Carol L. Douglas, Author at Carol L. Douglas

December 14, 2022

Self-doubt is a vicious cycle

Tin Foil Hat, *6X8, oil on archival canvasboard, $435.*

I have three students whom I’ll call A, B and C.

A and B are both very accomplished. C is earlier in the cycle but has good instincts and is working very hard to close the gap. It’s paying off.

I got a sad text from C that read in part, “I am really not at the level of the others in our class.”

C is a perfectionist, and that occludes her vision. (That’s, sadly, a common problem among painters who were very successful in their first careers.) C can’t see how energetic her brushwork is, how controlled her color is, or how beautifully she composes. All she sees are deficiencies.

“Are you kidding?” I responded. “A and B are both painting at a professional level, but the rest of the class is on the same level as you.” I didn’t say that to make her feel better, but because it’s true.

Possum, *6X8, oil on archival canvasboard, $435.*

Shortly thereafter, I got an email from B. “A is killing me,” she lamented. “I so want to paint like her. Wow, is she good.”

I haven’t heard from A yet, but I wouldn’t be surprised if she emailed me to tell me how much she wished she could paint like someone else.

I love painting with Eric Jacobsen and Ken DeWaard, but there are days when I want to throw my brushes in the harbor when we’re done. Eric’s brushwork is lyrical; Ken’s drafting is exquisite. I peek at their work and see only my own deficiencies in comparison.

I was once at an event where I felt totally outclassed. I know it makes no rational sense, but I’d convinced myself I’d somehow gotten in by mistake. “I feel like I’m surrounded by the big boys,” I whined at Eric.

“You are one of ‘the big boys,’” he told me. “You’re here because they chose you, and they chose you because they want you.” From that moment I was able to relax and do my job properly. Insecurity, anxiety, and envy were robbing me of my confidence. Without that, what could I possibly achieve that was fluid, relaxed and compelling?

Pull up your Big Girl Panties, *6X8, oil on archival canvasboard, $435.*

Envy is hard work’s evil twin

I’m not telling you this because I want to add ‘envy’ to your reasons to beat yourself up. We all feel envious at times. I bet some sense of inferiority stretches back from painter to painter all the way to the anonymous artist who first chalked on a cave wall.

“Ambitious men are more envious than those who are not,” Aristotle wrote in his Rhetoric, about 2400 years ago. “Indeed, generally, those who aim at a reputation for anything are envious on that particular point.” To excel, you must really want success, and envy is hard work’s evil twin.

Envy is an emotion, so by definition it’s irrational. That doesn’t mean we must be slaves to it. Eric dispelled my terrible state of mind with a few well-chosen words. I’ve been able to repeat them to myself as needed, and so can you.

Hiking, *6X8, oil on archival canvasboard, $435.*

Why do we deflect praise and take criticism to heart?

One day a fellow dog-walker said to me, “You look fabulous. You’ve really lost a lot of weight.”

“Oh, it’s just my leggings,” I said.

“Wrong answer,” she laughed. “Just say ‘thank you.’”

We deflect praise even when it’s true, but we take criticism to heart despite it being absurd. That’s especially true when it’s our jaundiced, ornery liar of a self who’s doing the speaking. Painting is uniquely and painfully personal. To excel, we must ignore those whispers of comparison and self-doubt. It’s really as simple as catching yourself in the self-doubt cycle and saying, “STFU, Self!”

December 12, 2022

Monday Morning Art School: Simplify shapes

Foghorn Symphony, *Carol L. Douglas, 30x40, private collection.*

A reader sent me photos of Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona. “How do you make sense of a scene like this to paint?” he asked.

I’d sit down on a rock and draw, until the focal points and the composition became clear organically. This is not a magic trick; it’s harnessing my subconscious mind in the service of what I know rationally about composition. We draw what we’re interested in, and then draw more of what we’re interested in. It may take several pages in our sketchbook but if we’re relaxed and patient, a composition will emerge.

