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Author: Carol L. Douglas

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There’s a change in the weather

The stark geometry of dying autumn is compelling, but I think the weather is trying to kill me.

Beauchamp Point, 12X16, oil on canvasboard, $1449 framed, is available at my show at Camden Public Library.

This is the most dangerous time of year, and the most dangerous hour is the gloaming before dawn.

Nothing bad is going to happen. The real risk is that nothing will happen at all. I’ll look out the window at the ice crystals glittering on my car and tell myself it’s too cold to go out.

To date, I’ve been able to force myself into clothes and up Beech Hill. Minutes later, my heart is pumping. My extremities warm up. I become alive to the hush in the air and the strange and wonderful colors of decaying autumn. The sun breaks the lip of the ocean, flooding the sea with light. “It’s a beautiful day,” I say. It almost always is.

Watercolor in the snow presents its own problems, because it freezes. Painting by Carol L. Douglas.

In the north, it’s easy to be cowed by winter. It’s a terrifying force. It takes time to dress for it and the cold air can be painful. If I don’t go outside every morning, I’ll stay in the house complaining bitterly until Spring.

“There’s no bad weather, only improper clothing,” we like to say. While that’s true, it takes time to adjust your habits. We painted our last plein air class of the season yesterday. It was about 40° F. I placed us on the boat ramp at Owls Head, where the sun acted like a solar collector and nearby buildings were a wind-break. We’re all northerners, born and bred, and we were togged out in the usual layers. But after three hours, we were chilled through.

Buoy, unfinished demo on my easel. It’s the stillness of plein air painting that makes it so cold.

There’s something exhausting about cold weather. In summer I can paint outdoors all morning and come home to open my gallery without a pause. Yesterday, I was done in by 3 PM.

Still, I’ll continue to go out. The stark geometry of bare trees is compelling.

My unfinished start from Beech Hill on Wednesday. It’s harder to get anything done when you’re cold.

I heartily recommend experimenting with cold weather painting. My tips are few and obvious: dedicate an old jacket to being trashed with paint, wear layers, tuck chemical hand warmers into the backs of your gloves. Some artists carry an old bit of carpet to stand on, because your feet will fail you first. Eric Jacobsen carries a small brazier as a portable campfire.

On Wednesday, I painted with Eric. We were tucked in at the foot of Beech Hill, where the prevailing westerlies couldn’t touch us. But then the sun went in behind the clouds, and it was suddenly cold. Down the hill sauntered David Dewey, looking as untouched by the frosty conditions as an Alabama camellia. He’s been painting regularly at the top of Beech Hill right after dawn, he told us. He sometimes rides his bike up the steep incline of Beech Hill Road with all his gear. That would be impressive in a kid, and David is 75 years old.

And a start from last winter, of Harness Brook, painted with Ken DeWaard. If I can find it, I’ll finish it.

I have a million things to do today before my opening at Camden Public Library this afternoon. And I have at least an equal number of unfinished, unframed plein air paintings in the racks in my studio. But that one more painting is calling me.

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What do when you hit the doldrums?

Failure is the one sure sign that you’re experimenting and growing as an artist.

Beth Carr’s painting of her mother camping, from a recent class on integrating figure into landscape.

I’ve got a student who’s been down in the dumps for a few weeks now. “Everything I paint is terrible,” she said. “I throw it in the fire.” What do when you hit the doldrums, she asked the class.

First, be merciful to yourself. This student had major surgery a few months ago. She recently took a workshop that was a sucker-punch to her self-confidence. We all want to believe we’re like Bozo-the-Clown bop bags, able to spring back upright right after we take a hit. That’s not how we’re made. The body and mind both need time to recover from injury.

Lauren Hammond’s contre-jour fruit.

“Painting is hard,” her classmates reminded her. Yes, it’s also fun and immensely rewarding, but each time we pick up a brush it’s a personal battle between our inner vision and our own limitations. That gets exhausting at times.

Experience is a great teacher. For children, every setback seems catastrophic. Toddlers cry uncontrollably when toys are snatched from them. The circumstances change, but the reaction remains. “I will never pass my driver’s test!” “He asked her to the dance, and not me!”

Lorraine Nichols turned her drapery study into seasonal fun.

