When does it stop being plein air painting?

“The Three Graces,” Carol L. Douglas

I have never been much for the debate over what constitutes plein air painting. What percentage needs to be done on location? Does painting from your car count? These questions mostly just annoy me. At every plein air event I’ve done, painters continue to work at night after they leave their location. Years of painting give you excellent visual memory. Letting your eyes rest after a day of working in bright light is an important step.

Since the only requirement is that the work be finished within a certain period, it’s up to us to interpret what “painted en plein air” actually means. And the vast majority of artists, I find, are very strict about the rules they establish.

“The Three Graces” as it looked when I took down my easel.

In most cases, I can tell at a distance whether a work was done on location or not. The energy of plein air painting is not easily faked, although the lighting and brushwork may be indistinguishable from studio painting. In plein air painting, the whole scene is constantly subject to change. That lends a frisson of nerves to the process.

“My clients don’t care whether it was painted on location or not,” Brad Marshall once said during one of these interminable discussions. “They’re just interested in whether it’s a good painting.”

“Mercantile’s anchor,” Carol L. Douglas

That’s true, but it becomes an issue for painters when they’re selecting paintings to apply for upcoming plein air events. At what point do after-the-fact edits disqualify a work from consideration?

I did the two paintings in this post during the same week. There was gorgeous weather and I painted almost non-stop on the floating docks at Camden. Of course there were interruptions, since wherever I go, that’s where the party’s at.

Had I gone back to my studio and made the same changes I made yesterday, I’d have had no hesitation in calling them en plein air paintings. However, my husband flew home from Norway, and I didn’t get back to them until yesterday.

“Mercantile’s anchor” as it looked when I took down my easel. Because I’d painted this boat in dry-dock, I know its black hull is underpainted in green.

I made no structural changes to either painting, because I’m trying to make a point. (Otherwise, I’d have moved that boom out of directly behind the anchor.) In neither case was a photo necessary to finish. But in both cases, the surface has been overpainted almost completely, and I had the luxury of time in which to finish them.

So, for the purpose of jurying, is this plein air painting? I don’t have a ready answer, and I’m interested in your opinion.

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 9, 2017

Painting the Great White North

“Hayfields, Niagara County,” Carol L. Douglas

My bedroom is unheated. On a -3F morning like this I am not anxious to jump out of bed. Yes, I’ve painted outdoors on days like this and, no, I’m not not in any hurry to repeat the experience.

Among my painting fraternity, the two people out there painting last week are both watercolorists: Poppy Balser, who’s up in Nova Scotia using vodka in her wash cup to keep the paints moving, and Russel Whitten in Ocean Park, who just worked fast until his paint crystallized.

Oil paint will eventually stop moving in this weather as well, although it takes this kind of extreme cold to get there. The painting of hayfields, above, was done on a similarly frigid morning. It was so cold that my car battery died while I was painting. I trekked to a farmhouse to call for help. “I couldn’t figure out what you were doing out there on a day like this,” the woman answering the door said. “I thought you were watching coyotes.”

That year, I had committed to a plein air painting every day, six days a week, regardless of the weather, which in Rochester, NY can be wicked. I painted in gales along the Lake Ontario shore, blasting snow in a vineyard, lashing rain, and occasional electrical storms. That year made me into a painter, and it is also how I finally moved from being an amateur to a professional. I had so many paintings lying around, I had to sell them. It also proved to me that I could paint in any conditions, and that I didn’t need to ever again—unless I wanted to.

“Iceberg: Sledge Dogs, Greenland,” 1935-7 and 1952, Rockwell Kent

Rockwell Kent first visited Greenland in 1929, saying the visit “had filled me with a longing to spend a winter there, to see and experience the far north at its spectacular worst; to know the people and share their way of life.” In 1931, Kent built himself a hut in in the tiny settlement of Illorsuit (then called “Igdlorssuit”), a village north of the Arctic Circle. He wintered and painted there. As a socialist, Kent was enamored of Inuit society, considering their little village a kind of utopia.

Kent later said that his year in Illorsuit was the happiest and most productive time of his life. Among his other pursuits, he acquired a sled and team so that he could make even more remote painting and camping expeditions. In a witty aside, Kent painted himself painting this iceberg, surrounded by his sled dogs, here.

“The Sea of Ice,” 1823–24, Casper David Freidrich

“The Sea of Ice,” 1823–24, Caspar David Friedrich

As a German Romantic, Caspar David Friedrich could, I suppose, be described as a utopianist of a different stripe. His goal was to portray that sublime moment when the contemplation of nature causes a reawakening of our spiritual self.

Friedrich set out a manifesto for painters that still rings true: “The artist should paint not only what he sees before him, but also what he sees within him. If, however, he sees nothing within him, then he should also refrain from painting that which he sees before him. Otherwise, his pictures will be like those folding screens behind which one expects to find only the sick or the dead.”