*One of the Petrified Forest photos my reader sent. I couldn't paint from this without drawing from life first.*

A rock is a rock is a rock, right?

How different are these petrified trees from the tumble and scree of Maine’s coast? In detail, they’re significantly different—more on that later. But in overall plan, they’re the same idea.

Above is a painting I did of Cape Elizabeth called Foghorn Symphony. Trundy Point is a long spit of rock that juts out into the Atlantic Ocean.

My sketch of Trundy Point. It doesn't need to be complicated; it's a map, not a masterpiece.

I photographed my sketch as well. This drawing moved Ken DeWaard to accuse me of doing Paint-by-Numbers. In a way he was right, because I was numbering the values from one (sky) to four (deep shadow). The drawing is vastly simplified, of course. Its purpose was to freeze the early-morning light so I could finish this vast 30X40 canvas in the field over two long days. By afternoon, the light is completely reversed, but I had it locked in my mind.

In addition, my drawing allowed me to check my composition before I committed myself.

You’ll get lost if you don’t have a broad plan

My sketchbook sat at my feet after I transferred it to my canvas in broad brushstrokes. I referred to it often.

I painted in one section of rocks before I started on the next. I don’t always work like this, but it’s a good way to not get muddled in a complicated scene. The sections didn’t have their final modeling, but there was enough detail there so I could come back and fill in the light at the end.

I was sacrificing the first axiom of oil painting (darks to lights) in the service of the second (big shapes to small shapes). This only worked because I had a plan in writing, in my sketchbook, where I could easily refer to it. You can edit a grisaille to your heart’s content, but erasing and revising with colors is a sure-fire recipe for mud.

You can’t break the rules until you know them

I almost always work with an overall grisaille, but I broke that rule in this case. Fog and light are transient, and I wanted to capture them as fast as possible.

Yes, you can break rules, but it helps if you have a solid grasp on them first. I could only fiddle with the grisaille because I’ve internalized value structure by having done hundreds of them.

Falling Tide, 11X14, Carol Douglas, $1087 framed.

Take time to just look

A tumble of rocks in Arizona is only the same as one in Maine in broad concept. In detail, they’re very different. There are painters who come to Maine and render the rocks as rounded brown lumps, because that’s how rocks in the Midwest look. I’m sure there are Maine painters who go to Sedona and render the red rocks there like granite.

For heaven’s sake, look before you pick up your brush. The cleavage, the color, and the erosion patterns are unique in each rock formation. An hour spent sketching will save you hours of bad painting.

December 9, 2022December 9, 2022

The little things in life

Stuffed animal in a bowl, with Saran Wrap. 6X8, oil on archival canvasboard, $435.

Most artists will tell you they love working big. We love making statement pieces that grab all eyes when people enter the room. These feel ‘important.’ The bigger you go, the easier it is to keep the brushwork free. Yet, practically speaking, we paint many smaller pieces.

I’ve been updating my website by adding still lives from a 6x8 show I did many years ago. My kids were of an age to chase the moment’s crazes, like Baby Monkey Riding on a Pig. Whatever idiotic thing they chattered about, I painted.

Some are dated, like the woman who fell into the fountain texting. The shoes could pass, but the cell phone is so 2011. In some cases, I can’t even remember the meme. What prompted me to paint a stuffed animal in a bowl, wrapped in plastic?

Falling into a Fountain While Texting, *6X8, oil on archival canvasboard, $435.*

The power of small paintings

Today I almost never paint this small. I’m not alone in that; it’s tough to love a tiny canvas. But by always going bigger, we ignore the power of small paintings. How many times are we in a museum and gallery and grabbed by a little gem in a corner? A small painting, artfully placed, can have the same impact as a monumental painting above the mantel.

Crista Pisano has made a career of painting jewel-like plein air miniatures, which is practical as well as aesthetically-pleasing. She doesn’t have to carry big, bulky frames to events.

