Carol L. Douglas Archives | Page 3 of 75

December 21, 2016

World’s Okayest Mom

Lonely rubber ducky in Camden harbor.

You might know my young friend Sandy Quang. She was my painting student for a long time, then my studio assistant, and sometimes my workshop monitor. Most recently, she worked at Camden Falls Gallery.

Sandy’s parents run a restaurant called Dac Hoa. It’s a small eatery on the edge of downtown Rochester, known for its fresh Vietnamese, Thai and Chinese food. Ha, Kahn and Nu know this range of cuisine because their families left China during the Chinese Civil War and settled in Vietnam. After the fall of Saigon they moved along again, eventually ending up in Rochester. I respect them for their courage, hard work, and integrity. Through Sandy, we’ve become friends.

“My parents’ restaurant,” graphite on paper, approx. 16X18, 2008, by Sandy Quang.

When I was a kid, I had a crush on an imaginary boy called Homer Price. I loved him because he was nice and could fix anything. Years later, I met him in the form of a gangling high school student. We’ve had four kids and grown grey together.

At the time, I didn’t know anything about Homer Price’s creator, Deer Isle’s own Robert McCloskey. I’d never seen his other children’s book classics. But I raised my own kids on a steady diet of his books. My youngest took Make Way for Ducklings very much to heart. The lad loved everything about ducks. “Well, that’s cute,” I thought. His obsession about ducks was just one of those things that were in the background of our collective family consciousness.

And then he was slightly older and we were at Dac Hoa during a Christmas season very much like this. He was restive and annoying, as little boys are wont to be. Looking to amuse him, I showed him the roasted ducks in the window. To this day, I have no idea why I thought this would be a good idea.

“Sandy’s parents’ restaurant interior,” graphite, approx. 18X24, 2008, by Zeyuan Chen.

He dissolved into howling, violent grief. Our dinner, obviously, was ruined. The lad cried for days.

“That boy is going to be in therapy for years,” I thought ruefully.

Last week we were in Dac Hoa celebrating the same kid’s 20th birthday. I asked him if he remembered the incident with the ducks. My husband pulled an exasperated face. Nu laughed. And my son also laughed. I’m so relieved.

I simultaneously believe that parenting is our most important job and that kids make their way somehow despite it. I guess for this youngest one, “World’s Okayist Mom” was good enough.

Christmas is the season of grace-made-manifest through the incarnation of Jesus Christ. It’s nice to know I’m forgiven.

December 19, 2016

A shot of Old-Time Christmas

A traditional Tom and Jerry set, like the one on the bar at Schwabls, will set you back a significant chunk of change.

When facing cancer, a brilliant doctor is your greatest ally. A mediocre doctor can cause a lot of damage. I know this from personal experience. The first time I had cancer, both my internist and gastroenterologist missed it, writing off my symptoms as running-related. They got worse and I finally switched doctors a year later. My new medico figured I might have a tumor. A week later, I was diagnosed, and the specialists he sent me to, saved my life. Thirteen years later, another team got to do it again for a completely-unrelated cancer.

The first time, I had six weeks of radiation, ten months of chemo and three surgeries. It was an aggressive regimen and there was some discussion about whether it was overkill. “You have young kids,” said my oncologist, and that was that.

That’s why I still go to Rochester twice a year to see my doctors. I realize there are fine doctors in Maine, but for now, I’m afraid to cut the cord. This is my week for medical tourism. “You really must like travel,” one of my friends commented. Well, I do, but I don’t like the Rockport-to-Rochester loop. I don’t much like being prodded, poked and scraped, either, but I’ve gotten sixteen good years out of it.

The Place lets you keep the mug as a reminder that your headache is not necessarily from your sinus infection.

Since I’m in Western New York anyway I met a gaggle of my kids in Buffalo for a Tom and Jerry and a beef-on-weck sandwich.

