Carol L. Douglas, Author at Carol L. Douglas

July 8, 2022July 8, 2022

Perfect is the enemy of good

This blog was on Google’s Blogger from 2007 until the present (with a short hiatus during which it was hosted by the Bangor Daily News). Blogger is a simple platform, but in 2021, it suspended support of its RSS web feed. That meant that people could no longer subscribe.

After consulting with the usual experts, I determined that it was sensible to bring it in-house, onto my own website. I have a tenuous relationship with my website—it’s a large beast that I placate by throwing content over the fence and then quickly running away.

Importing 15 years of blog posts was way above my skillset. In May, I wrote about hiring an expert. Unfortunately, she finished just as I started my hike across England. It was easier to just keep writing on Blogger. The posts piled up. I didn’t dare ask Deepika to do another import, so yesterday I finally sat down and moved the remaining mess on my own.

*Drying sails in Camden harbor. We're taking practice shots before Camden on Canvas.*

It’s not elegant. I’ve had 15 years to make Blogger look exactly as I want—font, header, nested links, advertising. But it’s done, and as of today, you should be getting this feed in your mailbox if you’re subscribed. And if you’re not, you can subscribe … oh, darn, the subscription box has migrated away again. Another task for Deepika, until I can master this interface.

When my father was 63, he was secure in his expertise, partially because there was a secretary who did all the technical stuff for him. When my grandfather was 63, he was dead. In contrast, my husband and I spend inordinate amounts of time and effort mastering new technology. In almost every field, we’re barraged by new information and equipment.

*Apple Blossom Time,* 9x12, oil on canvasboard, $696 unframed. I painted this with Eric Jacobsen last summer.

There are two lessons here, both of which I think are hopeful. The first is that, at 63, I see no sign of mental exhaustion or slippage. All this struggle is keeping me mentally agile.

The second is… oh, shoot, I forgot the second.

It’s summer, so I go out in the morning and painting for a few hours. Then I head home and open my gallery. It’s exactly the right amount of time for a good start. Last week I painted with Ken DeWaard. I painted an absolute stinker. This week, Björn Runquist and I have been practicing our chip shots together and mine have gotten better.

Spring Greens, *8X10, oil on canvasboard, $522 unframed.*

“How can you be rusty?” my husband, who’s a bass player, asked me. “Isn’t painting a mental skill?” Painting and music are both combinations of the mental and the physical, and the two are closely intertwined.

Are my painting starts perfect? Heck, no. Do they show promise? Yes.

Oh, yeah, that was my second point: it doesn’t matter if my blog or paintings are good or bad. They won’t get better unless I actually work on them.

July 6, 2022July 8, 2022

Change is an inevitable part of growth, but it’s not easy

We like certainty, but plans are to some extent illusory; things can and do change in an instant.

Sunset sail, 16X20, oil on canvas, Carol L. Douglas, available.

I’ve noticed a strange split this year—my east coast workshops are sold out, and my western ones are languishing. To be completely accurate, my Acadia workshop has sold out 1.5 times, because as people made plane and car reservations, they realized the difficulty and expense of travel to smaller markets. They dropped out and were replaced by others on my waiting list. I’m extremely blessed to have had a waiting list.

That list is now exhausted. I have a last-minute opening at my Acadia Sea & Sky workshop (July 31-August 5, 2022), because one of my students is waiting on a nitrogen oxide sensor and microchip for his GM truck. As GM has nearly 100,000 vehicles sitting in lots waiting for microchips, my optimism is dimming. I told him I’d ask if anyone wants his seat, so if you’re interested in a last-minute jaunt to Maine, let me know.

Owl's Head Early Morning, 8X16, oil on canvas, available.

This strange year, by the way, is not limited to just me, or to the painting workshop market. I’ve talked to people across the tourist industry in England and Maine and heard much the same laments. There’s an international labor shortage and things are still topsy-turvy from COVID.

It’s not that business is down—it’s not—it’s that it’s spotty and weird. We each have our own explanation. I’m hearing a lot about travel concerns, particularly the cost of rental cars. Another teacher says Zoom is killing his workshops. It’s easier to stay home and learn on one’s laptop.

Skylarking 2, 18X24, oil on linen, available.