From the consumer’s side, small paintings are a practical way to ease into art-buying. They seldom run more than a few hundred dollars.

Back It Up, *6X8, oil on archival canvasboard, $435.*

Why don’t painters tell more jokes in their work?

Painting can take itself way too seriously. I was reminded of this recently as I flipped through one of my sketchbooks with another small being—my grandson Jake. At eight, he’s unimpressed that I can model rocks and sea accurately. What he’s interested in is Action! Humor! Dragons!

“What have you painted recently that tells a story?” I asked myself. Well, Ravening Wolves, and In Control (Grace and her Unicorn). But for the last decade or so, it’s been mostly straight-up landscape with the occasional figure or portrait commission thrown in. Recently, as I’ve written, I’ve realized this isn’t enough.

Baby Monkey Riding on a Pig, oil on archival canvasboard, $435.

I’ll never be another Francisco Goya (whose Disasters of War should be required viewing for every voter) or Käthe Kollwitz. I’ve been spared firsthand experience with war, thank God. As a result, I’m simply not that deep, or that dark.

I’m sort of the Bertie Wooster of oil painting—trivial, amiable, wooly-headed, and somehow always bobbing along into events that are bigger than me. That realization is what got me thinking about these old still lives. There’s something about the triviality of modern internet culture being taken as seriously as a portrait of the president that still makes me laugh.

Small paintings are a place to explore our odd ideas. I need more of that.

December 7, 2022December 7, 2022

What everyone knows

Toy Reindeer with double rainbow, *oil on archival canvasboard, 6X8, $435 framed.*

At the end of her senior year in high school, my young painting student told me that she wanted to go to college. “But you apply to colleges at the end of your junior year,” I exclaimed. She didn’t know. Somehow, she missed “what everyone knows.”

I watched this play out again this week as my goddaughter’s family sold the restaurant they’ve owned and run for decades. They don’t speak much English, and they have no experience selling real estate. It’s been painful.

Santa Claus, *6X8, oil on archival canvasboard, $435 framed.*

Order of operations

In painting, these “everyone knows” assumptions most often appear in the way paint is applied. There are specific protocols for applying watercolor and oil that have remained unchanged for centuries. Yes, there are exceptions, and people who dabble with other techniques.

Most recently that’s been with alkyd media challenging the ‘fat over lean’ rule in oils. In general, those experiments haven’t gone well. Let the horrible condition of Albert Pinkham Ryder and Ralph Blakelock paintings be a cautionary lesson.

Learning these basic protocols makes painting faster, easier and less fraught, but too many students pick them up by osmosis. That’s why a short course in basic painting technique, such as that taught by my pal Bobbi Heath, is so helpful. The true beginner can’t muck around thinking about more complex questions of composition or color temperature when he can’t even get the paint down on the canvas without making mush.

Toy Monkey and Candy, *oil on archival canvasboard, $435 framed.*

Our own bad assumptions

It’s hunting season here. I wouldn’t stake my life on a hunter’s judgment, so I advertise my presence by wearing blaze orange when I’m in the woods. (If I’m shot, that hunter is also going to have to explain why he thought a deer was singing “I want a hippopotamus for Christmas.”)

“No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public,” H.L. Mencken may or may not have said. That’s rude, but substitute ‘attention’ for ‘intelligence’ and you get to the nub of the matter. We assume others know all about our art. That’s because we’re all far more important to ourselves than we are to the general public. Most of the time, other people are not thinking about us.

If you want people to see and interact with your ideas, you must model Thomas Edison and constantly, repeatedly, get your stuff out there for them to see. You must wear blaze orange in the public arena.

Most artists shy away from that, but what’s the point of communicating through painting if nobody is looking at what you’ve made?

