Carol L. Douglas Archives | Page 11 of 75

July 18, 2016

Augmented reality

Rachel Carson sunset, 10X8, oil on canvas

Pokémon Go has taken my family by storm. It has its critics, but I love the way it blurs the lines between reality and fantasy. They call this “augmented reality,” and I’m all for it. After all, augmented reality is what we artists are supposed to be all about.

I left home yesterday to start seven days of augmenting reality the old-fashioned way: with a brush. Until Wednesday, I’ll be in Ocean Park, ME’s Art in the Park. On Wednesday I decamp to Castine Plein Air.

That’s one full car.

While I’m only likely to paint ten paintings over the week, I can’t say for sure what sizes they’ll be, or in what colors, or even what subjects I’ll choose. I have a larger-than-usual assortment of frames and boards with me, plus clothes, paints and tools. My little Prius seems packed for any eventuality, but I still managed to spill ketchup on my one good shirt yesterday.

Ocean Park was founded in 1881 as a Free Will Baptist Chautauqua. It still functions as a Chautaqua Assembly 135 years later. Its grounds are graced with a series of lovely meeting spaces in the classic Camp Meeting style of the last century.

A duck family wandered through my scene.

I arrived at Porter Hall just a few minutes past the arrival time, and was actually the last expected artist to check in. My hosts are Ocean Park’s Education Committee Chairman Frank Gwalthney and his wife Helen. Although I’ve known them only for a year, they seem like old friends.

We sat and chatted until the sun started dropping. I went to Rachel Carson National Wildlife Refuge’s Goosefare Brook trail to paint while Helen went to the Temple to see PORTopera present Gian Carlo Menotti’s The Medium. That’s the Chautauqua experience in a nutshell: a whole lot of culture packed into a place of profound tranquility.

The fog dropped like a curtain across our view.

Ed Buonvecchio joined me at the mudflats. We worked fast against the sunset. Because I was looking directly west, I painted with my sunglasses on until the sun dropped below the trees. Then I put them on top of my head, only to accidentally shake them off over the bridge embankment.

Yesterday’s lesson was that climbing over guardrails and down concrete ledges was much easier 20 years ago. Nevertheless, I need those glasses. I managed to retrieve them without landing in Goosefare Brook, and decided that henceforth I’ll stash them in their case, not on my head.

The end of the road for painting last night.

A few minutes later, a thick fog started so swirl around us. It came up so fast and thick that I could do nothing but pack up and grope my way back to my car. Redolent of the sea, it was beautiful, soft and cool. And it’s here this morning, so my ideas for today’s first painting have changed just a little.

July 15, 2016

Thrown out of better places

Very unfinished sketch across to Cold Storage Road in Port Clyde. Yes, the light was pretty dismal.

The Maine waterfront works for a living, and that’s one of the reasons it’s so interesting. The lobster traps and buoys stacked on piers, and the dories and dinghies tied to floating docks are the tools of someone’s trade. In general, I’ve found that I get along fine with working fishermen as long as I don’t trespass on their property.

PAPME’s northern chapter met at Port Clyde yesterday. This place is a special case. Parking is restricted because property owners understandably don’t want the Monhegan Boat Line’s customers leaving their cars parked all over the village.

This would probably have been my subject off Horse Point Road.

Marshall Point Lighthouse has visitor parking, but it’s too far from the village to paint the harbor. I arranged to meet Bobbi Heath and Renee Lammers on the co-op’s road instead, where we planned to paint on the verge.

Renee knew another site, off Horse Point Road, which had a fine view of Raspberry Island. This spot was just magical. While Renee photographed a dory, Bobbi and I looked at an outstanding fleet of wooden lobster boats. We were about to start painting when a lobsterman came ashore. “Ladies,” he started, and the next minute we were leaving.

There’s a beautiful fleet of wooden lobster boats out of Port Clyde.

We drove back to our first site and our first ideas. Cars were parked on this road because there is a community playground at the corner. I figured we were safe enough in joining them.