As adults, we watch these tempests with a certain amount of detached amusement. We empathize, having once been young ourselves. We also know how things level out over time. In fact, it’s through surviving these periodic disappointments that children learn resilience and tenacity.

The painting student is emotionally and intellectually adult, of course. However, he or she hasn’t been painting long enough to have racked up a history of bad paintings. That makes him feel those failures very deeply.

Cassie Sano painted my favorite blueberry barrens during plein air class.

When you’ve been painting a long time, you have an entire studio full of bad art. In fact, failure is the one sure sign that you’re experimenting and growing as an artist.

Sometimes this can stretch into weeks or even months. I’ve learned that it’s paradoxically a good sign—it means I’m integrating a new idea into my painting. Periodic lousy painting is, more often than not, a sign of intellectual ferment.

Sue Colgan-Borror’s contre-jour fruit.

I take refuge in routine. I always go in the studio at the same time, and I find that carries me through these uninspired times.

The support of other artists is invaluable. I have just three friends I can be brutally honest with about my paintings. They won’t lie to me and say they’re good when they’re not. They understand my values and goals. How do you find friends like these? Join a painting group, take a class, and cultivate friendships within the painting community.

Mark Gale is tuning in to Zoom class from wherever he lands in his Airstream camper. This is a ski tech in Telluride.

But if a person makes you feel bad when you’re working with them, steer clear of them no matter how witty or pleasant they may seem. There are too many people in the art world who prop up their own egos by scoring off others. Some are very subtle.

I have three openings in my Monday evening class (6-9 PM, EST) and either two or four in the Tuesday morning class (10 AM-1 PM). The new session starts next week and runs until the week of December 14. You can learn more here.

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Monday Morning Art School: simplification

This exercise, so critical to the success or failure of painting, is also important because it stresses the beauty inherent in all objects.

Prom shoes, 6×8, oil on canvas, Carol L. Douglas, $348 unframed

A major part of learning to paint is learning to see, and in the process, learning to draw. Part of this is not getting caught up in the details, but perceiving the big shapes and how they fit together. This is fundamental to how painting has been done since the middle of the 19th century.

This means we stop thinking of the object we’re looking at as things we can identify, and start to see it as a series of shapes, or more accurately, a light pattern. That’s very difficult at first. That’s why my students have studied draperiesand reflectionsover the past few weeks. They’re tough subjects, because they’re ever-changing. There’s no cheating with prior knowledge.

A rude little notan I did of my own house.

A few years ago, my student Sheryl drew the lobster-boat Becca & Meagan, which is moored year-round at Rockport Harbor. It’s painted a signature red, and I have painted and drawn it many times. Sheryl measured and drew, and I patiently corrected her. This went on for most of the class, until Sheryl finally insisted that I sit down and take measurements with her.

Whoops! It wasn’t Becca & Meagan at all. Its owner had launched a new boat, Hemingway. She was painted the same red and moored at the same buoy, but with her own unique configuration—“flat, wide, and deep on the keel,” as her builder said. I was so used to seeing Becca & Meagan that I had stopped really seeing at all. I was looking straight at one boat and seeing another.

Another rough notan of my house. That was back before my painter mislaid half our shutters.

Likewise, if I set a teacup in front of a student, he’s guided in part by what he knows about teacups—they’re rounded, squat and hollow. That gives him some checks on his drawing, but it also allows him to assume measurements and values. That can be very misleading.

He has to stop seeing a teacup and start seeing an array of shapes, planes and values. For most of us, that takes time. First, we must do a drawing to figure out what we’re looking at. Then, we need to ruthlessly simplify our drawing into a series of values. When we catch ourselves thinking “window” or “door” or “boat” or “tree”, we must stop and force ourselves to relabel those objects as merely light or dark shapes.

Yep, that’s a carrot, a lemon and an empty box. You can make an interesting painting out of anything, if you start with the simple shapes.

All objects can be reduced to a certain, limited number of shapes, which build on each other to make a whole. When you see things as abstract shapes, you expand your possible subject matter. A plastic pencil case is not, inherently, much different in shape from a shed. A shed, in turn has the same, simplified, forms as a house. If you start with a shed, you can ramp yourself up to Windsor Castle in no time.

Notanand all other value studies are, above all, about cutting the picture frame into shapes, what Arthur Wesley Dow called “space cutting.”