A Tom and Jerry is a form of hot egg nog laced with brandy and rum and topped with nutmeg. It’s very sweet and lethally potent. It’s been around since the early 19th century. Damon Runyon wrote a short story in 1932 that featured his protagonist drinking them with “one of the best lone-hand git-‘em-up guys in the world.”

“This hot Tom and Jerry is an old time drink that is once used by one and all in this country to celebrate Christmas with, and in fact it is once so popular that many people think Christmas is invented only to furnish an excuse for hot Tom and Jerry, although of course this is by no means true.”

It being Prohibition, Runyon’s characters substitute drugstore rye whiskey for rum. Runyon touches on the delicacy of the recipe. “[I]n the days when it is not illegal a good hot Tom and Jerry maker commands good wages and many friends.” Tom and Jerrys start with a meringue batter, and from personal experience I agree; it’s hard to make.

The sandwich, more properly called a beef-on-kümmelweck, is made of roast beef on a roll topped with salt crystals and caraway seeds. The beef is slathered in horseradish. Its origin is lost in time, but it was a beautiful collaboration between baker and butcher back in Buffalo’s German heyday.

Forget poutine; beef on weck is the apotheosis of cold-weather eating in North America. The horseradish can cure anything.

In general, you don’t find these foods in trendy new places, but in bars that are as old as your grandfather. Schwabls in West Seneca is often our destination but The Place in Elmwood Village got our custom on Wednesday.

Buffalo is simultaneously the most beautiful city in America and the one with the worst climate, I told myself as I slid on my walk back to my car. Coincidentally, my kids were off to the hospital to see a friend who’d fractured her kneecap earlier in the day.

Everyone should visit Buffalo; in fact, a lot of people do, just to see its architecture. The sensible ones go in the summer.

December 16, 2016

Beat the winter blues with a shot of color

“Spring,” by Carol L. Douglas

Wind is whipping around the corner of the house this morning. Our bedroom is unheated, so until one of us runs downstairs and stirs up the woodstove, we’re huddling here under a warm woolen blanket.

I’m going to do some on-line shopping until then. Paintings are a popular Christmas gift. On winter days when the sun barely rises and the wind is shrilling outside, it’s easy to see why. Here are a few painters whose work is broad and graphical and who work in bright, warm palettes. All of them have work in every price point, and they’ve made shopping easy by having good, clear websites.

“York River, Maine,” by Mary Byrom

Mary Byrom lives in North Berwick, Maine, and mostly paints the southern Maine coast. She is a great simplifier of complex scenes. That’s possible because she’s outside braving the weather at every possible moment. Her available work is marked on her website. There’s a contact form here if you see something you like.

“Monhegan Memories,” by Renee Lammers

Renee Lammers lives in Bucksport, Maine, and her work is centered in Stonington, Acadia, and the northern end of Penobscot Bay. She works on copper. Her work is priced on her website, which is set up for online sales.

“Sparkle,” by Bobbi Heath

Bobbi Heath splits her time between Yarmouth, Maine and Westford, Massachusetts. Right now, she’s donating a percentage of her sale proceeds to the American Cancer Society, so you can not only score a good painting, but do a good deed at the same time. Her website is set up for online sales.

“Point Look-out Barn,” by Elissa Gore

Elissa Gore lives in New York City but often paints in the lower Hudson Valley. Her work is simple and exuberant. Her website is exhaustive, and you can contact her for information about a painting that interests you.

“Sidelot off Pike Street,” by Kari Ganoung Ruiz

Kari Ganoung Ruiz was my monitor for my 2014 workshop at Schoodic in Acadia National Park. She lives and works in the Finger Lakes Region of New York, and her color palette is the softer, warmer tones of that area. She is passionate about painting old cars and other vehicles. Her website has prices, and you can contact her about buying work.

And, of course, there’s me. My website isn’t set up for e-commerce, but if you see something you like, let me know, and I’ll put you in contact with the gallery currently showing it. And of course, you can always get yourself or someone else my summer workshop for Christmas. Do so before the first of the year, and you can have $100 off.

