I assumed that my first winter in Montreal would be covered in snow. Prior to my move here this October, I obsessed with preparations for winter: I stocked up on puffy coats, heavy-duty boots, strap-on cleats for icy days...

Friends, it is now December and this is the weather here:

Rain?!

Perhaps this explains what happened when I visited the major temporary exhibition at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.

The exhibition, Colours of Jazz, focuses on Montreal in the 1920s by shedding light on the Beaver Hall Group, an association of some twenty artists and their colleagues who offered "one of the most original expressions of pictorial modernism" in Canada. The artworks are incredibly beautiful, especially the striking and intelligent portraits of women.

But all I could focus on was the snow.

This being a group of artists in Montreal, many of the landscapes in the paintings were covered in snow. I was enthralled with all the wintery scenes. I realized that these paintings were helping me to celebrate the season and get in a wintery mood. Hailing from Michigan, snow is an important part of the holidays. So I immersed myself in these representations of winter, imagining jazzy Christmas carols in my head.

(Might I suggest listening to some real jazzy Christmas carols as you read the rest of this post?)

I went on a snow photo safari (a visit to a museum focusing on details found in artworks around various themes, with the aim of looking at everything differently). I imagined my new city covered in a wintery blanket of snow.

Snow, as found in the exhibition Colours of Jazz in the MMFA:

Colours of Jazz, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Snow

Colours of Jazz at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (until January 31, 2016)

Address: 1380 rue Sherbrooke Ouest, Montréal ∣ Métro: Station Peel or Station Guy-Concordia (Green Line) ∣ Opening hours: Tuesday to Sunday from 10am to 5pm, major exhibition open until 9pm on Wednesday