“The Hunters in the Snow,” 1565, Pieter Bruegel the Elder

Friedrich recognized winter as a still and dead time, and the only hint of human activity in The Sea of Ice, above, is the subtle, moralizing shipwreck. This is very different from Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s ““The Hunters in the Snow,” which is a panoply of everything we do in the wintertime. While the overwhelming sense is one of order and human industry, there are precursors of Friedrich’s wrecked ship in this painting: the hunters and their dogs are exhausted, and their bag is one measly red fox.

This painting was done during the Little Ice Age, when the threat of famine was real. It is both a medieval Labours of the Month painting and a Renaissance narrative painting.

“Winter Comes From The Arctic To The Temperate Zone,” 1935, Lawren Harris

Lawren Harris was one of the driving forces behind the Canadian Group of Seven, and the most plastic of those painters. He went from impressionism to art nouveau realism to complete abstraction in a matter of two decades. His break with realism occurred in the early 1930s, after he visited and painted in the Arctic.

Harris believed in the arctic as a living force: “”We are on the fringe of the great North and its living whiteness, its loneliness and replenishment, its resignations and release, tis call and answer, its cleansing rhythms. It seems that the top of the continent is a source of spiritual flow that will ever shed clarity into the growing race of America.”

January 5, 2017

Holiday greetings from famous artists

Elissa Gore

I love getting holiday cards. One of the best things about having so many professional artists among my close friends is the number of cards I get that feature original art. (I seldom send any back, but I do love getting them.) Here’s a small selection from this year’s cache.

The painting at the top is by Elissa Gore. She lives in Manhattan. That is a neat counterpoint to her work, which focuses on serenity. Right now, Elissa seems to be concentrating on things glimpsed through tree screens. That is an interest of mine as well, so I’m curious where she’s going with them.

Renee Lammers

Renee Lammers sent me this lovely pen-and-watercolor drawing, which she said she did a long time ago. Added to her note was the suggestion that I try watercolor sometime. In fact, I use watercolor as a sketch medium whenever circumstances don’t allow for oils, such as during my 2015 jaunt to Alaska. Renee lives in Bucksport, and we paint together as often as our schedules allow.

Nancy Woogen

Nancy Woogen didn’t specify what medium she used for the poinsettia above, but she is a master of Golden’s fluid acrylics, so I’m guessing she used them. Nancy is a lifelong resident of the lower Hudson Valley region in New York. I know her through New York Plein Air Painters. She has taken several of my Sea & Sky workshops, where our acquaintance deepened into friendship.

Bobbi Heath

Bobbi Heath and I met at the first Castine Plein Air and have done that show together ever since. Her work focuses on the simplicity of accurate drawing and integrated flat color fields. She splits her time between Massachusetts and Yarmouth, ME. Right now, we’re planning a short mid-winter painting jaunt together—more on that later!

Yesterday, I also got a Thanksgiving card in the mail that had been postmarked on November 18. That’s not an error by the post office, it’s because our mailing address is different from our street address. If you ever need to contact me by mail, it’s PO Box 414, Rockport, ME 04856.

January 4, 2017

Making pictures while the sun don’t shine

“Cadet,” 8X6, oil on canvas, by Carol L. Douglas

My friends taught me to cook scallops a few years ago. Of course, to cook them, you have to have them. Last year and this, they’ve gotten me a gallon of the beautiful bivalves from their own fisherman source up in Castine.

Berna and Harry are cooking connoisseurs, but I’m usually a deeply insecure cook. Something snapped during the Christmas holiday, though. Over coffee, I confessed to Berna that I’d spent a good deal of the week in front of a stove. I’d run up a few batches of Christmas cookies, made sauce and meatballs, fried some cod, made a chicken pot pie and then schnitzel and red cabbage. As I have been known to not cook for years at a time, this greatly surprised my family.

My "Christmas Angel," was a 4H project. I trot it out every year on Facebook to amuse my childhood chums.

My “Christmas Angel,” (the real thing, not the painting) was a 4H project. I trot it out every year to amuse my childhood chums.

A childhood chum recently told me that my mother, who was our 4H cooking leader, had fostered his love of cooking. I didn’t seem to catch that from her, but it’s true that most of my foundational knowledge about cooking, baking, and sewing came from 4H. That group, an outgrowth of the Cooperative Extension, shows up in the most surprising places. Berna, it turns out, was also a 4H-er. We talked about the County Fair, baking sponges, and other joys of our youth.

I sure did enough canning as a kid. Putting up scallops reminds me of that (although it’s a lot easier). How, I wonder, did Mainers put up seafood before the invention of little plastic freezer bags?