At this point in the summer, my workshop schedule should be set in stone, but instead I’ve been dithering about my western workshops. After much agonizing (and advertising) I’ve decided to cancel Steamboat Springs and Cody.

That leaves only Gateway to the Pecos Wilderness, August 28-September 2. I kept it because it’s accessed through a major airport (Albuquerque), where I’ve found car rentals to be manageable.

Equally importantly, Our Lady of Guadalupe Abbey, which has inexpensive accommodations, did not burn down in the Hermit’s Peak wildfires this spring. I wish that last sentence was a joke, but this year has been a wild ride.

Beautiful Dream, 12X16, oil on canvasboard, available.

Lastly, there’s my second watercolor Age of Sail workshop aboard the schooner American Eagle, September 18-22. Although I’d have said Captain John Foss was irreplaceable, he’s made a mighty good stab at it in his replacement, Captain Tyler King. Tyler has the same equable temperament and top-notch sailing skills as John. When Tyler turns 70, I’ll be 107, and it will be time for both of us to retire.

Change is, of course, an inevitable part of growth, but it’s not easy. We like certainty, but plans are to some extent illusory; things can and do change in an instant. By not traveling so much in September, I’m making room for other opportunities. I can hardly wait!

July 4, 2022July 8, 2022

Happy Independence Day!

In just four years, we’ll be celebrating the 250^th anniversary of our grand social contract. Here’s a challenge to you to paint what challenges us.

Breaking Storm, 48X30, oil on linen. Available. Apparently, every time I paint the flag it involves a boat.

In just four years we’ll be celebrating the 250^th anniversary of our grand social contract, the United States. At my age, it’s not unreasonable to wonder if I’ll make it. I have no doubts about Uncle Sam; he’s tough.

I was 17 at our bicentennial. The world should have been my oyster, but that wasn’t exactly how it played out. My older sister and brother had died in two separate, horrific accidents. Every memory from the time is tinged in bleak.

Six bucks a pound, 12X16, was painted in 2020 when lobster dropped to that price. It was $7.70 on my local dock on Friday, at the same time that diesel fuel has doubled in price. Not everyone is getting rich in the current inflation spiral.

However, I loved history, and I spent lots of time with people much older than me, people who decorated their homes with antiques, debated the strategies of the Civil War, and pored over Eric Sloane books.

I never believed that there was any hope I’d live long enough to see our semiquincentennial (my beloved siblings having set such bad examples), but I’ve never doubted our nation’s fundamental toughness. We’ve been through far worse—civil war, repeated cycles of boom and bust, political corruption, world war.

Striping, 6X8, oil on canvas, available.

Interestingly, we’ve never suffered a famine. The economist Amartya Sen has argued pretty persuasively that famine and democracy are inconsistent with each other. Famine occurs not only from a lack of food, but from inequalities in the food-distribution systems. While the Dust Bowl and the Year Without a Summer produced local hardship, people could and did vote with their feet.

When I hear young people talk about us having approached the ‘limits’ of democracy, I remind them that, as they love to eat, they have a strong interest in preserving democratic institutions.

Safety check, 6X8, oil on canvas, long gone to another home.

At 17, I’d have been surprised by the issues that convulse us today—not because they’re so different, but because they’re so familiar. I have a foster brother who came out as gay in the late 60s, I am from a multiracial city, I lived in a Jewish neighborhood, and abortion has been legal in New York since 1970. Race, religion, sexual preference and abortion are discussions that have been going on for my whole life. The difference is the bandwidth they take up today. We had just exited the Vietnam War at the time of the Bicentennial, and that was where our hearts and minds were concentrated.

However, there is a difference, and it has to do with our reaction to violence. In May, 1970, the National Guard fired on anti-war rioters and killed four students at Kent State. The nation was convulsed, and that event galvanized anti-war opinion. Last week, 53 illegal migrants died in an overheated tractor-trailer in Texas and we just hunker down and wait for the next catastrophe. We’re inured to death, which is a very frightening thing.

I don’t want to add to the ugliness of the world, but I do think it’s time to think about bigger issues. The problem is that social-justice art doesn’t pay, which is why I have a storage-room full of the stuff. But sometimes these things need to be painted.