By this time it was raining fitfully. The wind was too high for umbrellas, so we just took cover during the wet times. Bobbi took a compass reading for me and I calculated where the light would be if it ever came up. I guessed wrong. When the sky briefly cleared in the afternoon, I realized I had built the light patterns backwards.

Yes, there were interruptions. (Photo courtesy of Bobbi Heath)

Meanwhile, our friends had been driven off Marshall Point by the wind, and a few of them joined us. I wasn’t paying that much attention until the property owner drove by. “How would you like it if I came to your house and painted all over your front lawn?” he asked. His driveway was completely parked in.

No summer squash to be had anywhere.

Well, in fact, I wouldn’t mind, but I did see his point. He couldn’t use his own driveway. Painters are generally polite people, so my pals quickly folded up and left.

Neither Bobbi nor I were in fact on his lawn, so I felt fine staying where I was. However, any magic there had been had faded in the ringing of his words. I took a few more swipes at my unfinished canvas. Then I too folded my tent and headed home.

July 14, 2016

Asian with a twist

Carpentry with one’s brother involves lots of second-guessing. (Photo by Sandy Quang)

My studio is in a retail area on Route 1, but I’m also less than three miles away from Camden Falls Gallery. To sell from my studio would violate my non-compete agreement.

A few weeks ago, Howard Gallagher, CFG’s owner, told me he thought it would be a good idea for me to keep hours in my studio. That opened the door to a mini-gallery of sorts.

Unfortunately, my studio is too beautiful to convert to a store. It has natural-finish shiplap walls, large sliding glass doors, and radiant heat in the poured concrete floor. I don’t want to damage the woodwork, and I don’t want permanent display walls. These are almost insurmountable limitations in designing a display system.

Somehow, my “open” sign looks backwards.

For those few areas where there are uninterrupted walls, I ordered a STAS cliprail system. This will let me rearrange paintings without constantly pounding nails into the woodwork. There are only about 20 running feet of wall space in the studio however. That means I will need additional display walls. However, I want to take them away when the season ends, so I don’t want to attach them permanently to the room.

I had an idea for the panels, but no way to attach them to the open beams. Then my brother Robert showed up. We toddled down to the lumber yard together. Between us, we figured out how to make a false moulding set off from the beam with spacers. It required just six wood screws set into the beam, and it is solid as a rock.

It will be interesting to see if this works.

Both of us are decent craftsmen, but neither of us totally trusts the other. I surreptitiously checked his angle measurement on the ceiling. After I set the spacing for the screws, I noticed he came back and double-checked them.

“Measure twice and cut once,” I told my son.

“Measure once and re-check everything your sister does,” my brother told him.

What is particularly painful about this is that I had a set of booth walls that I finally got rid of last December, after having stored them in my garage for years. They served me well, but I just didn’t need them anymore.

The panels hanging in place. They’re pegged at the top, and can come down and be stored.

We finished before dinner and the panels actually looked better than I expected.

“It looks kind of Asian,” I mused.

“In a Home Depot kind of way,” responded my nephew.

True, but really not that bad.

July 13, 2016

Road with a view

A million quiet moments of beauty are in every vista. (Photo by Sandy Quang)

One of the tasks of a plein air painting teacher is to locate painting sites. Not only must they have good subject matter, but they must be safe, have sufficient parking, and give access to a bathroom or a quiet stretch of shrubbery. They should be easily accessible to people coming from a wide range of places. Some of my favorites are on the St. George Peninsula.

After being surprised by the overgrowth at Glen Cove a few weeks ago, I decided I should reconnoiter more. Even that doesn’t always work. When I got to Spruce Head yesterday, a bucket truck was parked where I’d hoped to teach, doing something to the power lines. No matter. A little farther along there was ample parking and a different view.