Preparing luxurious pet food for Max.

I know that I could do something thrifty with all those bivalve feet—like make stock—but my 19-year-old Jack Russell terrier really loves them. Since he won’t be around next scallop season, I gave them to him. The ‘foot’ seems to be just a muscle attached to a bigger muscle. It’s tough, but it’s not like the toothless old guy chews his food anyway.

I frittered away my lunch hour chattering with Berna, so I had to work past dark. For my readers in more southerly climes, that means 4 PM in Maine in January. I finished my little painting of the Cadet under artificial light.

Years ago, I studied with Cornelia Foss. She would never turn the studio lights on at dusk, insisting that dim light was actually good for color management—it caused your paintings to be brighter and lighter than you expected. In general, I’ve found that to be true, but you have to wait until dawn to see the results.

I’m generally early to bed and early to rise so my dimly-lit studio is usually not a problem, but it does mean I have to make pictures while the sun shines.

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.

January 2, 2017

A @#$% of a hangover

Still life by Carol L. Douglas.

I was busy hanging a show of my own new works. It was a mixed bag—some expressive pastels, but an over-reliance on black and a few things that weren’t framed, which is my bête noire. Then the alarm clock rang and flung me back into reality. No new show, no new works, only the staleness of returning to work after a long hiatus.

Picking up ones’ brushes after a long lay-off is daunting. I’ll start by ‘playing scales’ with a small study. That’s what the still lives here were done for, but I’m more likely to paint the snow-covered branches outside my window today. From there, I’ll move to something more significant. I may be borrowing trouble by anticipating rustiness, but that’s the usual outcome of too long away.

Still life by Carol L. Douglas.

That’s if I can navigate the mess my studio became over Christmas. It’s an inviting, open space in an otherwise small house. People have a way of stashing unfinished projects in there.

Last week was the first week of Christmastide. My house rang with joy, particularly after my grandson discovered the sounds a good piano can make.

The prior week, however, was my semiannual week of medical tourism in Rochester. This leads to my only New Year’s resolution, which is that we must find doctors in mid-coast Maine. On-the-road colonoscopy prep may make for a good story, but it eats up time and energy.

Today is also the official opening day of income tax season. Having just resolved my last tax question right before Christmas, I’m not in any hurry to play again. If I add to that the 903 emails that came in while my laptop was stashed under my bed last week, I might almost feel gloomy.

Still life by Carol L. Douglas.

Luckily, the sky is blooming into another beautiful day. There is an interesting boat in dry-dock at the North End Shipyard, which Captain John Foss tells me is the Jacob Pike, built in Thomaston in 1949 as a sardine carrier, now in service as a lobster smack. Since I have to go out later this morning, I’ll stop and look at her more carefully.

I went downstairs and turned on the Christmas tree lights and immediately felt better. In modern America, we’ve moved the season of Christmas forward to start on Thanksgiving and end on Christmas Day. Among us old-timers, the lights remain on, stubbornly, until Epiphany.

December 26, 2016

Happy Christmas

“Rest on the Flight into Egypt,” 1879, by Luc-Olivier Merson.

I’m taking the week off from writing. While black bears and moose couldn’t stop me, the two tiny tots arriving tomorrow have a way of stopping all progress.

This Christmas season has been one of trial among my friends. That includes a homeless family, a dead son, and a friend with advanced cancer.

“You don’t have to look very far to count your blessings,” my mother would say. I would in turn wonder why it is only in the face of others’ disasters that we remember to thank God for our own safe-passage. But that’s how our minds work.

I grew up in a home where joy was muffled by grief. Christmas, like no other season, was when the pain came poking through the shroud. My mother checked out by working through the holiday; my father checked out by drinking through it. Parents model a lot of things to their kids, and one of them is how to be happy.

Grief teaches us that happiness is a tissue so fine that it can crumble in our hands. Peace teaches us that this doesn’t matter, that we must learn to accept our moments of joy regardless of our fear.

It’s not enough to just enumerate one’s blessings—we must also live them. Mine are mostly going to be here this week. So rather than work, I’m going to play with babies, cook with my daughters, and even watch TV with them.

Immanuel—God with us—takes many forms. A Merry Christmas to you all.

December 24, 2016

Ivanka is a problem only for really rich artists

Trump posing in her apartment before the Tony Awards. (Instagram)

Alex Da Corte, whose small assemblages sell in the $18-25K range, recently tweeted, ““Dear @Ivankatrump please get my work off of your walls. I am embarrassed to be seen with you.” He is part of an Instagram feed called called “Dear Ivanka” in which artists under the umbrella of Halt Action Group (HAG) repost images of Ms. Trump paired with political appeals. The political appeals are perfectly legitimate protest. Demanding that an owner remove a piece of artwork is not.

