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Author: Carol L. Douglas

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Five things I won’t waste money on

I’m wearing the tiara in honor of Queen Elizabeth II, whose state funeral is today.

Cheap paint

There are many good paint brands out there. They tend to be more expensive, but price is not the sole indicator of quantity. There are an equal number of horrible paints on the market. You might think you’ve saved a few bucks, but that’s a mistake that will cost you in time and frustration.

There are differences in the binders, in the amount of pigment the manufacturer uses, and how the pigments are stabilized. There may be filler or drying agents added.

Instead of buying cheaper paint, cut down on the number of colors you buy. I suggest a system of paired primaries, as explained here. Oil painters will add titanium white; watercolor painters should avoid white altogether at the outset.

My personal preferences are: Golden acrylics
QoR watercolors
Unison pastels
RGH or Gamblin for oils.

These aren’t the only good paints out there, of course; they’re just my go-to brands.

Fewer colors, no convenience mixes or hues, and better quality paints–that’s the most economical way to paint.

Hues and convenience mixes

Art paints are marketed with names that appeal to our sense of tradition. If you buy Naples Yellow thinking you’re buying an historic pigment, think again: the modern paint is a convenience mix replacing the historic (and toxic) lead antimonate.

Expect to find, at minimum, the following information on the label of your paint tube:

  • Manufacturer’s name or common name for the color;
  • The CII number and, sometimes, the name of the pigment(s);
  • The manufacturer’s lightfastness or permanence rating.

The CII code consists of two letters and some numbers. Most paints start with a “P” which means it’s a pigment, not a dye. The next letter is the color family:  PR is red, PY is yellow, etc. The number is the specific pigment included in the tube.

When you compare paints with the same names, check their CIIs. It seldom makes sense to buy a tube of paint that contains more than one pigment. These blends are meant to look like something else-either an historic pigment or an expensive one. They don’t behave like the pigments they’re named after. For example, ‘cadmium yellow hue’ may look like cadmium yellow coming out of the tube, but it makes insipid greens.

If you are comfortable painting with a hue, learn what’s in it and mix it yourself. You always have the greatest flexibility by working with pure pigments (rather than mixes) out of the tube.

The students in my watercolor workshop aboard schooner American Eagle get QoR paints, Princeton brushes, and Strathmore paper. You can’t learn with bad materials.

No-name brushes

You can buy a whole set of bristle brushes on Amazon for $20. The same price will get you a set of genuine sable brushes for watercolor. Good deal, right? Wrong.

Natural bristles have splits at the end, called flags. These help the bristles hold more paint. (With high-stain pigments, the flags can discolor, but that’s not a sign of permanent damage.) With good brushes, bristles are cleaned, sorted, sized and wrapped into bundles where the flags cup, or curl naturally into each other. This bundle is then glued into the ferrule with a solvent-resistant glue. The best ferrules are seamless nickel-plated copper, crimped onto a lacquered hardwood handle.

Badly cupped brushes and poor-quality bristles can be made to look good with lots of sizing that dissolves as soon as the brush is used. Bad brushes often lose hairs, which can ruin a painting. And ferrules that fall off the handles can’t be crimped back on.

You need fewer brushes than you think. In watercolor, a ½” flat, a 1″ wash brush, a #6 quill and a #8 round are enough to get you started. Add a set of short synthetic flats (or mottlers, as they’re sometimes called) in ž”, 1″ and 1½”. A little pointed brush to sign your name is helpful.

In oils and acrylics, a life list would include:

  • Brights (short flats) in 6, 8, 10, possibly 12, depending on how big you’re going to paint;
  • Rounds: 2, 4, 6;
  • Long (true) flats: 3, 4, 5;
  • Filbert: 2, 4, 6;
  • A few tiny rounds in sable for detail and to sign your name: 2,4;
  • 1″ badger blender brush;
  • 2″ spalter or hog bristle background brush-this is for blocking.

I recommend Princeton brushes to students; they come in a range of quality and material and are good value for money. I’m currently painting with Rosemary & Co. in both watercolor and oils, but they’re quite expensive. Other brushes I’ve known and loved include Isabey, and Winsor & Newton. But brushes are a highly-personal thing, and you’re best buying one or two from a maker and running them through their paces before you commit to a relationship.