Yesterday’s view from the causeway at Spruce Head. (Photo by Sandy Quang)

Back in the day, studios at the Art Students League were jammed full of students, to a degree non-New Yorkers would never accept. Needless to say, not everyone had a “good view.” We were expected to make the most of what we had. It was very good training in finding the sublime anywhere.

In general, if you can’t find something to paint, it’s your mind that need adjusting, not the view. That’s not to say that it’s not easier in Maine, where every twist in the road brings something new. But there are many levels of beauty in every scene.

Yesterday, my students all painted variations of a dinghy at rest on the mud flats. It was an easily accessible composition, and it’s what I would have painted. But sometimes when you’re sitting quietly in nature, other things begin to vie with your attention—a rock formation, the shadows formed by a dock. For me, that usually happens about halfway through a painting, when I realize I’m actually more interested in something completely different from where I started.

A heron flew in to fish in the shallows. He spent the whole morning with us.

I currently have three students painting in water-based media. For the teacher, having both oils and watercolor in your class requires turning your brain inside out repeatedly, for the basic way you see and work—light vs. dark—is reversed between them.

Sheryl Cassibry and I did this little watercolor sketch together, as a way of exploring how the medium works.

Sheryl Cassibry and I did a joint watercolor painting in my sketchbook last week. We took turns painting on it. It was a fun way to explore how the medium works.

My Southern readers will laugh, but even out on Spruce Head, it was just too hot to paint. My car thermometer read 79° F. as I drove back to Rockport. I’m not acclimated to any kind of heat, and standing out in the blazing sun with a strong on-shore breeze, I got a terrific headache.

It wasn’t just me, either. Renee Lammers told me later that it was too hot to paint in Stonington, too. “I think I need a cooling vest,” she said. Maybe she’ll invent one.

July 12, 2016

Looking backward

“Delaware Water Gap,” 12X9, oil on canvasboard, Carol L. Douglas

I used to commute from Rochester to New York City once a week, a round trip of about 700 miles. The fastest route between the two ends of New York is actually through Pennsylvania and New Jersey. This takes you through the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area.

A water gap is where an old river cuts through a mountain ridge. My college-age kid tells me that about 400 million years ago, a microcontinent called Avalonia collided with proto-North America. This heated and cracked the quartz in the Shawangunk Ridge, which allowed the Delaware River to slowly cut its path through the mountains as they rose. Or something like that.

“Lower Falls at Letchworth,” 18×24, oil on canvas. It took me a whole summer to finish two paintings but at the end I understood how I wanted to simplify the rock forms.

The whole idea sounds about as plausible to me as fairies, but there is no question that the Delaware Water Gap is a beautiful jumble of massive rock folds and towering greenery through which the river glides in cool, reserved majesty.

I frequently stopped there to rest; occasionally I painted. One of those paintings, above, is on my website, but I haven’t thought about it for years. Sunday I received an email inquiry about it. Yesterday a woman from Minnesota purchased it. I don’t know her attachment to the Water Gap, but I hope she has the joy of owning it that I had in painting it.

“Upper Falls at Letchworth,” 18×24, oil on canvas.

We all end up with good work in our storerooms that we’ve moved beyond. I think particularly of a pair of paintings of Letchworth Gorge that I spent nearly a whole summer on. I consider them among my best landscape paintings. It was in painting them that I learned how to abstract the natural form. However, they are very different from my current work and thus difficult to show.

“Buffalo Grain Elevators,” oil and cold wax medium. This was the culmination of a period of tinkering with surfaces to imply the decay of cities like Buffalo.

“Buffalo Grain Elevators,” oil and cold wax medium. This was the culmination of a period of tinkering with surfaces to describe the age of cities like Buffalo.

There is no expiration date on good work. But we frequently set it aside because its problems no longer interest us. That is a mistake, I think. Old work deserves to be revisited.

Sometimes its strength surprises me. At other times, it’s actually more consistent with my current work than I remembered. But beyond that, what no longer occupies your thoughts on a technical level may still bring great joy to others.