My friend Mark suggested I create a challenge to artists to paint about social justice, and to post their work publicly. To this end, I have created a public group is on Facebook, here. I ask just three things:

The work be genuine painting, not just billboards of angry words;
We must respect differing opinions and try to understand the thinking that went into work with which we disagree;
No political arguments; if you feel strongly, paint your feelings, don’t engage in verbal invective. I’ll just delete the comments.

And on that note, happy Independence Day! Enjoy your cookout!

July 1, 2022July 8, 2022

An unknown woman who changed art history

Behind every successful man is a woman, they say. She’s not always his wife.

Portrait of Johanna Bonger, 1905, Johan Cohen Gosschalk

Johanna Gezina Bonger is an unknown name to most of us. She was described by those who knew her as ‘cheerful and lively’ and ‘smart and tender’, and her remaining portraits depict a woman of grace and intelligence. For her times, that would have been enough, but she also changed the course of art history.

Johanna was born in 1862 in Amsterdam to a large middle-class family. Unusually for the time, she pursued higher education, including a stint at the British Museum library. She became an English teacher, which is where her story would have ended had she not met one Theo van Gogh. She rejected his first proposal, an indication that she was a woman who knew her own value. A year later, she said yes.

Portrait of Theo van Gogh, 1887, Vincent van Gogh, courtesy Van Gogh Museum

Theirs was a sadly short marriage, lasting less than two years before Theo died of what was recorded as dementia paralytica, a symptom of syphilis. Theo certainly didn’t transmit it to his wife, who lived a long and productive life. The couple had one son, named Vincent after his uncle.

Theo’s death left Johanna and her infant child relatively impoverished. Their assets were their Paris apartment and around two hundred paintings by her late brother-in-law, Vincent van Gogh.

Van Gogh’s legacy as a painter was not yet established. The critic Albert Aurier, who was his greatest champion, died suddenly of typhoid in 1892. Van Gogh’s former friend, artist Paul Gauguin, was disinclined to help the young widow market his late competitor’s work. Although today we think of van Gogh as the primary figure in Post-Impressionism, at the time he was on the fringes of acceptability. Most art experts thought his pictures were worthless, and told her so.

Johanna van Gogh-Bonger with son Vincent Willem, 1890, Raoul Saisset, Paris

Thankfully, Johanna ignored them. She moved back to the Netherlands, opened a boarding house, and began to tirelessly promote Vincent’s work. For extra income, she translated short stories from French and English. Meanwhile, she raised a toddler.

“Mrs Van Gogh is a charming little woman,” wrote the now-forgotten painter Richard Roland Holst, “but it irritates me when someone gushes fanatically on a subject she knows nothing about, and although blinded by sentimentality still thinks she is adopting a strictly critical attitude. It is schoolgirlish twaddle, nothing more. The work that Mrs Van Gogh would like best is the one that was the most bombastic and sentimental, the one that made her shed the most tears; she forgets that her sorrow is turning Vincent into a god.”

Her son Vincent was 11 when Johanna married painter and art critic Johan Cohen Gosschalk, who shared her appreciation for her late brother-in-law. He helped her organize an exhibition of van Gogh’s paintings at the then-new museum of modern art in Amsterdam, the Stedelijk. Johan died after a decade of marriage, and Johanna then organized a retrospective of his works.

Before her own death, Johanna arranged for her late husband to be exhumed and reburied in France with his brother so that the inseparable pair could lie together in eternity. Photo courtesy Yannbee Dutch Wikipedia.

Through her second widowhood, Johanna continued to tirelessly promote Vincent. She arranged showings of his works and translated and published the brothers’ correspondence. The Letters of Vincent van Gogh established his reputation as a suffering genius. By saving and selectively showing his works, over and over, Johanna created the modern myth of Vincent van Gogh, which in turn influenced 20^th century art in incalculable ways.

Johanna lived to age 62, working on the van Gogh letters right to the end. But as important as her art legacy is, her personal legacy is also arresting. Her grandson Theo was executed as a resistance fighter during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. Her great-grandson, also called Theo van Gogh, was a filmmaker who was murdered by an extremist for making a movie with Ayaan Hirsi Ali that criticized the treatment of women in Islam. Courage and vision run in that family.