Dow wrote the definitive 20th century book on composition, which sets down fundamental principles still used today. He taught his students to restrict the infinite range of tonal values in the visible spectrum to specific values—perhaps black, white and one grey. He wanted students see all compositions as structures of light and dark shapes. The success or failure of a painting rests on whether those shapes are beautiful.

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Not in MY backyard!

The choice is a stark one: either we cut consumption, or we start supporting efforts to bring more green energy into our homes. Which will it be?

The Alaska Range, oil on canvasboard, 12X16, $1159 unframed.

I have driven along pipelines many times in my perambulations in the Great White North. I’ve found them interesting and no more intrusive than roads. The ones I saw in Canada were well-maintained. (That may not be true in California, which raises the question of the disconnect between our talk and actions.)

Nevertheless, pipelines are the safest way to move oil and gas in terms of human accident, and they have the lowest carbon footprint. Still, we’ve come to the corporate conclusion that they’re somehow bad.

Spring greens, 8X10, is one of the paintings that will be at Camden Public Library’s Picker Room this month.

I really dislike the look of modern windmills. I find big windmill farms intrusive, and I think they muck up the landscape. Luckily, there’s a lot of landscape out there, so I can easily find another ridge, mountain, or butte to paint. They look even more ungainly in the ocean, but there’s almost three times as much ocean as there is land on our planet.

Solar farms aren’t good-looking either, but they don’t stick up as high. One was built over a beautiful blueberry barren in Rockland last spring. I see it every morning when I walk up Beech Hill. At first, it annoyed me. However, one small blueberry barren will hardly be missed in Maine, and when I paint that view, I just leave it out.

High plains pasture, 9X12, oil on birch, $696 unframed.

Mainers will vote on Question 1 next week. This seeks to retroactively rescind permits for an energy corridor. I think that ‘no’ is the proper vote, for all the reasons set out in this clearly-reasoned essay by Tom Murley. However, most of my readers are not Mainers.

I mention it because it’s typical of how Americans approach the question of energy and the environment. We’re conflicted. We love clean energy in theory, but only as long as we don’t have to look at it or hear it.

Franklin Roosevelt was an ardent supporter of a hydroelectric project in Passamaquoddy Bay. It foundered on the distribution question, but today it would probably be blocked because of the potential impact on fish and animal populations. Still, it would have generated clean energy using tidal action. Congress yanked funding for it in 1936, but had it been built, Down East’s story would be very different today.

Spring Birch on Beech Hill, 8X10, is one of the paintings that will be at Camden Public Library’s Picker Room this month.

Americans are becoming gradually more energy efficient, but that has to be set against our rapidly-increasing population. (We experienced a dip in energy use in 2020, but that was due to COVID.) The bottom line is that we want our cars, our laptops, our televisions, our vacations, our flowers and food from the Southern Hemisphere, our pools and our central heat and air conditioning. We will make concessions to use less energy only when those concessions are not too expensive or inconvenient. Few of us want to go back to carrying water from the well, cutting firewood, or doing subsistence farming.

But while we’re not willing to cut consumption, we seem equally unwilling to tolerate intrusions to make or move energy with alternative technologies. My friend Garrett, a retired oilman, reminded me that fracking was introduced as a clean energy alternative. We oppose pipelines, power corridors, offshore windmills, and other efforts to cut greenhouse emissions because they will personally inconvenience us, or because we have a romanticized notion of the woods and the water.

The choice is a stark one: either we cut consumption, or we start supporting efforts to bring more green energy into our homes. Which will it be?

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Welcome back to real life

We’re just beginning to fathom the changes between the pre-COVID and post-COVID worlds.

The last time I was in the Picker Room of the Camden Public Library was for an opening for my pal Peter Yesis. That was the last opening the library had before COVID shut it down, programs coordinator Julia Pierce told me recently.

I’d recently seen my old friend Christine Long at an art opening in Rochester, NY. She’s an epidemiologist, and she muttered that she hoped she’d be able to retire “before COVID hits.” That gave me pause, because Christine is a very smart woman. Until then, I assumed COVID was going to be a flash-in-the-pan, like avian flu had been.

Termination dust, oil on canvasboard, 6×8, $435

It was, however, still a blip on the horizon on the evening of Peter’s opening. That night, Ken DeWaard introduced me to the ‘elbow bump.’ I thought it was funny, but I’ll probably never shake a stranger’s hand again. That’s only one small change between the eras we might call pre-COVID and post-COVID.