Happy New Year, *6X8, oil on archival canvasboard, $435 framed.*

A reminder

I hope you are cheerfully plugging away with your holiday shopping. Here’s a reminder about my holiday gift guides:

Holiday Gifts for the Budding Artist (including kids)

Holiday Gifts for Serious Artists (including you)

Have yourself a merry little workshop—because selected workshops are on sale this month, and won’t be after January 1.

And, of course, paintings are a wonderful surprise for the special person on your list. Quality original art is one of the few gifts that doesn’t depreciate no matter how much you enjoy it.

December 5, 2022December 5, 2022

Monday Morning Art School: the artist’s website

Drying Sails, *9X12, oil on canvasboard, $869 framed.*

Do I need a website?

“Do I need a website? I already have a Facebook page and Instagram.” That’s a common inquiry I get from emerging artists.

I’m the last person to dis the Metaverse—I use it daily. But it has its limits, starting with fact that you don’t own it. If you’ve ever run afoul of FB’s esoteric speech algorithms, you’ll understand its power to shut you down. I once earned a 30-day slowdown with a bit of hyperbole. It had a devastating effect on clicks. It took much longer than my period of detention to recover, because it pushed my blog way down in their display algorithm.

Furthermore, the Metaverse is fleeting. The half-life of a social media post is the amount of time it takes for a post to receive half of its total engagement. FB ranks near the bottom, at 60 minutes, only slightly besting Twitter. That’s fine if you’re advertising t-shirts, but fine art requires intellectual engagement.

Instagram is better, with almost a full day of engagement, but it suffers the limitation of no live links. That means people will buy your painting on IG or not at all. Despite my decent track record of online sales, I’ve never sold a painting through IG, so I use it to create background noise, nothing more.

FB and IG don’t come up on Google search nearly as often as items posted on websites. That means people simply can’t find you if that’s all you’re doing.

Ever-changing Camden Harbor, *oil on canvas, $3,188.00*

A website today functions almost like a Yellow Pages listing did a generation ago—it not only makes you findable, it denotes a level of reliability to users. Its content is also as static or changeable as you want. We all ‘know’ that we’re supposed to constantly change up content to feed the Google maw, but buyers also want to be able to see your catalogue. Importantly, so too do jurors and gallerists.

Sunset Sail, *14X18, oil on linen, $1594 framed.*

What’s the best host for my website?

That’s a much more difficult question for me to answer, because it depends on your skill level and your interest in managing your own marketing. FASO Fine Artist Websites and Fine Art America are good ‘plug and play’ marketing tools. My friend Poppy Balser has had a FASO account for years, and she’s a nimble, accomplished on-line marketer.

I was most surprised to realize I have a free Google Site. These are intended for small groups, like soccer clubs and school classrooms, but it may provide all the functionality you need to get started.

My website is built on WordPress. It’s powerful for online commerce, but I sometimes feel like a three-year-old who’s been given a Lamborghini. Ultimately, I had to hire a developer to help me put the bones of on-line commerce in place. And it has relatively high running costs if you’re not making a lot of online sales.

Camden Harbor, Midsummer, *oil on canvas, 24X36 $3,985.00 framed*

Keep it simple

However you design your website, it will benefit from constant pruning. Viewers want to see your most recent work, examples from your catalogue, your blog (if you have one), your upcoming shows, and your CV. Nobody wants to wade through acres of verbiage and layers of windows.

What website host do you use? If you’re willing to share your experience, please respond in the comments section below.

December 2, 2022December 2, 2022

I don’t have time to do art!

*I painted this when my kids had a snow day. Those are my son's toys, left outside in the weather, sigh.*

I have two students of similar ability and background. They started taking my Zoom classes around the same time. One retired last year and can devote himself to painting. The other has a high-pressure job that eats up lots of his time.

Which do you think is making faster progress right now?

“I wish I could wave a magic wand and save you from 60-hour weeks,” I told the latter student. Then he did something that surprised me—he arranged a three-week block of vacation time to stay home and paint.