July 11, 2016

The chattering classes

“War and intimations of war,” by Carol L. Douglas, 2001

Lack of solitude has interrupted my work over the last week. Creativity is a singular process, and too much interaction—even when you love your visitors—is hard on your work. My Mainer friends tell me this is an occupational hazard of living on the coast. After two seasons I understand. But social encroachment takes many forms. Physical contact is only one.

Auberon Waugh coined the phrase “chattering classes” to refer to the politically active, highly-educated urban middle class. While the term is peculiarly British, the concept is not.

Social media has been a very useful invention in my line of work, which one could describe as “self-appointed expert.” In the past, we had to convince an editor of our brilliance and relevance before they would let us opine in print. Now their role as arbiters has withered away. In some ways it’s a pity, since a good editor stops a person from looking like a damn fool.

Older people like me are still daily readers of news. This is an engrained habit. The newspaper was in the kitchen at breakfast and the television wasn’t. Growing up, my local paper (the Buffalo Evening News) was dignified, measured, literate and informative. It shaped my understanding of writing, certainly, but also of reading.

Concurrent with the decline of newspapering has come a rise in public cynicism.Almost nobody believes that the Fourth Estate is independent or accurate. I’m not innocent of this; I too have media sources I don’t trust. But I’m not sure where a culture goes when it can no longer rely on facts.

It was this past weekend’s horrible violence that finally tipped me into paralysis. No responsible citizen can watch a series of public executions and not be moved by them. However, the hardest part was looking at Facebook. Crisis exposes social media’s fatal flaw, as the chattering classes rush to judgment and normally-intelligent people engage in the blame game.

A number of my friends have pointed out the similarities between the Current Crisis and 1968. Let me point out a few of the differences. In 1968, we were a nation of middle-class values. These acted like a giant counterweight to extremism. In 1968, we hadn’t become as profoundly cynical about the ruling classes.

We live in perilous times. When you’re sitting on a tinderbox, it behooves you to speak peace, not war.

The wheels of justice turn slowly, but grind exceedingly fine. The wheels of public opinion jump to conclusions and then warp the facts to meet their preconceived ideas. I need social media, but at times it drives me nuts.

July 7, 2016

Frog weather

I have decided to repost my BDN blog here so that my non-Maine friends who object to the survey can see it.

Class at Schoodic Point.

My pal is a righteous church-going grandmother from Allegheny County, PA. Yesterday, she was offered $50 to perform an immoral act. We were both a little confused about the economics. If that’s the going rate, prostitution really doesn’t pay well.

In reality, she’s a residential advisor at a center for adults with developmental disabilities. This is empowering and important work. I teach painting, which isn’t as immediately beneficial to society, but is probably equally important in the bigger picture.

A happy student

I’ve been painting since many of you were in short pants, and teaching since you were angst-ridden teenagers. You could read my long and boring CV here, or you can cut to the main point: lots of people have become better artists by studying with me.

I understand from my pals that it’s hotter than blue blazes in my birth state of New York. I was dismayed to see photos from last weekend’s Battle of Fort Niagara reenactment in Youngstown, NY. The parade grounds appear as parched, brown and dusty as the ancient walls of the fort itself. It’s been hot, humid and hazy downstate, too, where there’s been an air quality advisory for metropolitan New York. In fact, that’s the way it’s been going for much of America so far this summer.

Concentrating.

Here in Rockport, Maine, it is hitting the 70s, but there is a cool breeze. In Acadia, it might even be a few degrees cooler. That’s one reason you should consider joining me in Acadia’s Schoodic Institute for this year’s Sea & Sky workshop from August 7 to 12.

The Schoodic Institute isn’t open to the public. To stay there, you need to be part of an educational program. That makes it quiet and secluded. I’ve watched its transition from a former navy base to its current incarnation as an educational institution. Someday we will all brag about having been there.

Me, demoing.

Some of the best painting on the East Coast is there. High granite cliffs drop down to the misty green depths of Frenchmen’s Bay. Atlantic surf roars onto Schoodic point in the clear light of Maine, which is like no other light in the northeast.