Dollar-Store painting boards

Why does one manufacturer charge $15 for a painting board when you can buy one at a local discount store for $2? There’s a difference in quality at every step. The cheap board is made of cardboard, which warps. The gesso is thin and porous, so paint bleeds through it, breaching the all-important barrier between surface and substrate. The canvas is glued with a water-based glue, so if the board gets wet, it will start to separate.

Still, the price of a premium painting board is too high for painting exercises. Instead, buy a tablet of linen or canvas and tape sheets down on a board. For linen, I like Centurion; for canvas, Dick Blick’s house brand. If you do end up creating a masterpiece, you can glue it to a stable board with PVA adhesive.

As a bonus, a tablet of painting canvases is a lot lighter than the same number of boards when you’re traveling.

Straight up linseed oil, and for a palette cup, a bottle cap.

Painting mediums

I used to spend a lot of money on painting mediums tailored for specific situations-matte finish, quick-drying, slow-drying. However, because these all have solvents in them, they’re not legal to carry on airplanes. I found myself replacing them on every trip. Eventually I went back to the jar of linseed oil I’ve been carting around since my salad days. It’s cheaper, it lasts forever, and you can carry it in your checked luggage. (An aside-you can also fly with a small jar of Gamsol, but not Turpenoid; they have different flash points.)

Linseed oil is the binder for most oil paints. It’s harmless; it’s made from flax-seed, the same thing I eat for breakfast. The same cannot be said of the driers and solvents in many mediums.

If you’re worried about yellowing (I’m not, because my paints are linseed-oil-based) then use stand oil. That’s linseed oil that’s been polymerized by heating.

No blog Wednesday–I’m sailing this week.

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What sells?

Sea Fog, Castine, 9X12, $869 framed.

“Interesting that you say ‘I have come to recognize that there are certain subjects that will languish, and I no longer seek them out.’  You mentioned gray days. What other subjects do you find difficult to move?” a reader wrote in response to Wednesday’s post.

For the record, it was Ken DeWaard who doesn’t like gray days. I love fog, especially Maine fog, which seems to have an intelligence of its own. I don’t have a particular problem selling fog paintings, especially when there are boats involved.

Snow at Higher Elevations, 11X14, available, $1087 framed

On the other hand, I have never had much success selling snow paintings, although they can be very interesting as they invert typical light relationships. I’m from Buffalo and live in New England, so I know snow. I’ve painted enough of it. But I only go out in winter to keep Ken and Eric Jacobsen company. Just as Ken has a closet full of grey days, I have a closet full of snow paintings.

Perhaps my audience is sick of shoveling it. However, the late, great Aldro Hibbard lived and worked in Rockport, Massachusetts. He made a fine business of painting snowy Vermont landscapes.

Buyers tend to associate certain painters with certain subjects. Colin Page paints boats, children, and complex still-lives. Charles Fenner Ball paints pastorals and trains. Mary Byrom paints the marshland along the southern Maine shore. Whether or not it’s fair for the marketplace to pigeonhole artists, it happens.

Île d’Orléans waterfront farm, Saint-François-de-l'Île-d'Orléans, Quebec, 8X10, available unframed, $522

I will occasionally paint an old tractor or historic old farm. These, too, sit on my shelves, but Kari Ganoung Ruiz and Jay Brooks are able to move them along just fine. They both capture the mystery of lost time in these paintings, whereas I am just painting objects.

On the other hand, I sell a lot of boat paintings. A lobster boat is just a tractor of the sea, so why does my audience find them romantic and a Massey-Ferguson prosaic? Perhaps because nobody comes to Maine to look at old tractors, but they do go to central New York for them.

Glaciar Cagliero from Rio Electrico, 12X16, $1159 unframed, available.

I love rocks. They tell the story of a place, they’re fascinating to observe and classify, and I find rock outcroppings easy enough to sell.

However, I also appreciate farm animals, orchards, and hayfields. However, I find it harder to shift these subjects. The farther I get from the farm country of my youth, the less it compels me. Somehow that’s transmitted to my audience, although I can’t tell you how.

What sells depends on the obsessions of the artist. If you love, say, butterflies, your passion will be transmitted to the canvas and buyers will respond. If you are indifferent to rain, it will show, and your rain paintings will languish. If you spend lots of time painting boats and very little time painting classic cars, your boat paintings will be fresher and livelier.

