American Eagle Archives | Page 3 of 3

March 6, 2017

The Dog with Nine Lives

The Beggar of St. Paul, Carol L. Douglas, is a parable based on Watteau’s Pierrot, 1719. A younger Max was the model for the American dog who eats better than starving Africa.

While I was in the Bahamas my elderly Jack Russell terrier, Max, stopped eating and drinking. My husband, who professes to hate this dog, spent many hours tempting him with various delicacies. Nothing worked.

Jack Russell terriers are very long-lived. Our vet says the old man is nineteen. Since we got him second-hand, I can’t say for sure, but he’s slightly younger than our college-sophomore son.

In January, I thought for sure that Max was done for. I packed him up and took him to the vet to be put down. On the way, I stopped at the North End Shipyard, where I ran into Sarah Collins and Captain John Foss of the American Eagle. Neither had met Max before, but they came out to my car and said a kindly hello and goodbye to the old thing. When I got to the vet, they announced that Max’s wound had healed nicely, and he still had a few more miles to go.

That wasn’t the first time he’d fooled me. When he was a mere lad of 17, I took him in because he was having trouble breathing and was bloated in the midsection. I was sure he had a tumor. “He’s getting awfully fat,” the vet said. Oh, the indignities of middle age!

Max spends most of his working day in my studio.

But now he seems to be in renal failure. My goal is to let him slip away naturally, since he isn’t in pain and still seems to enjoy our company. To that end, I called the vet’s office to ask if they can help me when the time comes. Early March is no time to dig a hole here in the Northeast. They warned me that dying at home isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

Jack Russell terriers are ferocious little beasts. Max has killed an African Grey Parrot, two cats and innumerable songbirds, which he could pluck out of the air in his youth. I never left him with small children until after his teeth fell out.

That ferocity made him an exceptional guard dog. I am used to traveling alone to paint, and would often bring him with me. Compact, he would sleep in a tent with me or allow me to stash him in a van overnight while I couch-surfed. He would stand guard while I worked in isolated places. Nobody ever walked up to me without him knowing.

The last time I took him along was to Boothbay Harbor last spring, which is when I realized that his judgment was impaired. “I am not going in after you,” I told him repeatedly, but he still took outrageous risks for such an old dog.

When the model didn’t show up at the Art Students League, my daughter Julia and Max volunteered. Kathy Gulrich captured his wriggling in a wonderful chalk drawing.

On Friday, I made meatballs. I slipped a bit of raw meat to my ever-present sidekick. I watched sadly as he sniffed it, and then in considerable surprise as he ate it. Ultimately, he ate four ounces of the stuff.

Since then, he’s been eating small amounts and drinking chicken broth. I am not fooling myself into thinking that the old geezer is going to survive much longer, but he always surprises me.

If you’ve ever attended an old person, you know that death is not predictable. You can’t schedule it. Perhaps our inclination to euthanize our pets blinds us to that reality. But where there is life, there is hope. Sometimes it takes a frail old dog to remind us of that.

January 20, 2017

How to paint something that makes no sense

“Coal Seam,” by Carol L. Douglas

We’ve all had the experience of loving an abstracted landscape painting, only to finally visit the site on which it was painted and realize it was much more realistic than we’d thought. Visiting Ghost Ranch with Georgia O’Keeffe in mind is an excellent example. There are iconic views that make sense no matter who paints them, like Motif Number One in Rockport, MA. On the flip side, there are things that wouldn’t be believable even in the most realistic of styles.

This was the case with the coal seam I painted along the Red Deer River in Canada’s badlands. It’s small, it’s odd, and I like it, even though I’m still not sure I’m finished.

This is what my camera saw of the coal seam. It’s an excellent argument for plein air painting.

I didn’t finish the painting on-site because the vibrations from the high winds were making my easel unusable. I was shocked to look at my reference painting and see how bleached the place looks in a photo. Those seams of rock were a beautiful cross-play of color in real life.

“Goosefare Reflection,” by Carol L. Douglas

This summer I painted Goosefare Creek in Ocean Park, ME, which ended up being a similar abstraction. The Goosefare’s mouth changes course with every nor’easter that blows through. That means you can take any artistic liberty you want. I was interested in the sand and its reflection in the wide arc of the stream.

“Sunset off Stonington,” by Carol L. Douglas

Sunrises and sunsets sometimes seem artificial to me. The one above was painted from the deck of the American Eagle off Stonington, ME. I threw it down in disgust after touching up the colors last week, complaining that I had ruined it.