Over several decades, I’ve seen this pattern: young people paint until they acquire houses, careers and families. Then there’s a long gap when they never pick up a brush. It isn’t until middle-age that most of us pick up painting again.

That’s not simply because we have more time; it’s the realization that our time on earth is finite, and if we don’t start now, we’ll never do it.

*The house across the street from my church, visible out the window.*

Time management is a universal problem

I struggle for time to paint, too. That’s absurd, but there are lots of other demands on my time—lesson planning, writing this blog and marketing.

In fact, that’s a universal problem among artists. Many of my professional peers work second jobs to afford the time to paint. That can take the form of a day job, running their own gallery, or teaching.

*I drew this fat dragon to entertain my grandkids. Then we went outside to look for his dragon lair.*

Can you make time to draw?

I take my sketchbook to meetings, to doctors’ appointments, to church—anywhere I’m expected to sit quietly. If you’re sitting with kids, you can engage them in your drawing. Children love telling you what to draw and they don’t really care how badly you execute.

You can draw other people surreptitiously, on the subway, in waiting rooms, or in the airport. Start with a fast gesture drawing and fill in what details you can before they wander off. At first, you’ll feel self-conscious and a bit sneaky, but most people don’t notice and don’t care.

*Any drawing, no matter how mundane, is better than wasting time playing on your phone.*

Put away the cell phone

Recently, I’ve noticed my cell phone eating up time that I previously used to draw. I need to consciously put it away. That’s hard in a culture that encourages us to always feel ‘on demand.’

Make art a habit

I get up at 5 AM to write this blog, exercise, bathe, make breakfast, answer correspondence, and do a daily marketing meeting. I start projects in the early afternoon. If I maintain this routine, my brain settles into work with minimal hassle. Once the order is disturbed, I spend most of my energy getting back on track.

Our minds crave routine, so let’s give it to them. It’s easier to squeeze a half hour of drawing in after supper than to block out a week to paint, and you’ll improve more with brief, regular practice than with the occasional marathon.

*If all else fails, draw your hand. It's right where you left it.*

Stop beating yourself up

Our schedules, like our closets, are jammed full. We can’t add one more thing without taking something out. Years ago, Bobbi Heath taught me an organizational technique with post-it notes. When you’ve filled up your workweek, you… just stop adding stuff.

“What activity is netting you the lowest return?” my daughter asks me. That’s not just a financial question. We collect obligations like boats collect barnacles. Some we can shed, some are ours just for a season, still others are lifelong and non-negotiable. Once you’ve eliminated what you can, take a clear-eyed look at what’s left. If that means you only have four hours a week to make art, stop beating yourself up about that. Four hours is still better than no hours at all.

November 30, 2022

Artisan in an age of mass-production

In Control (Grace and her Unicorn), *24X30, $3,478, oil on canvas.*

A student told me that he knocked a painting off a high shelf onto another one that he’d just sold, putting a wicked gash in the blue sky.

“Can you pass it off as a contrail?” I asked.

No such luck. He’ll have to repair it, which means matching the blue, which raises the possibility of not quite hitting the color and having to repaint the whole sky. This is opening Pandora’s box, because once the brush is in your hand, it’s too easy to end up repainting the whole darn picture.

“Oh, well,” he told me, and quoted me back to myself: “If you can paint it once, you can paint it 1000 times.”

That isn’t exactly what I meant, of course.

Sometimes students see something breathtakingly wonderful in their work. “I did that?” they marvel, and protect that passage at all costs. That’s great, unless it’s in the wrong place, or it’s the wrong color. It’s good to remember that this passage wasn’t a happy accident. It came from their competence and experience. If it’s not strengthening the painting, they need the courage to wipe it out.

The Logging Truck, *oil on linen, 16X20, $2029*

What is the dumbest thing you’ve ever done?

One time I sold a painting online that I couldn’t find. In retrospect, I should have confessed all to my collector and refunded her money, but I didn’t want to disappoint.