That week was the last week I spent in what I might call ‘old time.’ The next Thursday I flew to Argentina, and all hell broke loose. People have asked me why we still went when COVID was marching across the globe. The answer is, simply, that our own government said it was safe to travel. 24 hours later, they changed their minds.

Owl’s Head, 18×24, oil on linenboard, $2318

The calendar notation anno Domini (AD) tells us that something profound happened at that moment that changed the course of human history. No, COVID isn’t on the same scale as the birth of Christ, but it seems to have made lasting changes in our culture. We’re still just beginning to fathom what they are.

It’s both fitting and passing strange that I’m the first artist scheduled in what I hope will be a long, uninterrupted line of post-COVID openings at the library. My show is called Welcome back to real life and it will be up in the Picker Room for the month of November.

Belfast Harbor, oil on canvasboard, 14×18, $1594

The opening will be Friday, November 5, from 3:30 to 5:30 PM. The library asks that masks be worn, which is just one small way in which post-COVID life differs from what we knew before.

2020 was an unprecedented challenge for artists, with galleries closing and classes and workshops cancelled. It also created new opportunities. For example, I would never have taught online before. Now I actually prefer it to live classes. It’s an opportunity to work with students from all over the country, and it allows students to hear everything I say one-on-one to their classmates. That’s impossible in a large room or outdoors.

On that subject, my students reminded me yesterday that the new session starts the week of November 8. There are a few openings. My website is undergoing a redesign, which I don’t think will be finished by then, but you can get the general information here, and contact me here to register.

Welcome Back to Real Life; paintings by Carol L. Douglas
Camden Public Library Picker Room
55 Main Street, Camden Maine
Friday, November 5, 3:30-5:30 PM

The show is hanging through the month of November.

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Monday Morning Art School: The Canon of Human Proportions

Vitruvian Man, c. 1492, by Leonardo da Vinci.

Throughout history, artists have subjected the human figure to canons of proportion. That means they’ve overridden what they see, in favor of what they think is beautiful or graceful. In fact, in some cultures (classical India, for example), drawing from life was not considered an advantage. And until the age of photography, subjects like squirming infants were difficult to draw.

Every flourishing culture has developed its own canon of proportion. The best known examples are the art of ancient Egyptand classical Greece, both of which had rigid standards of what was true and beautiful.

Vitruvian Man, illustration in the edition of De Architectura by Vitruvius; illustrated edition by Cesare Cesariano, Como, Gottardus da Ponte, 1521

Marcus Vitruvius Pollio was a Roman architect and civil engineer whose ten-volume de Architectura profoundly influenced Roman building. He believed that beauty derived from nature, with universal laws of proportion and symmetry. He carefully measured the human (male) body, thinking it a model of natural proportional perfection. He demonstrated that the ‘ideal’ human body fitted into both a circle and a square, which illustrated the link between perfect geometry and the perfect body.

Leonardo da Vinci drew Vitruvian Man as a sort of rebuttal to this, since he knew there was no way the circle and square could have the same midpoint on the human form. He used his own measurements and idealized them into a system that’s written across his drawing.

His is, at least to modern eyes, a more beautiful scheme; compare it to an illustration from the 1521 version of de Architectura, which bears an uncomfortable resemblance to a crucified man.

The human measurements I learned as a child in mid-century America.

Fast forward to our own times and our own canon. We’re taught that the human form is between 7.5 and 8.5 heads tall. As a child, I learned that the midpoint of the body is the hipbone, that the line from top of head to chin equals the line from chin to nipple line, from nipple line to natural waist, from natural waist to hips, and then an equal distance from there to the feet.

This of course is the measurement of a long-limbed person. A stockier person will have a bigger head, and the measurement will be more like 7 figures tall.

Tableau Vivant by German actress Olga Desmond, c. 1908. I’ve taken the liberty of adding the hashmarks to demonstrate how variable those proportions are.

Of course, what is considered beautiful changes with the generations. Consider the figure of Olga Desmond, a German dancer who performed nude at the turn of the last century. Even making allowances for her head being tipped down, she is significantly large-headed and short-waisted compared to the ideal of the 20th century. Her legs are three head-units long, rather than four.