“What do you do with the ones you don’t like?” a friend asked.

“Swear and get back to work on them,” I answered.

In fact, after a few days not looking at it, I think the light and color are really quite accurate.

“Rain squall on Lake Huron,” by Carol L. Douglas

I had about fifteen minutes to limb out this storm on Lake Huron before the blowing rain emulsified my paint. Finishing it was just a matter of adding some final coverage. I wouldn’t do more with it, because even though it’s just a few brushstrokes, it tells the viewer everything he needs to know.

There’s something to be said for not jumping in too fast to ‘fix’ a plein air piece. You can easily destroy what’s quirky and wonderful about it because to your tired eyes it looks just wrong.

January 10, 2017

The meaning of blue: color temperature on a snowy day

“Lewis R. French raising her sails,” by Carol L. Douglas

I’m busy finishing plein air work from last season. Some of this needs nothing more than a few brush-strokes and a signature, some of it returned home as nothing more than color notes that need to be fleshed out into a painting.

That was the case with this small painting of the Lewis R. French raising her sails at Pulpit Harbor. I started this in the early morning, knowing I had only a few minutes to finish before the American Eagle sailed out. I probably did fewer than twenty brush strokes on site, but Sue Baines of the Kelpie Gallery saw something in it and urged me to finish it.

Normally, I trust my plein air sketches for color notes. In this case what I’d recorded didn’t match my emotional memory of the day, which told me that this had happened just after sunrise. So I heated up the lighting structure and it much more closely resembles the mood of that early morning in Pulpit Harbor.

“Doe drinking in the woods,” by Carol L. Douglas

Blue shadows on evening snow. (Carol L. Douglas)

I painted Doe drinking in the Woods years ago. It was a demonstration to my students on how the color of light works in practice. The setting and lighting were imaginary.

The photograph of footprints in the ice on a winter evening, above, clearly shows blue shadows across the snow. I think it also gives a sense of my frustration about the condition of the sidewalks.

The exception to the color-of-light rule happens in indirect light. There are many places where an ambient cloudy milkiness is the dominant weather condition. In it, both color temperature and contrast are muted.

Snow shovelers in a snow squall. (Carol L. Douglas)

A snowstorm is an exaggeration of indirect light. There are no shadows; there are merely objects in space. A snowstorm exaggerates atmospheric perspective, too, rendering even middle-distance objects indistinct and neutral.

Artists constantly check themselves against a construct called “color temperature.” There are warm and cool colors, and warm and cool variations within each color. A warm color gives us a sense of warmth and energy and tends to draw our eye, like the life preserver on my painting of the Cadet. A cool color recedes from the eye and gives us a sense of static coldness, like the underside of Rockwell Kent’s iceberg from yesterday.

I’ve written before about the color of light, and it’s one of the most important concepts in painting. The earth’s atmosphere bends light just like a prism does, so what you see is always tinted. Either the light is warm and its shadows cool, or the light is cool and its shadows warm. Which that is depends on the time of day and the season of the year.

In the wintertime, the sun barely crests the treetops here in the North. The ground is often covered with neutral white snow. That gives us textbook conditions to see light temperature in action, for the sun on the horizon always gives us warm light and cool shadows.

Blue shadows on evening snow. (Carol L. Douglas)

January 3, 2017

I’ve got a crush on every boat

It’s a start.

Yesterday I planned to stop in to the North End Shipyard to take a good look at the Jacob Pike, which I think I want to paint. From there I would go home and do an exercise painting the branches behind my studio.

It would be improper to poke about without saying hello to Shary Cobb Fellows (and her chocolate lab, Coco) in the office. Captain Linda Lee of the schooner Heritage was there. We chatted about the Jacob Pike’s history as a sardine carrier. It may have been a vacation day for many people, but for Captain Linda, it was another day in a new season of fitting out.

The “Jacob Pike” in drydock.

Sometimes what you need to do is just look, so that’s what I did. I looked at that old sardine boat from the front, the back, the propellers, and the top. While I was doing so, I ran into Sarah Collins from the schooner American Eagle. She was crossing the yard in search of wood filler. I talked with her as she sanded that young slip of a rowboat, Roscoe.

In November, Shary took a great photo of the sun rising over Owls Head. In the foreground, the little tug Cadet nestles against American Eagle; behind them is the Rockland light. Yesterday, I noticed that Cadet was back in the same place. That in turn reminded me that I had intended to paint that tugboat last summer; the idea had just gotten away from me.