That meant I had to forge a copy of my own work. Sounds easy, right? It was anything but—I worked harder on that small painting than I’ve done on any other. I blew the image up on my studio monitor, and laboriously, painstakingly matched it, brush stroke to brush stroke, color to color.

All I can say is, forgers earn their money.

All flesh is as grass, 30X40, oil on linen, $6231 framed.

The customer is always right doesn’t mean you can always make everyone happy

Until recently, American consumers could get anything we wanted at any time. Then in 2020 we started to see longer and longer wait times for retail goods.

Those wait times are not obvious when you’re ordering from a big-box store. You flash your credit card and your garage doors appear magically 11 months later, just when you’ve forgotten you ever ordered them. Mass marketing creates an illusion of efficiency. These stores have powerful websites, but they’re subject to the same shortages.

If you’re trying to source locally, the labor shortage is obvious from the very beginning. Contractors don’t even have the time to come by and quote jobs, let alone do them.

They, like us, are human beings, not cogs in a huge wheel. My kitchen is being renovated by David Ernst. Yesterday he took a few hours out of his already-overloaded schedule to chase down my countertop suppliers. Knowing why they’re slow doesn’t solve my problem, but it helps me to be patient.

Vineyard, *30X40, oil on canvas, $5072 framed.*

Perfect is the enemy of good

Our retail expectations were formed in pre-2020 culture—we believe that purchases should be delivered promptly and cheaply, and they should be perfect. These are great goals but they have never been possible in a one-man, artisan operation. Stuff gets dinged and nicked, paintings get lost, and we sometimes don’t get them shipped on time or packaged properly.

Paintings are not garage doors, built in a factory on a jig and knocked out one after another. Paintings are the individual work of a person’s hands. They won’t always be perfect, and that’s part of their charm. Focusing on mistakes prevents us from seeing that, overall, we’re doing a great job.

November 28, 2022

Monday Morning Art School: the right tools

Waiting to Play (Boat House)*, Carol L. Douglas, 14X18, $1275 $1020.*

Beth is one of my most advanced students. When she first started my Zoom classes, she worked in a corner of her kitchen. The lighting was abysmal. She had to carry her painting across the room to her computer every time she wanted to share it with the class.

She has a good field easel and sometimes set that up indoors. Just last week she sent me a photo of a painting she’s been working on, and I realized she’s also been using a tabletop easel.

Eagle gets her wings, *Carol L. Douglas, 12X16, oil on canvasboard, $1,159.20*

Any tool can be the right tool?

There’s no law that says you can’t create brilliant work on a tabletop easel; Beth has demonstrated otherwise. But it’s tough on the back, and that alone will break your concentration.

We all make these sacrifices when we start painting. The start-up cost for a fully-outfitted studio is daunting for those of us of modest means. I painted for several years on the foldable floor easel I’d had as a kid before I could afford a proper studio easel.

But there are limits to this approach. “Paint like you’re rich!” my student Becky Bense says. There’s lots of wisdom in that advice.

Cheap watercolor paper will convince you that you’re a bad artist, that you have no talent, and that there’s no point in pursuing painting. Compound that with department-store paint sets and you will quit in frustration before you ever really get started.

In oil painting, the unpleasantness of bad materials doesn’t show up as quickly, but it’s there. The cheapest painting boards warp, and pigment bleeds through the thin gesso. Bad hog bristle brushes will paint properly at the beginning but quickly lose their hair. And department-store paints are often hues, or cheaper analogues of expensive pigments.

Marshall Point Rock Study — Marshall Point, *Carol L. Douglas 12X9, oil on canvasboard, $556.80 unframed.*

Step away from the pretty paint rack

There are ways to cut corners without cutting quality. Start by being disciplined about buying paint. New paints are seductive and beautiful, but they’re also expensive. Avoid paints with romantic names like Wisteria, Moonstone, or Silver White or historic names like Naples Yellow or Egyptian brown. It’s all romantic twaddle.