Idealized proportions are a useful guide, especially when you’re drawing people from imagination. I probably sketched them a few hundred times as a kid, before I had access to models. They’re also useful for checking your work. If your drawing seems way out of proportion, check it against this standard.

But relying on memorized proportions will lead to lazy, generalized, generic drawings. It’s far better to measure carefully.

This is especially true in our polyglot American culture. A society that idolizes both Emily Ratajkowski and Lil’ Kim has no rigid standards of beauty, and that’s a great thing. The only generalization you can make about Americans is that we’re, by and large, well-fed.

Reserve your spot now for a workshop in 2025:

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Generalization is a trap

In science or art, it’s always better to describe what you see, rather than what you think you know.

Figure painting by Carol L. Douglas

Somatotypingwas developed in the 1940s by psychologist William Sheldon. He sorted the human physique into three ‘somatotypes’:

  • Ectomorphs are tall, skinny, weak, and have low testosterone levels.
  • Mesomorphs are naturally hard and strong, with even weight distribution, muscular with weight training, thick-skinned, and have good posture with a narrow waist.
  • Endomorphs are fat, short and have trouble losing weight.

Sheldon didn’t stop there. He then concluded that:

  • Ectomorphs are intelligent, gentle and calm, but self-conscious, introverted and anxious.
  • Mesomorphs are competitive, extroverted, and tough.
  • Endomorphs are outgoing, friendly, happy and laid-back, but also lazy and selfish.
Figure painting by Carol L. Douglas
Ultimately, he decided that criminals tended to be ‘mesomorphic’—you know, the hard guys in film noir.

Somatotyping is now rightly dismissed as quackery verging on eugenics. But it did have an impact on policy worldwide, and is still in use today, in the variant called the Heath-Carter formula for measuring total body shape.

I can’t help but think his description of endomorphs was targeted at the millions of southern European immigrants who came to the US in the late 19th and early 20th century. They tended to be short and round. They didn’t match the northern European phenotype of long bones and narrow skulls.

Figure painting by Carol L. Douglas

Sheldon’s ideas were less of a theory than an assumption: that you can see a relationship between structure and behavior. We deny it, but we still think that way today. Yesterday, I watched a Labrador retriever wallow in a puddle. His owner proudly remarked that it was classic Lab behavior.

In fact, the greatest swimming dog I ever had was a Jack Russell terrier. Meanwhile, my friend Mary kept standard Poodles who hated water. Dogs have been closely bred for behavioral traits since they were first domesticated around 20,000 years ago. Yet they’re continuously acting outside the bounds of their so-called breed characteristics.

Never is this truer than with the humble apple. You can’t get it to breed to type. There are between 7,500 and 10,000 apple cultivars worldwide, depending on who’s counting. But apples must be propagated asexually, via grafting. Apples are extreme heterozygotes. Seedlings don’t run true to their parents. You might see a beautiful apple tree in the wild, take a bite of its lovely fruit and—blech! It’s mealy and indigestible.

Figure painting by Carol L. Douglas

In figure drawing, we use a variation of somatatyping when we idealize measurements. We sometimes teach that:

  • The average person is generally seven-and-a-half heads tall.
  • An ideal figure is eight heads tall.
  • An heroic figure is eight-and-a-half heads tall.

Those figures are based on the Nordic model, and they’re no more accurate than Sheldon’s somatotypes. It pays to paint what you see, not what you ‘know’.

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The power of affirmation

Left to their own devices, the voices in our heads take up a litany of “I can’t do this, I don’t know what I’m doing, all my work sucks.”

Glacier Cagliero from Rio Electrico, 12X16, oil on canvasboard, Carol L. Douglas, $1159 unframed

“At the core of true leadership is the idea that high value is placed on empowering people to become all that God has destined them to be,” said Pastor Bryan Carle this weekend. He went on to discuss how affirmation and validation are powerful tools to accomplish this.

To ‘affirm’ means to confirm or state positively. To ‘validate’ means to recognize, establish, or illustrate worthiness or legitimacy. “Affirmation is one of the most powerful aspects of the human experience,” said Bryan.