Bloomberg just saved me a ton of work by figuring out how much the art in Ivanka Trump’s apartment is actually worth:

In one post, Trump shimmies in front of a Dan Colen “chewing gum” painting; a comparable work sold for $578,500 at Phillips New York in 2012. In another post, Trump’s child plays the piano in front of a ‘bullet hole’ silkscreen by Nate Lowman; a bullet-hole painting in the same palette sold for $665,000 in 2013 at Sotheby’s in New York. In yet another post, taken from a Harper’s Bazaar shoot, Trump poses at her dining table in front of a work by Alex Israel. A similar painting by Israel sold for $581,000 in 2014 at Phillips New York.

“It’s a moment of reckoning,” said Alison Gingeras of HAG. “Going forward, we need to think more carefully about how our work gets brought to the world, and who it’s sold to.”

Ivanka Trump-branded purse in front of a work by Christopher Wool. This painting appears in a lot of photos of her home.

Who are these semi-professional sans-culottes? Certainly not struggling artists. The majority of ‘emerging artists’—i.e., the rest of us—sell in the $100 to $5000 range. We are happy to sell our work at all. I, for one, never enquire into my buyers’ politics. I just smile as I cash the check.

The Visual Artists Rights Act of 1990 (VARA) was the first national legislation in which ‘moral rights’ of artists were addressed. However, these are limited to the:

right to claim authorship;
right to prevent false attribution to works one didn’t create;
right to prevent distortion, mutilation, or modification that would prejudice the author’s honor or reputation.

And of course, artists maintain copyright.

The client purchases the right to display and resell a piece of artwork. In other words, Alex Da Corte can’t demand that Ivanka Trump remove his painting from her home; she paid good money for that privilege. Her use of the artworks in tweets, however, sails a little closer to the wind. In considering copyright, the courts factor the effect of the use on the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work. For example, an aspiring Hitler can’t use a landscape to promote the Third Reich, even if he bought the painting. And your painting can’t be used to market whisky unless you get royalties.

Ivanka Trump’s apartment contains works by Nate Lowman, left, and Dan Colen. I’m of course reposting her Instagram photo under the Fair Use Exemption.

And that’s the point on which the question turns. Until a few weeks ago, artists were chuffed to see their paintings in Ivanka Trump’s tweets. She was marketing herself as an urbane, sophisticated collector, and marketing them as the artists being collected by the cognoscenti.

What has changed? Nothing substantive, only the perception that she is part of the smart set. Since they were happy for her to do it last year, I doubt they can stop her from doing it next year.

December 22, 2016

Your favorite artist you can’t remember

Cover art by Eloise Wilkin.

If you were raised in the United States, the odds are overwhelming that you had at least one Little Golden Book while growing up. These books were introduced in 1942 as a joint project of Simon & Shuster and Western Publishing. The idea was to do big runs of color pages so the books could be sold cheaply. They premiered with a cover price of a quarter, which rose to 29¢ in 1962. That was cheap enough for nearly everyone, which made them ubiquitous, and extremely important. With more than two billion sold, they have been “baby’s first book” for many American children.

Cover art by Eloise Wilkin.

Eloise Margaret Burns Wilkin has been called “the soul of Little Golden Books.” Born in 1904 in Rochester, Wilkin moved downstate at age 2. She returned to Rochester to attend the Rochester Athenaeum and Mechanics Institute, now known as Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT). This school has a long tradition of excellence in art instruction.

After earning an Art and Illustration degree in 1923, Wilkin opened a studio with her friend Joan Esley in Rochester. Struggling to find work, the pair moved to New York City. A week later, Wilkin was hired to illustrate The Shining Hours by Mary Meek Atkeson.

Cover art by Eloise Wilkin.

In 1930, Wilkin put her career on hold to marry. She, her husband and their four kids lived in Canandaigua, in the Finger Lakes region of New York. Her house there made cameo appearances in many of her books.

In 1944, Wilkin signed an exclusive contract with Simon & Shuster. This required her to illustrate three Little Golden Books each year. She had it all—wife, mother, career.

Cover art by Eloise Wilkin.

In an interview with RIT’s University News, Wilkin’s son Sidney recollected his mother working long, long days as she approached her deadline. “We would run in and out of the house by her studio and she would stop us, show us something and ask if we liked it.”

In 1974, Wilkin revised “My Little Golden Book about God” to reflect our multicultural reality

Eloise Wilkin will never be remembered as a great artist, but her warm, beautifully-rendered pencil drawings had a profound influence on generations of American children. If you pored over books as a child, she probably had a hand in shaping your visual aesthetic.

Cover art by Eloise Wilkin.

Wilkin illustrated more than 110 books, including 50 Little Golden Books. She died of cancer in Brighton, New York at the age of 83.