June 29, 2022July 8, 2022

What’s a poor artist to do?

Perhaps my dream is telling me I ought to paint about something more serious than the beauty of nature.

The Third of May, 1808, 1814, Francisco Goya, courtesy the Prado.

I am seldom engaged by the news, but the death of 51 smuggled illegal migrants in a tractor-trailer in Texas has shattered my calm. It’s not just the absolute horror of the end of their lives, or the inhumanity of whatever monster left them to die. I subscribe to three different news feeds. In each of them, the story was buried somewhere below Ghislaine Maxwell’s sentence, SCOTUS protests, and the trial in Washington. That’s callous.

There was a time when this story would have resulted in a national soul-searching. In a nation where mass murder is no longer remarkable, I guess it no longer matters. I’m not interested in casting blame for it, by the way, but I sure wish there was a way we could guarantee it won’t happen again.

Charles IV of Spain and His Family, 1800–01, Francisco Goya, courtesy the Prado.

Last night I dreamed about that most remarkable and revolutionary painter, Francisco Goya. He was a professional success, being named Primer Pintor de Cámara to the Spanish court. That was the very top of the heap for Spanish painters. His reputation was based on royal portraits and Rococo decorative arts. Had he stopped there, he would have probably been remembered as a second-rate Diego Velázquez, because, frankly, there’s nothing unique about his court painting.

And then came the Peninsular War, with Spain, Portugal and Britain attempting to stymie Napoleon’s imperial ambitions in the Iberian Peninsula. It was seven years long, it was bitter and bloody, and it was the first war in which guerrilla warfare played a major role. It left Spain and its institutions in ruin. The violence and instability didn’t stop with the end of the war, either. A long-running civil skirmish then erupted.

Plate 47 from The Disasters of War: Así sucedió (This is how it happened). Murdered monks lie by French soldiers looting church treasures, Francisco Goya, courtesy the Prado.

Goya remained in Madrid during the war, which affected him profoundly. He never wrote or spoke of his feelings; instead, he produced the shocking Disasters of War series. It was so explosive that it wasn’t published until 35 years after his death. He also painted two paintings about the invasion, The Second of May 1808 and The Third of May 1808 (at top). The latter is one of the most famous canvases ever painted on the impact of war.

He didn’t reserve his criticism for the French, either. The Caprichos and Los Disparates etching series are about the superstition and folly of his fellow Spaniards. In fact, his entire output from this period is troubled and desperate, heavy on metaphor and allusion.

The Dog, c. 1819-23, Francisco Goya, oil mural on plaster transferred to canvas, courtesy the Prado.

At the age of 72, Goya moved into a two-story house outside Madrid called Quinta del Sordo. Here he painted a series of murals on the walls, now known as the Black Paintings. These include The Dog, now considered the precursor of modern art. Goya never meant for anyone to see these paintings; he lived in total isolation and they weren’t removed from the walls and exhibited until 50 years after his death.

I’m no Goya—for one thing, I’m an irrepressible optimist. (That’s easier when you live in the fat and sassy United States instead of troubled 19^th century Spain.) So why did I dream about him? Perhaps my reverie is telling me I ought to paint about something more serious than the beauty of nature. I shrink from examining the pain of those poor sufferers in Texas too closely, but, for heaven’s sake, someone needs to.

June 27, 2022January 10, 2023

Monday Morning Art School: the four steps of landscape painting

Being technically accurate frees up your subconscious mind to analyze and interpret what you see.

Observation

I once took an artist on a long loop to see all my favorite painting sites here in midcoast Maine. “But there’s nothing to paint,” she wailed. She was suffering an extreme case of sensory overload. We all experience this to some degree when we’re forced to buckle down to work. We’re asking ourselves to choose one subject among an infinite number of possibilities. And the obvious and iconic may not make the best (or most interesting) painting.

We all want to jump quickly into painting, but the better path is to spend some time relaxing and looking. I prefer to do this with a sketchbook and a lawn chair. If you’ve spent 10 minutes just drinking in the beauty, and then do four thumbnails of different scenes, you haven’t ‘wasted time.’ You’ve saved yourself immeasurable amounts of work on mediocre paintings, by answering the following questions:

Where does the visual strength in this composition lie?
How can the picture plane be broken into light and dark passages?
How can I crop my drawing to strengthen the composition?