I frequently marvel over this real estate listing, which features large paintings of meat on the wall. Why anyone would paint them, and why anyone would buy them, escapes me. But truly there’s a market for anything, if you’re passionate about it.

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Why success matters

Autumn Leaves, 12X16, $1449, available

On Monday, I wrote about how to be a successful artist. Perhaps I should have written about why you should pursue success, because the comments I received through Facebook and emails questioned that assumption.

“I hate the fact that everyone expects us to happily marry art and capitalism. I love art. I hate capitalism. Why can’t I just enjoy the thing I love independent of the other?” wrote Jason Weinberg. “I wish art was simply free to be art, not product.”

In fact, I think that many people are better off as gifted amateurs than trying to make a living at it. Monetizing it can kill the very thing you love, so it's not for everyone.

A Woodlot of Her Own, 9x12, $869, available

For those who spend long hours making art, it helps to have an outlet for it. Let’s start with the fundamental truth that the laborer is worthy of his hire, as Jesus pointed out. All modern societies (capitalist or communist) measure output in terms of money and assign value through currency. To say that art should be free assigns it a value of exactly zero.

I have a friend who’s an excellent printmaker but prefers to keep it purely amateur. She also needs to eat, so she works full-time unloading trucks. That doesn’t leave much time or energy for art, so she doesn’t make a lot of it. She’s happy with that compromise, but I wouldn’t be.

Blueberry barrens, Clary Hill, oil on canvas, 24X36, $3985 framed.

It costs money to make art. My printmaker friend needs to buy ink, paper, and whatever she’s using for plates. A small etching press starts at around a thousand dollars. The archival canvasboards I use are about $15 each; the paints run between $12 and $40 a tube. Then there are frames, which are the bête noire of the working artist; they cost a fortune and get dinged up constantly. All that money either gets recouped through sales or the artist’s day job.

It can cost thousands of dollars to have a foundry cast a sculpture in bronze. Unless you’re wealthy, it makes no sense to cast sculpture without sales in mind, and yet without that last step, the artistic process is incomplete.

I have a gifted student who supports herself working a series of side-hustles while making art seriously and studiously as an avocation. I’m sure she excels at anything she does, but she’s a brilliant painter, she has a unique message in her work, and it deserves to be in the public marketplace. By not putting herself out there in the fray, her work stays relatively unknown. That extends beyond her own circumstances, because she has insight that would benefit us all.

Bunker Hill overlook, watercolor on Yupo, approx. 24X36, $3985 framed.

We don’t just exchange goods in capitalist trade; we exchange ideas. That requires entering the marketplace. Its critiques are harsh, its judgments summary. But it is also the most honest judge of whether we’re getting our point across or not.

“I would love to sell more of my artwork but I still want to be able to do whatever I want, not what someone else expects me to do,” wrote another correspondent. That’s difficult. Although artists are paid to think, they also need to connect with their audience. That requires compromise.

I have come to recognize that there are certain subjects that will languish, and I no longer seek them out. As my friend Ken DeWaard says of grey days, “I have enough of those in my closet at home.”

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Monday Morning Art School: how to be a professional artist.

Today’s blog is being released simultaneously with the YouTube version, above. They’re slightly different, of course.

I wince every time I hear someone say “art is a good hobby but you can’t make a living at it.” Of course you can; I know many people who do. Last year, the global art/antiques market had sales of $65 billion. Of this, the US was by far the biggest player. All that art is, or was, made by someone.

However, a career in art is hard work. If you don’t like that, get a day job and keep your art as a hobby. Successful artists are entrepreneurs, and entrepreneurs generally work harder and longer than anyone else. There’s a lot of drudgery in an art career—bookkeeping, inventory control, making frames, online sales. On top of that, you have to create your own inventory and somehow keep the creative fire alive.

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

It helps to start when you’re young. As soon as you have a mortgage or car payment, you’re locked into a 9-5 job. Keep your expenses down. If your parents can stand you, live in their basement, but use that time wisely. Too many young people just piss time away.

However, sometimes you come to the realization that you should have been an artist much later in life. I was 38 and had four kids and a mortgage when I had that epiphany. It was doable, but juggling all those responsibilities was a lot harder than it would have been had I started as a youngster.