If you’re a history buff, you know that this is Acadia’s centennial year. That makes our workshop part of an amazing run of history.

Our lobster bake.

The cost for this whole shindig including instruction, meals, accommodation, and a lobster feast is just $1600. Compare that to other workshops and you’ll realize it’s a great deal.

Yes, I have a few openings left. I believe that the people who go are those who are meant to go. Perhaps that’s you. If so, email me soon so you can snag one of these last spots.

June 11, 2015

New Location

Watch Me Paint has moved! The new URL is:

http://watchmepaint.bangordailynews.com/

June 9, 2015

Welcome to the neighborhood

One of my favorite subjects for blogging has been the food we’ve eaten in our workshops. Here, doughnuts from the Willow Bake Shoppe, now just down the road from me.

While I was in mid-Hudson, I got a note from a student suggesting I send my blog link to the Bangor Daily News. I’d been a full-time resident of Maine for exactly five days, three of them spent back in New York painting at Olana and the Catskills. I was more than mildly surprised at their interest. If all goes well, tomorrow my blog will appear on their portal rather than on Blogger, where it’s been since 2007.

Then there are my favorite places. Here, Camden Harbor.

One of my painting students is branding guru Brad VanAuken. He once told me I should blog regularly, or forget about blogging at all. On his advice I started posting every weekday. That’s improved my readership, but it’s also helped me develop an economical writing style, one that doesn’t take over my entire day.

It would be fun to kick off this new blog with something exciting like a painting festival. But the flip side is that I have time this week to work on the transfer. I still have a lot of work to do before I hit the road, exciting stuff like going to the dump for the first time, figuring out my mailbox question, and registering my car.

I love writing about the technique of painting. This was a how-to for making canvases.

What will I write about on this new platform? The same stuff I already do, I imagine: plein air painting, art history, an occasional digression into social commentary. I hope you come along for the ride, dear friends.

As always, painting with friends is the most important thing.

Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me on the Schoodic Peninsula in beautiful Acadia National Park in August 2015. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops! Download a brochure here.

June 8, 2015

Traveling truths

Catskills over Athens, NY, 8X6, oil on canvasboard, Carol L. Douglas. The grass is courtesy of a park worker who was string-trimming nearby. Not to worry; it will pick off when the painting is dry.

When Nancy Woogen and I were painting at North –South Lake on Thursday, a woman glided past us in her kayak. “Oh, you’re painters!” she exclaimed. “May I join you?”

Turns out she has been looking for her tribe. I introduced her to my pal Jamie Williams Grossman, chair of Lower Hudson Valley Plein Air Painters. We arranged to meet the following day at Site #9 on the Hudson River Art Trail, also known as Promenade Hill Park in Hudson, NY.

A tug approaching the Athens-Hudson Lighthouse in the Hudson River.

Like many upstate New York towns, Hudson went into decline after its primary industry was closed down, but its industry wasn’t the usual paper or steel mill. For a century, Hudson was notoriousfor vice. Its red-light district included 50 bars, 15 whorehouses, two major illegal horse gambling rooms and a big-stakes floating crap game—all in a community of just a few thousand people. A series of high-profile raids in 1951 put an end to that. Hudson slumped into the familiar pattern of decay.

Power lines crossing the Hudson, 8X6, oil on canvasboard, Carol L. Douglas.

It’s been gentrified since my last visit, driven into the inexorable real-estate maw of New York City. This is great for the landowners of Columbia County, and not so good for those who need to buy or rent houses.

I talked to an artist who commutes to Manhattan and who is considering relocating to Troy, farther upriver. “Two hours on the train I can handle,” she said. “But two and a half is just too much.” Having done my time commuting from Rochester to Manhattan, I understand.

I painted a half-day at Promenade Hill, and decided to start the trek back to Rockport, ME, where my commute is, well, nothing at all.