screen through which the town of Ipswich is seen as it abuts the river. He used the dominant windswept trees to obscure the cubic cluster of the town, forcing one to exercise some effort to make it out. The sense of shifting movement in the limbs and branches of these trees is masterfully achieved, for they are built up from short diagonal strokes that do not remain within crisp limits. Here and there he dragged his dry brush out from the limbs into the wet paint of the warm white sky or the cooler blue of the house roofs, giving a sense of delicate twigs in movement and thereby reduced to a visual fuzz.
This is one of a number of paintings Kenyon executed near his home in the winter, in which the mix of nature and urban life is very evident. Obviously, he did not venture far from home in painting these, but in all of them there is a sense of desertion. When Kenyon first painted at Ipswich, buildings and boats were very much in evidence as he went through his structuralist phase, but here in his later Ipswich in Snow there is a shivering melancholy about it. If the weather kept him close to home, it was keeping everyone else inside, which is what he clearly preferred.