Sarah Collins making everything ship-shape for next summer’s cruises.

Cadet was rebuilt over ten years by the American Eagle’s captain, John Foss. She was built in Kennebunkport, Maine, by Bernard Warner in 1935 or 1936 for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Captain John Foss wrote in 2011. “At some point she was sold to Ellis S. Snodgrass, who built the Cousins Island bridge in Casco Bay. The Cadet went on to be owned by Cianbro from 1969-1984 after which she was bought by William Clark as the Cadet Corporation in the Portland area. She was used last by John C. Gibson from 1984-1989.”

“Cadet” nestling up to the “American Eagle.”

Instead of my painting kit, I was traveling with my ancient dog. There would be no field painting with his help. But forget the study of the winter woods. I could paint the Cadet. I went back to my studio and started a small sketch. (Boats are complex; it will take me more than a day to finish it.)

As I drew, Pandora queued up Donovan’s Atlantis. That song combines the coolest groove with the stupidest lyrics. Yet, somehow, his mumbling about his “antediluvian baby” seemed perfectly appropriate to the Old Girl on my canvas. I laughed, and my groove was back.

November 28, 2016

In praise of ships’ cooks

The American Eagle’s stove.

A lot of my artist friends spent the weekend doing holiday painting sales. I’ve done this myself. Not everyone wants to go to the mall and brawl, but the idea of a National Day of Shopping is infectious. Selling paintings on Thanksgiving Weekend works.

However, I took the weekend off to celebrate in the Berkshires with family. Having taken no exercise and eaten way too well, I find myself going into the holiday home stretch six pounds heavier. I blame that on having a beautifully-appointed kitchen and way too many cooks.

Visitors often pronounce my kitchen in Maine poorly laid-out and equipped. There is only one work surface. It is near neither the stove nor refrigerator. I don’t care; it’s a light, bright space with running water and electricity. That makes it a great improvement over many people’s lot in life, and better than some places I’ve lived.

“Stewards of an Ocean Liner Above and Below Decks,” The Booklovers Magazine, May 1904.

Last June I sailed on the American Eagle out of Rockland. My purpose was painting, but I naturally gravitated—as most passengers seemed to—to the galley. As I made pies last Wednesday, my thoughts kept returning to how hard each task would be on board a boat. Imagine, for example, trying to put a raw pumpkin pie into a hot oven when the whole room is moving.

I have a thing for woodstoves, and the heart of the American Eagle’s galley is its Atlantic Fisherman woodstove, made in Nova Scotia. It has a rail and spring system to stop pots from flinging themselves off the stovetop in heavy weather. It also is connected to the boiler that supplies hot water to the showers.

Otherwise it works like a normal woodstove. It was fired up each morning at 4:30 by cook Matthew Weeks. In addition to regular meals for passengers and crew, he and Sarah Collins turned out pies and cakes.

Today my biggest concern is to keep my weight under control. At the time the Eagle was built, Americans were not worried about stoutness; they were concerned with acquiring, processing and storing enough food to power their highly-physical lifestyles. That was as true on boats as on land.

Pies have been known since antiquity, with both the Greeks and Romans having written recipes for their pastries. The medieval coffyn was a great way to make food in the most primitive conditions; it can be baked with a minimum of fuss and you can throw almost anything into it. Most importantly, it’s a convenience food; you can take it with you.

1870s galley stove on board the USS Constitution, Photo of the galley stove taken between 1897 and 1905 by Thomas E. Marr. (USS Constitution Museum)

In our culture, it’s a minor miracle when one can actually make a pie from scratch, never mind that it’s done with a food processor, mixer, electric stove and refrigerator. Now imagine doing that in a cramped, rolling galley, with very little room to maneuver, and an oven in which you must control the temperature by tossing blocks of fuel in.

At least Sarah and Matthew don’t generally need to worry about scurvy. Roughly 30 million people bobbed across the ocean to the Americas between 1836 and 1914, and all of them needed to eat on the way. To travel that route under sail took weeks, sometimes months. With the advent of the steamship, the time was steadily cut down. By the 1950s it was done in about a week.

My own grandfather came to this country in 1919 on the ocean liner S.S. Caserta, which had recently demobbed as a troop boat. It was capable of carrying 1200 passengers at a clip. Even at that size, the cooks were still working with woodstoves, using food and fuel they’d stowed before their voyage.

I tip my hat to the humble ships’ cooks who fed our ancestors. Without them, none of us would be here today.