Either way, you might have to work part-time when you’re getting started. A lot of artists have done it, either in the home or away. Child-care definitely counts as one of those jobs. Don’t magically think that the kids will play quietly at your feet while you’re painting. Käthe Kollwitz made child care a condition of her marriage. We can’t all afford that, but caring for a child is real work and must be factored in as such.

“Beautiful Dream (Rockport Harbor),” oil on canvasboard, 12X16 $1,449.00 framed.

Twenty years ago I would never have said this, but don’t bother with art school. The best art schools are private colleges, and they’re too expensive now. Instead, take classes at an atelier or working studio. Copy works by great artists in your field. Watch and learn from artists around you.

Above all, give yourself time to become good at your craft; working every day is the number one key to greatness.

"Skylarking 2", 18x24, unframed $1855, oil on linen.

The most common problem I encounter in artists is a lack of interest or experience in business. I started there myself, and it was a painful learning curve. If I had it to do again, I’d take business classes at community college or through an adult education program. Instead, I learned slowly, on the job.

You’ll be selling a product no different from any other product, and you can’t afford to turn your nose up at marketing. You’ll spend half your days doing it, so learn to love it. Marketing changes constantly. When I started, we stuck labels and stamps to postcards. Today, we focus on the internet. The one constant is how time-consuming it is.

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Goodbye, Cabbage

Queen Elizabeth II, 1955, Pietro Annigoni, tempera, oil and ink on paper. Courtesy Fishmongers’ Hall, London.

I prominently display a slim volume in my bathroom: How the Queen Can Make You Happy, by Mary Killen. It’s a paeon to duty, discretion, politeness, healthy habits, kindness and more. Anyone who visits for more than three days ought to be able to finish it. As I have a lot of houseguests, it’s one small way to improve the world.

If you’ve spent any time with me, you know I’m a fan not of royalty in general, but of Queen Elizabeth II in particular. Her portrait is on my pickup truck; a statuette of her waves at me when the sun comes up. I was in Britain for her Platinum Jubilee.

Coronation Day, 1953, photograph, Cecil Beaton, courtesy Royal Collection Trust

She reminds me of a generation of women who are now almost gone. They were tough, phlegmatic, hard-working, and loyal. They were the first generation who went out of the home in large numbers to work. They dressed well, but their breasts and bums stayed inside their clothing. They were saddled with incredibly annoying children who burned draft cards, burned their bras, did drugs, joined ashrams and generally made complete asses of themselves (myself included). And yet they persevered and by and large those kids have turned out okay.

“Cabbage” was supposedly Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh’s affectionate nickname for his wife of 73 years. She had many of the virtues of that under-sung vegetable-she was tough, resilient, humble, nourishing and supportive. Her British sisterhood was forged in the London Blitz, but the same words could describe American women of that vintage. My mother was like that, as was our old neighbor Norma Stern, who died last week at age 94. Norma chopped her own firewood, but scratch beneath the surface and there was that same steely determination.

Queen Elizabeth (unique), 1985, lithograph, Andy Warhol, courtesy of Adamar Fine Arts.

Princess Elizabeth was ten years old when Edward VIII abdicated the throne, precipitating a crisis that transformed her from a mere princess to heir to the throne. In 1939, when Britain entered the war, it was suggested that she and her sister Margaret be evacuated to Canada. The Queen Mother famously responded, “The children won’t go without me. I won’t leave without the King. And the King will never leave.” At age 14, Elizabeth made her first wartime radio broadcast. At 18, she trained as a driver and mechanic with the Auxiliary Territorial Service. She ascended to the throne of a world empire at 25.

Much has been written about her work ethic, and it was prodigious. On her 21st birthday, she pledged, “I declare before you all that my whole life whether it be long or short shall be devoted to your service and the service of our great imperial family to which we all belong.” She never broke that vow. Two days before her death, she appointed her fifteenth Prime Minister, Liz Truss.

The Queen at Buckingham Palace, 2007, photograph, Annie Leibovitz, courtesy Vanity Fair

“Forgiveness lies at the heart of the Christian faith. It can heal broken families, it can restore friendships and it can reconcile divided communities,” she said in Ireland in 2016. “It is in forgiveness that we feel the power of God’s love.”

She wasn’t just blowing smoke. The IRA killed a close member of her family, Lord Mountbatten. He was Prince Philip’s  uncle, the godfather of King Charles III. When she laid a wreath at a memorial garden in Dublin for ‘all those who gave their lives in the cause of Irish Freedom,’ she demonstrated that hard, hard work of forgiveness.