December 13, 2016

Found on Facebook

“Halo of Autumn,” Christina Perry Davis‎

According to legend, when George Will signed up to become a syndicated columnist in the 1970s, he asked his friend William F. Buckley, Jr. — the founder of National Review and a columnist himself — “How will I ever write two columns a week?” Buckley responded (I’m paraphrasing), “Oh it will be easy. At least two things a week will annoy you, and you’ll write about them.” (Jonah Goldberg)

I’m often asked how I can write five days a week. I keep a list of topics, but I seldom get to them. Usually, something else catches my attention first.

“Pine Point, Scarborough,” Christina Perry Davis

Such is the case with Christina Perry Davis. Her work appeared in my Facebook newsfeed. She doesn’t have a website, so what I know of her I’ve learned from her profile. She’s 51 years old; she was raised in Westbrook, ME; she now lives in Scarborough, ME; and she’s married.

“I am a painter of landscapes mostly and am always drawn to the way color and light mingle but I look for the movement of grasses, clouds or light that surrounds what I see. I feel it’s necessary to capture this feeling because it is dramatic and freeing to tell the story of something that only last for such a short amount of time,” she told me.

In other words, her subject is turbulence.

“Prince Edward Island,” Christina Perry Davis

“I have learned basic painting skills from my early days at Portland School of Art but recently have taken a class in pastel from Jacob Aguiar, which has opened a wonderful world of painting with pastel.”

“I love drawing,” Davis said. That shows in the perspective of her clouds and the way her buildings are seated in a receding landscape. Pastel, she says, allows her the opportunity to give drawing and painting equal emphasis in her work. That can be true of oil painting, of course, but it takes longer to get there.

Pastel is different, of course, because you can bore into it with hand pressure. Davis’ chromatic intensity and ferocious mark-making create a world of upheaval. I’m interested in where she goes with this subject.

You can reach Davis by email, here.

December 12, 2016

Seeking peace in a painting

“Spring Snow in the Maples,” 10X14, Poppy Balser

The most-read post I’ve ever written was about how to fold a plastic shopping bag. Peoples’ reactions to my writing always surprise me. It’s one of the great joys about blogging—and about painting. You send your ideas out into the world, and they elicit responses you never dreamed of. And here you thought you were being perfectly clear.

When I wrote about going to Buffalo for a funeral last Thursday, it was a howl from my own darkness. I figured people would read it and move on. Instead, I’ve received a deluge of responses: on Facebook, by email, and in person. Stories of sons dying, friends dying, nephews dying. Stories about the child of a senior pastor, a daughter-in-law. Stories of near misses and years of soul-crushing worry.

“Passing Goat Island,” 7X11, Poppy Balser

About five years ago, I decided I would pay attention every murder in Rochester, NY. Two things became apparent. The first was that murder victims in my city were overwhelmingly black, male and young. The second was that society reacted much more strongly when the crime victim didn’t fit that demographic. Young gang-bangers, we tell ourselves, bring this on themselves. It is only when they miss and shoot a child or a grandmother that people make a fuss.

That is part of the black, urban, poor side of the drug war.* I’d totally missed the white, suburban, affluent side because we don’t call drug overdoses “murder,” and we don’t put them in the news. Often, we don’t even talk about the cause of death. But inner-city murders and suburban overdoses are flip sides of the same evil coin.

“Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour,” says 1 Peter 5:8.

“Hay Bales and Evergreens,” 7X11, Poppy Balser

As you can imagine, I drove home from Buffalo in a black mood. I’m seeking peace. And I found it in my mailbox last night, with four paintings by Nova Scotia artist Poppy Balser. (I’ve written about her before, here.) “To spread a little calm this week I thought I would share some of my paintings from this last year that I painted in particularly peaceful surroundings,” she wrote.

Why are these particular paintings so peaceful? Poppy painted them in tightly-controlled analogous color schemes—it was a blue day on the water, a green day in the fields, or a misty grey day in the winter. There are no notes of complementary color to engage us. Our minds are free to rest.