Measurement

At some point, you need to get precise. Fast, loose painting rests on a base of good drawing. If you haven’t been taught to measure with a pencil, start here, here and here.

People tell me all the time, “I can’t draw a stick figure.” It depresses me, because drawing is a technical exercise, and anyone can learn it, just as they learn to write or do arithmetic.

I recommend the book Sketching from Square One to Trafalgar Square, by Richard E. Scott. It’s a comprehensive introduction to drawing from observation. Books and classes that focus on the interpretive side of drawing are not useful for the artist who needs to get things right, so before you sign up, make sure that teacher, video, or book is actually teaching drawing, not some form of self-analysis with a pencil.

Interpretation

Being technically accurate, oddly enough, frees up your subconscious mind to analyze and interpret what you see. We all paint through the filter of our own experience, values and aspirations. That’s why one artist will edit out the power lines and trash cans on a street scene, and another will focus on them.

But there’s a deeper level at which this happens, and that’s in the colors, forms and shapes themselves. They’re tied to your subconscious. Within the rubric of ‘good composition’ or ‘good taste’ are infinite variations. What you perceive is highly individual, so your interpretation will also be individual.

Reiteration

The first three phases are all essentially input-identifying, measuring, and analyzing the subject you’re painting. The final business of producing a work of art is collecting all that input and restating it on your canvas or paper. If you’ve done the first three steps conscientiously, this last step should be relatively relaxed and free. It should also go quickly. Your own ‘handwriting’, in the form of brush or pencil work, will be unfettered and loose.

This post was originally published in August, 2021, but I thought it was worth restating.

June 27, 2022July 8, 2022

Monday Morning Art School: fat over lean, what does it mean?

Mastering fat-over-lean will remove the need for varnishing and ensure a long life for your paintings.

Ottawa House, oil on canvas, available, is going in my gallery this summer.

There are three fundamental truths of oil painting, which are:

Big shapes to small shapes
Darks to lights
Fat over lean

The first one is more about how to think than about the technical aspects of oil paint. The second is a response to white paint’s infinite ability to dilute darker shades. The third is really the most difficult one to master, and the one that has long-term archival implications.

Belfast Harbor, oil on canvas, available, is also going in my gallery this summer.

The business of laying down paint is a craft, one that’s been developed over millennia. It’s possible to take this craft to new places, but only on a firm foundation of technique. That doesn’t mean that things don’t change; if they didn’t, we’d all be still painting encaustic funerary portraits a la the Romans. But there is still broad consensus on how oil paint is applied.

Fat-over-lean developed to prevent two problems: sinking color and cracking paint emulsion. The first is that dullish grey film that develops over paint that’s overthinned with solvent. Cracking paint doesn’t usually appear until after the artist is dead but is a major issue in some masterpieces.

Some manufacturers of alkyd mediums argue that the fat-over-lean rule no longer applies. I take this with a grain of salt. It’s a familiar argument to conservators now trying to fix 20^th century masterpieces that were painted with zinc oxide, once considered a great substitute for lead white. It takes time for problems to appear in paintings, time that’s measured in decades, not years.

Owl's Head, 11X14, oil on canvas, available.

Fat over lean sounds simple, but the application is tricky. By ‘fat’ we mean the medium—either commercially-mixed mediums or drying oils like linseed, poppy or walnut. Remember that the paint itself contains some of this medium as a binder, usually in the form of linseed oil. By ‘lean’ we mean the pigment and a solvent, usually odorless mineral spirits (OMS), or, if there are unreconstructed traditionalists out there, turpentine.

The usual way to achieve this is by cutting the initial underpainting layer with OMS. Since it evaporates, it leaves a thin layer of paint on the surface. As you develop additional layers, increase the amount of paint and, ultimately, medium.

Drying oils don’t evaporate, they oxidize. That means they stay there, bonded with oxygen, creating a new chemical structure on the surface of the paint. This can be extremely durable, when done on a proper lean base.

