When ice and snow and freezing temperatures are too much, hibernation is preferable!

[Morris] Graves has lived mostly in remote rural areas, and uses the elements of nature as his subjects. Animals abound in his paintings and birds appear with special frequency, but towards a metaphorical rather than descriptive end. Shunning contact with contemporary industrial life, Graves in the 1960s painted abstractions based on the noises of the machine age with a degree of understanding possible only to one who cherishes quiet.

Source: Virginia M. Mecklenburg. Modern American Realism: The Sara Roby Foundation Collection. (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press for the National Museum of American Art, 1987).

Pictured: Morris Graves (born 1910), Hibernation,1954, watercolor, 18 3/16 x 26 3/8 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of the Sara Roby Foundation..