Rest in peace, Queen Elizabeth. Your like will not this way come again.

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Gone Native

Update: here is a link to all the paintings in this sale.

Camden Amphitheater, 11X14, oil on canvasboard, Carol L. Douglas, $1,087 framed

Camden Public Library is co-sponsoring the Camden Native Plant Celebration & Sale — A Wild Seed Project, on the grounds of the Camden Amphitheatre Sunday, Sept. 18, from 9 AM to noon.

I asked ten of my students to create art for this project. Their only limitation was that they were restricted to native species; they could work in any medium they chose. Proceeds from the sale of their work will be split between these emerging artists and the library. This is just a very small selection of the work that will be available.

Milkweed and Butterfly, 5X7, watercolor, Rebecca Bense, $150, matted.

Fundraising is important because Camden library’s remit extends beyond its building. The library maintains Camden’s amphitheater and harbor park in addition to its own magnificent grounds. All three were designed with an eye towards the natural environment. That was an unusual approach a century ago.

In 1928, architects Parker Morse Hooper and Charles Greely Loring chose to slip the library under the shade of existing elms and maples on the site, angling it toward the community rather than the picturesque harbor below. Today, traffic and parking have rendered the Main Street portico almost obsolete; patrons use a new ground-floor entrance on Atlantic Avenue. That has an upside; its facade is undisturbed in its austere, symmetrical, colonial beauty, despite the very modern library within.

Common Milkweed, 8X10, acrylic on board, Rebecca Bowes, $50. The artist has designated 100% of this sale to go to the library fund.

Immediately adjacent to the library is Camden’s amphitheater. It’s a confection of fieldstone, brick, grass native trees and shrubs, with Art Deco wrought iron rails, light standards, gates and arches. It’s all carefully orchestrated to marry sophisticated garden theater with the wilds of Maine.

Across Atlantic Avenue, Harbor Park extends the views from the amphitheater down to busy Camden Harbor. This was designed by the Olmsted Brothers and is less formal and more naturalistic. It also relies on native plantings.

Caltha Palustris/Marsh Marigold, mixed media collage with hand-colored botanical print and vintage map 12 x 16, matted, $150, Lori Capron Galan

Once this fabulous complex of gardens was completed in 1931, the whole mess was given to Camden Library by arts patron Mary Louise Curtis Bok. Here choice of stewards wasn’t misplaced; they’re approaching their centenary in great nick.

In addition to my painting above, I’ll be painting en plein air during the event.

Blueberries on the Summit, 9x12, watercolor, $250, matted, Cassie Sano

But honestly, the event is mostly about the plants. They’re available for pre-sale here. They’re from local native plant nurseries and are grown without the use of pesticides, herbicides, and neonicotinoids. “Native plants are low maintenance and normally do not require watering, fertilizer, herbicide, fungicides, or pesticides,” said Amy Thomsen, organizer, restoration ecologist, and my buddy.

If I can sneak away, I’ll be looking for a tree to replace the not-native sequoia seedling in my front garden. It only lasted two years before it dropped dead from cold. Imagine that.

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Am I part of the problem?

Beauchamp Point in Autumn, oil on canvasboard, available.

I’m no fan of the Guardian, but this recent (unsigned) piece is one more argument about a well-known problem in the art world. Women’s art sells at a shocking 10-to-1 markdown from men’s work—"for every £1 a male artist earns for his work, a woman earns a mere 10p.” That should come as no surprise to readers of this blog; I’ve written about it here, here and here, among other places.

Women artists earn less than their male counterparts; they are collected less by institutions, and—this is something that surprised me—if they sign their work, the value goes down.

Autumn farm, evening blues, oil on canvasboard, $1449 framed.

Meanwhile, in blind tests, viewers can’t tell the gender of painters by the work alone. My pal Chrissy Pahucki was so taken by that question that she replicated the blind study using plein air paintings by artists she knew. Her results came in about the same as the original study; i.e., the same as guessing.

Gender disparity is something I track as I watched the prizes being given in juried shows. So how did I fare as a juror at Adirondack Plein Air? I’d promised organizer Sandra Hildreth I’d set my own biases aside. With few exceptions I did not know who the work was by. (Although artists are told to not sign their work in advance, that’s difficult to enforce.)