In plein air, this process is usually cut back to two or three steps: an underpainting cut with OMS, a layer that’s pure paint, and then possibly a detail layer cut with medium on the top. However, in more complex paintings with more layers, the shift from lean to fat can be more gradual.

Vineyard, 30X40, oil on canvas, available. In larger works, the shift from lean to fat is more gradual.

Either way, you want the bottom layers to have more OMS and less oil and the top layers to have more oil and, hopefully, no OMS at all.

Another way to get there—less accepted—is to use only painting medium, starting with almost none in the bottom layers and building more and more oil into the layers as you develop the painting. However, the vast majority of painters start with thin underpainting as a means of sorting out their ideas. For them, there’s little advantage to this method.

Many painters never use medium at all. I use very little myself. I like Grumbacher’s traditional oil painting mediums (labeled I, II, and III), but the looser my method has become, the less I use at all. It’s almost always just refined linseed oil, since I can fly with it.

June 21, 2022August 24, 2022

Gone sailing

Sailing is a great disperser of cares.

Breaking Storm, oil on linen, available. *That’s of course* American Eagle *in the starring role.*

By the time you read this, I’ll be sailing in Penobscot Bay, teaching my first workshop of the season aboard the schooner American Eagle. Between the pressures of work and some personal issues, I’ve been struggling since I got home from walking across Britain. Sailing is just the tonic I need right now.

Occasionally, someone will tell me that they suffer terribly from mal de mer and ask me for suggestions. There are better medications available these days, but if you really can’t look at a glass of water without getting queasy, you’re better off just taking a different kind of workshop.

But if you’ve got the stomach for it, sailing is a great disperser of cares. You’re at one with the boat; you have to be, as ignoring her swings and rolls will cause you to fall down. That puts you totally in the moment, watching the sails, the waves, the shifts in air, and being an active part of the amazing complexity of 19^th century transport technology. Sail power is the original renewable energy resource, but the boat doesn’t go if we don’t help. Someone has to hoist those sails, and we’re it.

Schooners are defined not by their hull shape but by their rigging; they’re fore-and-aft rigged on two or more masts, with the foremast generally shorter than the mainmast. They were the workhorses of the preindustrial sea, designed mainly for fishing and to move cargo. The overwhelming majority of them were never meant as passenger boats. The whole Maine windjammer thing was an impossible idea realized by people who primarily wanted to preserve and sail these big, beautiful beasts. The best way to do that turned out to be to operate them for the tourist trade.

One of these people is Captain John Foss, who restored American Eagle and sailed her for 37 years. He’s passed the wheel to Captain Tyler King. I’ve sailed with Tyler, and he’s a nice young man who clearly knows what he’s doing. I’m quite confident Tyler won’t hit anything, but I’ll sure miss the old gaffer. But as they say, the only constant in this world is change.

I won’t be back until Saturday, so there will be no blog post here on Friday. But on Saturday afternoon, I’ll open my gallery at 394 Commercial Street, Rockport, for the first time this year. It’s going to be a soft opening (meaning I don’t have my act together) but I sure would enjoy seeing you if you want to stop by.

June 17, 2022July 7, 2022

Alone or apart?

A painting class or group is good for your mental health.

Painting aboard American Eagle last September.

I’m puzzling out a problem, so I’ve been peppering Ken DeWaard with texts. It’s just as likely to be Bobbi Heath, Jane Chapin or Eric Jacobsen on the receiving end of one of these barrages, but it was Ken’s unlucky week. They’re all smart cookies whom I trust with my confidences—in short, my friends. And how do I know them? Through plein air painting.

Painting is a fundamental contradiction in work style. It’s solitary, but it’s also a form of communication. Most artists I know are sociable beings, but we’re required to spend long hours alone to achieve our goals. That push and pull can be tough on the psyche.

Main Street, Owl's Head, available, click for details. I started this painting with Eric Jacobsen.

Artists invented work-from-home, so a study that analyzed the effects of work-from-home during the pandemic should be of particular interest to us. The majority of people working remotely said they experienced adverse impacts on their mental health, including isolation, loneliness and difficulty separating from the job at the end of the day.