Fogbank, 14X18, oil on canvasboard, Carol L. Douglas, $1275 unframed

The power of words spoken over us was keenly demonstrated by my friend Helen, who’d been classified as ‘learning disabled’ as a child. Having taught her for many years, I know she was anything but slow. But when things got difficult, she would retreat into a shell of “I can’t do this; I’m stupid.” It was impossible to reach her when she got into that angry knot of self-loathing.

That doesn’t mean that classifications aren’t important in education; they obviously are. But we live up or down to the labels that others apply to us.

Helen tried to start a blog. I encouraged this by sharing it on Facebook. One of my friends sharply criticized Helen’s poor grammar and spelling. She never published her writing again. It was a loss to her, but an even greater loss to the rest of us. She had insights from the population permanently living in poverty. We frequently read writing about them, but seldom from them.

Beach Erosion, 8X10, oil on canvasboard, Carol L. Douglas, available through Ocean Park Association.

I never learned my multiplication tables. That and my gender, coupled with my apparent talents in the arts, morphed into a label of “she can’t do math.” It became part of my self-identity until I returned to college as an adult. There, I found that I loved mathematics, particularly calculus.

A lot of hay is made about the dumbing-down of modern education, but positive affirmation is a tool I would have welcomed in my school days. How much more helpful a kind word would have been than the ruler across my knuckles. (Yes, I’m really that old.) Kindness and support changes mindsets from “I can’t do this,” to openness.

Years of teaching have disabused me of the notion that some personalities make better painters than others. We all have experiences and traits that can contribute to great art. The only telling factors are a willingness to work hard and openness to correction. Ironically, many of the most talented students fail because they protect their little nut of competence too fiercely. They’re afraid their teacher will invalidate them as artists.

Bracken Fern, 9X12, oil on canvasboard, Carol L. Douglas, $869 in a gold plein air frame

There isn’t a painter alive who hasn’t entertained self-destructive thoughts. Left to their own devices, the voices in our heads take up a litany of “I can’t do this, I don’t know what I’m doing, all my work sucks.” It’s particularly easy to fall into this in painting, because we generally work alone. Moments of validation—sales and prizes—are all too infrequent.

If professional artists can feel invalidated and alone, how much harder is it for painting students? That’s why teachers should be more interested in pointing out what’s right than in belaboring what’s wrong.

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Monday Morning Art School: drapery

Drawing drapery isn’t a dated skill; it’s as fundamental to the t-shirts and skinny jeans we wear today as it was to the gowns, kirtles, jerkins, doublets and linen chemises of the 16th century.

Drapery study, Albrecht DĂźrer, undated.

I spent a lot of time painting the human figure at the Art Students League, but I never studied drapery, unless you count the drapes that might be behind a model or still-life. That’s typical, but unhelpful. In the real world, artists are far more likely to draw the clothed figure than the nude.

“The masters must be copied over and over again,” wrote Edgar Degas, “and it is only after proving yourself a good copyist that you should reasonably be permitted to draw a radish from nature.” In that spirit, I’ve illustrated this post with a series of drapery studies by the Renaissance master Albrecht Dürer. I suggest you copy them not on paper, but in creating a drape—and then draw from your draped copy.

Drapery study, Albrecht DĂźrer, 1506.

The t-shirts and skinny jeans we wear today are worlds apart from the gowns, kirtles, jerkins, doublets and linen chemises of the 16th century. Modern clothing is more formless and forgiving than ever. But the principles, regardless of the fabric, remain the same.

Wherever fabric is held down or comes into contact with the underlying support, it creates a pivot point. That point is a hub from which folds radiate. That’s easiest to see if you hold a towel in your hand and let it drape. Where you’ve pinched it is the hub from which all folds originate. If you hold the same towel in both hands and let it drape, you’ll see the collision of folds from two pivot points.

Drapery study, Albrecht DĂźrer, undated.

In clothing, there are often several points of contact, creating several different hubs. Across the back of a shirt, our two shoulder blades strain the cloth in opposition to each other. In jeans, our knees, ankles, derrieres and hipbones are all in contact with the fabric. Even in tight jeans, there will be folds, albeit subtle. Wherever the figure presses against the fabric, it makes a hub for folds.

A person and his clothing tend to move and act as one. Not only does our clothing conform to our bodies in the moment, it carries the memories of past movement. Think of the knees of your favorite jeans. That’s one reason it feels strange to borrow another person’s clothes, and why we develop old favorites we’re loath to get rid of.