Of the nine prizes I gave, overall, three were to women. The top three all went to men. Ouch. That’s hardly a large-enough sample to convict myself over, but it is cause for reflection.

Blueberry Barrens, Clary Hill, 24X36, oil on canvas, $3985.

I stress the formal elements of design over mood and evocativeness. (I scarcely know how one would judge those subjective values.) Perhaps that gave the edge to men. Does that mean that quantification, classification, and structure are somehow male thinking? That’s an argument that troglodytes on both sides of the culture wars might happily embrace. I reject it myself; I have the brain that God gave me, and he made me female.

This concept of a male-female divide is in some ways stronger than it was in the benighted 1950s and 1960s. Back then, nobody went on about some inner standard of male and female that our outer bodies might be in misalignment with. In fact, nobody spent a great deal of time analyzing our minds unless there was something starkly wrong with us.

Clary Hill Blueberry Barrens, approx. 24X36, watercolor on Yupo, available

I may not have been allowed to wear trousers to school until the seventh grade, but there was no pink-and-blue differentiation in kids’ clothing in my youth. Outside of school, we all wore the same mud-stained shorts and shirts. We had the same toys. We played sandlot baseball together.

At the same time, artists like Lois Dodd struggled mightily against a system that denigrated her work in comparison to her peers. While I wish I could stuff Barbie-culture back in the hole it came from, I never want to go back to the days of ignoring women artists.

That ship has started to turn. “Even though prices for work by female artists are starting from a far lower base, they are currently rising 29% faster than for art by men,” said the Guardian. “For canny investors who want a bargain and a higher return, it’s a no-brainer.”

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Why pay for it when you can get it for free?

Autumn Farm, Evening Blues, $1449 framed.

In our impecunious youth, bar owners were notorious for offering bands the ‘opportunity’ to play for exposure (and maybe a free beer). According to my bass-player husband, it’s a practice that continues to this day. “All you need is to learn three chords and you can call yourself a blues band,” he said. “And 90% of the people in the audience won’t know the difference.”

Of course, art buyers are not usually as drunk (or rowdy) as a Saturday night crowd in Buffalo. But the basic mechanism is the same. We’re often asked to give away the very thing that is our livelihood. If we don’t, some other artist—hungry for success—will step in to do so. Since the audiences for these events are not art-centered, they often can’t tell the difference between a masterpiece and something that will look good in their bathroom.

Autumn farm, oil on canvasboard, $1449 framed.

General auctions are not to be confused with events where a non-profit organization mounts an exhibition or plein air event, such as Cape Elizabeth Land Trust’s Paint for Preservation. These are generally well-run and pay both the artists and organization.

If the organization can give an artist exposure to the kind of people who will be future art buyers, it’s not a bad business plan to occasionally give away a painting. This introduces the emerging artist to the world of selling art and helps them learn to price their work. But the value to the artist is extremely limited.

You won’t be able to deduct the value of the painting on your taxes. Artists are not entitled to take deductions on charitable donations of artwork. In fact, the IRS limitations on donating art are extremely restrictive.

Beauchamp Point, Autumn Leaves, $1449 framed

Non-profit organizations are perpetually fundraising, and general auctions are a favorite way of doing it. They assign a committee to gin up donations, and one or two people always seem to know artists. When it was my late friend Dean and the organization was Ducks Unlimited, I said sure. I like conservation and I loved Dean.

Believing in the mission of the organization isn’t enough. Often, your artwork is not a good match to the audience, so the work sells for a fraction of its value. A fisheries organization used to ask artists to paint wooden buoys for an annual fundraiser. I believe in their mission, so I participated. It was an interesting challenge, but also a lot of work. The buoys sold at such a discount I would have been far better off just writing them a check.

A Woodlot of Her Own, 9X12, $869 framed

Colin Page is doing a similar fundraiser for the AIO food pantry in Rockland. It has a much greater chance of success. Artists painted wooden bowls that are available through silent auction at the Page Gallery at 23 Bay View Street in Camden from September 3-10. Colin’s a local celebrity, the cause is critical, and—most importantly—the venue is art-centered. It’s an example of how to do this right.