The workplace is a strong influence in modern culture. We no longer live in a society that’s village- or church-centered. Work takes up the biggest part of our waking lives. Often, people struggle to make and maintain friendships outside of the formal workplace, especially those who are socially-anxious or buried under family responsibilities. Work colleagues often share the same background, education, interests and values. They may not be our closest friends, but they usually understand us.

Mountain Fog, available, click for details. I painted this with Sandra Hildreth.

When one paints full time, work friendships are far harder to create. Yet there are times when only a colleague or peer gets it. Facebook is a poor substitute for that kind of conversation.

When I moved from Rochester to Maine, my former students wanted to keep painting together. They formed a group and called themselves Greater Rochester Plein Air Painters. That’s since morphed into a dynamic, active painting group with a few hundred members. It couldn’t have happened had I stayed in Rochester, because as their painting teacher I stood in the way of creating a peer group.

Quebec Brook, available, click for details. I also painted this with Sandra Hildreth.

However, people make lasting friendships in painting classes. I still have friends from my student days, and I’m blessed with students who like and support each other outside our classes and workshops.

A group or class can be healthy, but it also has the potential to be subtly overwhelming. Groupthink is the tendency of members of small, cohesive groups to value consensus over truth. That can stifle artistic development. If the ‘stars’ of your group all paint exactly the same way, you might be in a group or class where conformity is too strong a value. The answer, of course, is to find a different class or group, and luckily, that’s not too difficult—they’re everywhere!

June 15, 2022July 7, 2022

Buying a painting is a good hedge against inflation. Seriously.

Chosen wisely, a painting is a durable asset that will increase in value over time.

Spring Greens, 8X10, oil on canvas, click for more information.

If you were in midcoast Maine on Monday, you might have heard my yelp as I cashed out a 16-pound bag of Purina kibble. I checked to see if I’d accidentally scanned it twice. No, it really was $26.48.

I’ve been following the current crisis, of course. I know gasoline is over $5. I’m getting regular pings from Discover telling me, “One of your recurring charges seems different” as they all go up. But sometimes it takes a single purchase to bring home the enormity of the problem, and dog food was it.

Apple Tree with Swing, 16X20, oil on canvas, click for more information.

This all seems sadly familiar. Inflation, a GDP contraction, whiffs of a bear market—“it's all a bit 1970s, but without the decent tunes,” wrote the gossip columnist Steerpike.

There are few sure-fire inflation hedges, but the worst thing to have is money in the bank—especially when it’s earning no interest (which is different from the 1970s). Some of us are investing in groceries, but for those who are a little more flush, art is a recognized inflation hedge.

“Art gives its owners the pleasure of looking at it on their wall, and no rate of inflation can take that away. It is both an investment and a form of consumption, and the latter is quite protected against any macroeconomic conditions. When all else fails, spending money is one surefire inflation hedge. Art also happens to be a durable asset, so the expenditure is not entirely wasteful,” wrote Tyler Cohen of Bloomberg.com.

Bracken Fern, 9X12, oil on canvas, click for more information.

This of course requires choosing wisely. Original art by known artists of quality are a different kind of art from mass-market prints of dubious quality. (I’m afraid that here is where NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, will reveal their true worth. In the end, they’re just an ownership record of limited edition digital ‘prints’, not significantly different from the giclee prints we were all hawking a few years ago.)

The problem, of course, is that for every winner who picked up a Van Gogh when he was just an unknown crazy guy, there is a loser who bought art that sank into obscurity. How do you tell the difference? The art market is both excruciatingly logical and highly subjective.

Apple blossom time, 9X12, oil on canvas, click for more information.

Educate yourself. Identify artists you love and learn more about them. Are they showing and selling in good venues? Do they have a social media presence? Ten years ago, I’d have said that their gallery representation was a good indicator, but the internet has changed that. In the end, it’s not just about the talent of the painter, but about marketing as well. Van Gogh might never have become famous had his brother’s widow, Johanna van Gogh-Bonger, not tirelessly marketed him after his death.

Of course, if making money is your only consideration, you’re still best off taking all your spare pennies and buying an index fund. Nothing beats equities. But let’s be real here—none of us are shoveling every spare dollar into the future, and art will have a better return than other durable assets like a car, a refrigerator, or a washing machine—assuming those are durable in the first place.