In fact, before you buy another tube of anything, I suggest you do this exercise to see what’s on your palette now, and what holes might need to be filled.

Ironically, people end up spending more on bad brushes than they would have had they bought just a few decent ones at the beginning. I often see watercolor students starting my classes with a pail full of cheap brushes that, in total, cost more than just a few good brushes would have. If you keep buying brushes that don’t seem to work, put away your credit card and ask an expert what you really need. Your painting teacher should have a supply list that includes brushes.

Canvas pads are another way to cut costs at the student level; they’re properly primed. If you should turn out a masterpiece, you can always mount it on a board. You can also sand out and reuse old boards, providing they don’t have too much impasto on them.

The happy ending

Recently, Beth moved to a different space in her house. She tackled her lighting issue with a clip-on lamp. She also bought herself the Testrite #700 Professional Studio Easel that I recommended in Holiday Gifts for the Serious Artist.

My other holiday gift guides are here and here, and this is a reminder that my Twenty Paintings, 20% off sale ends tonight.

This page contains affiliate links for some but not all products. If you choose to make a purchase after clicking a link, I may receive a commission at no additional cost to you. Thank you for your support!

November 25, 2022

Find the right mentor and strive to be their number one student

Sometimes It Rains, *oil on canvasboard, 11X14, $869 $695.20*

I’ve been listening to The Side Hustle Show, a podcast by Nick Loper. Many of his ideas are universal truths applicable outside business. This one, from episode 541, stopped me cold: Find a coach or mentor and strive to become their number one student. The ‘mentor’ part we’ve all heard; it’s the striving to be number one part that struck me.

It’s been an amazing year for my students. They’re zooming past me on both sides, knocking out successes with solo and group shows and sales. Those in an earlier stage of development are also showing significant growth. Whether they articulate the idea or not, many of them seem to strive to be my number one student. They practice what I preach, and they work hard between sessions.

Main Street, Owls Head, *16X20, oil on gessoboard, $1,298.40 unframed.*

Loper was talking about business, but there’s a better analogy in sports. Yes, superstars are surrounded by coaches, but so too is every player at every level, right down to the four-year-old taking his first swing in t-ball. We’ve all read about how coaching benefits the person at the top of his game. But it’s also critical for the person just starting out.

(In painting, by the way, that model of coaching for top players doesn’t really exist. I leaf through my mental contacts list to try to identify an artist who would be a good mentor and come up blank.)

Coast Guard Inspection, plein air, oil on canvasboard. 6x8, $348.00 framed.

Thirty years ago, I suffered extreme stage fright. I was a passable musician, but couldn’t play in front of others. I could never have taught a large class or done a large demo, and video cameras made my stomach clench. I tried a lot of remedies, including psychotherapy (where I learned why I was anxious but not how to fix it) and a beta blocker before events. Nothing really helped.

Then I confronted the problem head-on by taking a public speaking class at community college. As you can imagine, writing stemwinders was no problem, but delivering them was excruciating. However, the kind, helpful critiques by the instructor and other students gradually desensitized me. Today I can bore people to tears without turning a hair.

That was when college classes were in-person, live and personal. The remedy to my problem required one-on-one, direct, personal interaction. No amount of video instruction could have dealt with it.

In painting, technical skill is only part of the equation. We all face personal issues that get in the way of our artistic expression. That can take the form of avoiding our easels as we try to work out a difficult knot that we can’t untie. We’ve all been there.

Sometimes it takes a disinterested outside voice to tease those knots out. In my experience, that’s often not the instructor, but the artist’s fellow students. In class, it often pays for me to shut up and let them talk. This is why painting groups like Greater Rochester Plein Air Painters are so important. Friends will keep you working when you have absolutely no heart for it.

Owl's Head Early Morning, 8X16 oil on linenboard, $722.40 unframed.