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Monday Morning Art School: five compositional no-nos

There’s more to composition than just avoiding these no-nos, but respecting the bounding box is a good place to start. Treat the edges as if they’re an important part of your composition.

Don’t cut off the corners

This can sometimes be difficult when running an S-curve to the corner of the page, but will make a painting feel boxed in. If you absolutely can’t avoid it, bring the contrast in that corner way down.

Don’t let a line exit through a corner

That’s a variation on the same problem—the energy in the line slams against the corner and is trapped. The viewer’s eye follows with the same effect. Again, if you absolutely can’t avoid it, bring the contrast way down.

Don’t run an unbroken parallel line with the sides of your painting

Nobody told Renaissance painters this, but even Caravaggio gave it up as he matured. An edge at the bottom, an unbroken horizon line, etc., just creates a box-within-a-box. Unless you have a op-art reason for doing it, it results in dead space within your canvas. And it’s a wasted opportunity to use angles beautifully, as Francis Cadell did with his still lives.

Don’t put a focal point on the edge of your painting

Focal points are an invitation for the viewer’s eye to linger, to be drawn in. A focal point at an edge is an invitation for them to just leave.

Avoid shapes just skimming the edge of your canvas

Either bring it in comfortably inside the picture frame, or let the object extend past it. And don’t scrunch trees trying to avoid hitting the edge; that robs them of their majesty. It’s better to start over.

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My fall teaching schedule

Towpath on the Erie Canal

Towpath on the Erie Canal, 30X40, oil on canvas, private collection.

My painting student from Austin is in Maine briefly. We hiked up Beech Hill together. This is a great way to socialize—the dog gets his workout, you’re outdoors, and you’ve earned a big breakfast at the end.

“Everybody,” he told me, “is jumping on the Zoom teaching bandwagon.” That’s true, but I don’t much like the dominant formula that’s being touted. It’s too much like those social sip-and-paint places, where everyone is assigned the same painting and the instructor leads you through preformatted steps.

I’m not sure what you learn from that, except that potables and paint have a long, sometimes unhappy, relationship with each other. A painting is far more than the pigments that are swished around the canvas. It is choice, composition, focus, line, and color relationships. You don’t learn any of that by having the subject of your work preselected.

I try to tailor my classes to what my students need, instead. This fall I’m teaching three sessions.

Lobster fleet at Eastport, ME, 24X36, oil on canvas, $3985 in a gold-leaf frame.

The Figure in the Landscape

Monday evenings starting September 26

The Figure in the Landscape is meant to address a problem I’ve noticed recently: many excellent painters are unsure of how to add human figures to their paintings. They either avoid them altogether or wash them in as wisps in the distance.

Adding the figure starts with some knowledge of drawing and painting the figure. Then, there’s the question of using people as part of an arresting composition, not as an afterthought.

The American Impressionist Childe Hassam used people, carriages and horses in his landscapes, and today we see a glimpse of turn-of-the-century life from his paintings. They are everyday scenes made real because there is activity in them.

This class is for intermediate and advanced alla prima painters only. To qualify, you must either have taken a class with me and gotten my OK, or you need to submit a portfolio for review. If you have questions, contact me.

Coast Guard Inspection, plein air, oil on canvasboard. 6x8, $435 framed.

Mixing interesting color

Tuesday evenings starting September 27

For those who need instruction on the fundamentals of color and paint application, I’ll be offering Mixing interesting color. It's not enough to simply reproduce what you see; your painting's color structure must invite the viewer into your world. Alla prima painting rests on the idea of getting it right on the first strike, so we’ll delve into color theory as well as the practical business of making and applying color with confidence.

This class is for early-intermediate painters who have been introduced to the process of painting but haven’t completely mastered the design/application protocol. If you have questions, contact me.

The world's best classroom.

Live in midcoast Maine: Plein air short session

Tuesday mornings starting September 27

If you can drive to Rockport, you can take this class. It meets in various beauty spots in the region on Tuesdays from 10 AM to 1 PM. This is the only class where I can handle beginning painters, so if you’re wanting to try painting, it’s a good place to start. (The schooner American Eagle is another, and I understand there’s still a berth open for my September workshop. That comes complete with a good-quality watercolor kit.)

There is simply no better way to learn painting than en plein air (with still life a close second, and figure after that). Maine in Autumn is beautiful, so if you’re still here, plan to join us.

For the details on these classes, see here.