This is my favorite of Albrecht DĂźrer’s drapery studies. Undated.

To draw folds accurately, you need to see them as having shape and volume. It’s useful to see each fold as having three surfaces: a top and two sides. The valley between folds is the base from which the folds arise. You may not always see both sides, because one might be folded back, but they’re always there.

It may be difficult to puzzle out whether you’re seeing the top or sides of a fold. The answer is really immaterial, as long as you’re drawing the fold as a three-dimensional object. Folds are infinitely variable, and sometimes the top will take the form of a sharp crease, or a side will disappear for a while. Even when that happens, bear in mind that you’re drawing a three-dimensional object. Folds are never simple lines drawn over the surface of fabric.

Like the rills on a hillside, folds have a way of transmogrifying into other shapes. They twist and turn and merge into other folds, or vanish entirely. It’s helpful to block out drapery as a whole before you start drawing. Just as if you were drawing a hillside, start by measuring the big shapes and checking angles.

In your first pass, don’t worry about subtleties of shading. Think of your this phase as a plan from which you’ll draw or paint. In other words, make it clear, concise, and accurate.

When you’ve finished, you can test the accuracy of your drawing by dropping a contour line across it. Imagine a bug crawling in a straight line from one side to another. Trace that line with your pencil. When your imaginary bug hits a fold, he’ll crawl into it and out the other side. If you get to a point where you can’t figure out where your bug should go, you’ve made a drawing error or been unclear. Go back and resolve that.

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Carry on!

You can’t always force yourself out of a difficult mood. However, that’s no excuse to not paint.

Fernald’s Neck, 9×12, oil on loose linen, available. When Ken Dewaard and I painted here last year, it was in a biting wind and with snowflakes. This week has been warm and sunny.

My painting pals Eric Jacobsen and Ken DeWaard have been at Cape Ann Plein Air, where they bagged a bouquet of prizes. Eric took Second Prize and Ken won Best Nocturne and the Artist’s Choice/Greg LaRock Legacy Award. Greg passed away unexpectedly last year. “As much as it was a huge honor to win this, it was the most difficult award I’ve ever had to accept,” said Ken.

Those prizes are a tremendous honor for my friends, but also for wee little Knox County, Maine, population fewer than 40,000. Of course, about half of these are artists. You can’t throw a cat here without hitting a painter. It’s an exhilarating milieu to live and work in. We learn from and influence each other. Thus are ‘schools’ of painting created.

Eric Jacobsen with his prizewinning painting.

As lovely as it was to have Ken and Eric gone, they were bound to come back sooner or later. With our various schedules, I haven’t painted with either of them in quite a while. This was a good week to rectify that, as the fall color is blazing and the light is clear and sweet. Of course, I can’t suddenly transform into a happy person on demand; I’ve been brooding after the death of my friend Helen.

On Wednesday, Ken and a few other friends and I painted together. I painted a contre-jurelandscape I’d had my eye on. I have no idea if it’s good or bad, because I haven’t even taken it out of its carrier.

I am a creature of process and routine. It both saves and exasperates me. “I should ask my boss for bereavement leave,” I told myself, and cackled. I’m self-employed and have built a life of tightly pressing commitments. It’s easier to carry through than to try to reschedule them.

You can’t always force yourself out of a difficult mood. However, that’s no excuse to not paint.

Ken DeWaard’s body of work for Cape Ann Plein Air.

Furthermore, there’s never a guarantee that what you paint will be good. That’s also no excuse. Anyone who paints in a disciplined manner will know there are periods when the well runs dry. There’s nothing to do but work through them. That’s one reason our studios are littered with unfinished paintings, false starts and bad ideas. It’s also why paintings are so darned expensive. You’re not just paying for that gem you love, but for all the experiments and tries that are lying on my studio floor.

The Nazis have many great things to answer for. One small thing was their corruption of the phrase Arbeit macht frei, which they emblazoned, with hideous cynicism, on the gates of Auschwitz and other Nazi concentration camps. It means “work sets you free,” and it was a horrible thing to say to slave laborers you intended to kill.

However, the underlying idea is in fact true. The repetition and structure of work can be redemptive. It pulls your conscious mind away from your troubles. That lets your unconscious mind do its job, which is to process emotions.