I’ve learned a tremendous amount from podcasts, Tik-Tok and YouTube, and I’m currently teaching myself to cook with an app called Sidekick. But I’ve also wasted a lot of time watching bad content, and some of what I’ve seen has been flat-out misleading.

Pre-set content is one-size-fits-all, and that can easily be wrong for the artist’s skill level or irrelevant to his or her goals. What would be optimal is a combination of wide distribution and personal interaction. That’s difficult. The person who came closest was Mary Gilkerson, and she’s sadly passed away.

Do you have a mentor? If not, why? If so, how is he or she helping you?

*Critique runs through December, and there are still a few openings).

I know your in-box is inundated this morning, but 20 Paintings, 20% off runs until Monday. After you’re done looking at 800 tiresome Christmas decorations in the Target email, scootch over to my website and pick out a non-disposable, American-made work of real art.

November 23, 2022November 23, 2022

Annual Painting Sale and a Peek Behind the Curtain

American Eagle in Dry Dock, 12X16, oil on canvasboard, $1159 $927.20 unframed. My favorite schooner in my favorite boatyard.

Happy Thanksgiving!

I've already driven through eight different states. Today I'll bake seven pies. Tomorrow we'll have more than twenty people at dinner.

However, don’t expect to see me out shopping on Friday. I tried it once, and… blech. However, I’m observing Black Friday with my own painting sale—20% off twenty selected paintings for five days.

It’s almost like those bad old days when department stores would advertise large-screen TVs and have only one in the store. Here I’m telling you upfront that there’s only one of each item. When the painting you love is gone, it’s really gone.

This sale lasts only until Cyber Monday (November 28th, 2022).

I asked my daughter to select the paintings, and she picked some of my absolute favorites. Here’s a behind-the-scenes look at three of them.

Quebec Brook

When Sandra Hildreth chooses a painting location, it’s always a place few others know about. This was a trailhead through the Quebec Brook primitive area, near Paul Smiths NY. It’s part of the Madawaska Flow, a large marshy primitive area includes running water, boreal bog and forest.

The beavers were just getting started on this muggy August morning. I’ve wondered ever since whether they were allowed to finish, or whether the DEC decided they were threatening the logging road and removed their dam.

To me, the beauty was in the shape and colors of the shoots they’d laid up, as well as the dull reflections below the alders. That pregnant sky is typical of the Adirondacks and the subtle warm colors will go beautifully with the warmer palette predicted by decorators for 2023—in other words, you’ll never get sick of it.

Best Buds

The Adirondack Carousel is a small gem located in Saranac Lake, NY. Coincidentally, its decorative boards were painted by Sandra Hildreth, and are little masterpieces in themselves. The carousel is beloved of local children because its seats are hand-carved and -painted animals native to the Adirondacks. (That includes a black fly, which I elected to leave out.)

I modeled the child after a little girl named Meredith Lewis back home in Maine. I see from her mom’s Facebook that she’s now more teenager than child, a transition that always leaves me wistful.

The title came from something one of the kids told me that day. The deer was her best friend, so she always chose the otter so that she and the deer could ride together.

How do you paint moving objects like a carousel or a tilt-a-whirl? You find the rhythm of the ride and look up in intervals.

This painting is in brilliant jewel tones. If you love carousels, it will give you as much joy as riding the real thing.

The Late Bus

This is a painting that will probably only appeal to a person who grew up in the north and remembers the biting cold of ‘staying after’ school. I swam on my school’s swim team in Niagara County, NY. My bus dropped me at the end of the road and I walked the last quarter-mile home, my hair freezing in the bitter winter air. That walk was my transition from school to home, and it was my favorite part of the day.

There’s a clarity to the twilight of those evenings that stays with you forever. Fast forward a generation, and I was a parent of four ‘walkers,’ or kids who lived close enough to walk home. When they had to stay after, I’d collect them, as there was a busy intersection between their school and home. But how they got home is immaterial. That memory of evening changing to night, when all one’s chicks return to the nest, is one every parent cherishes.