These paintings are a great example of color theory in action. If they make you feel less frantic this holiday season, they’ve just demonstrated one reason why art is so profoundly important to society. In fact, take one painting and call me in the morning. They’re more powerful than Xanax, and totally free of side effects.

“Farmyard Morning, 7X11,” Poppy Balser

*In 2000, the highest overdose rate was among black Americans aged 45-64. Today, it’s young white people. Non-whites actually use less heroin than in the past; the out-of-control epidemic is in white America.

December 8, 2016

A deadly inheritance

“Annunciation,” by Carol L. Douglas. That phone call is like a nuclear bomb, only worse.

The work I’d planned for today and tomorrow is off my slate. Instead, I’m driving back to Buffalo for a funeral. Our oldest friend’s youngest child died of a drug overdose on Tuesday night.

I’m not going to speculate on what happened. For one thing, I don’t know. But it’s a tragically common story in our age.

Parents like to believe they can protect their kids from making bad choices. To a degree that’s true, but it’s not totally true. I don’t know a single kid who never did anything monumentally stupid, including mine.

I’ve known three generations of this family. None of the usual bromides apply. When I say that the boy had “every advantage,” I’m not talking about just education or money; I’m talking about love, stability, heritage, and a sense of his place in the world.

“Female,” (detail), by Carol L. Douglas.

If you’re my age, you probably think of recreational drugs as pretty harmless. Back in the 1970s, many of us experimented with them. True, most of us aging hippies have—more or less—our faculties intact, but we’ve left a big mess behind.

We are fools when we look back on our youthful foibles through John Lennon-framed rose-colored glasses. Drugs are a curse on our children’s and grandchildren’s generations. Deaths from opioids and their synthetic analogues have skyrocketed, according to the DEA. Heroin deaths increased 248% from 2010 to 2014. Heroin is more potent and less expensive than ever. Even pot is no longer the mild, friendly drug we once knew.

In the 1970s, the annual drug overdose death rate was fewer than 2 deaths per 100,000 people. In 2014, it was 15 deaths per hundred thousand people. As a cause of accidental death, it is now second only to car crashes.

And that’s just the user side of the problem. On the other side is the violent drug war in our cities that disproportionately claim young black men.

When the Bible talks about “visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and the fourth generation,” it isn’t talking about transferring punishment (Scripture says that can’t happen). This boy’s parents never touched drugs themselves. They were so focused on their studies that they sat out the Swinging Seventies, making them a little puzzling to have at parties.

That verse says that sin itself, unless repudiated, will keep on reappearing. Our generation’s casual attitude toward drugs has morphed into a scourge ravaging our young people. Both the middle-class kids who overdose and the ghetto kids caught up drug violence are its victims.

When I argue for a closed border, it’s not to keep undocumented migrants out of the US; it’s to seal off the major heroin routes into the US. But even that won’t work as long as there’s demand.

“Chris in Pink,” by Carol L. Douglas.

Since my own misspent youth, my generation has cheerfully torn away at the underpinnings of our culture. Marriage, work, faith and family have all been tossed into the great maw. They’ve been replaced by self-actualization and sensualism. Is it possible that this leaves our descendants feeling unnecessary, marginalized and devoid of purpose?

To a degree, parents can counter those messages, but the larger culture has a profound influence on our kids. That’s why there are so many upright old ladies in urban churches mourning the loss of their sons and grandsons in the drug war.

For now, kiss your children and tell them you love them. One never knows what one’s tomorrow will bring. And pray. Pray like crazy.

As for me, in the words of my former gangbanger friend, I feel like punching them drug-dealing m—rf—rs in the throat. Nobody expects a left hook from a little old lady.

December 7, 2016

Artist faces mountain of student debt

Abstraction, by Carol L. Douglas. Art can be done with nothing more than charcoal and newsprint.

Alex Katz is famous for having destroyed about a thousand of his own paintings while he tried to solidify his style. “There didn’t seem much reason to keep them. The positive thing was what I got out of the painting, not the paintings.” That was on top of an already-prestigious art education at Cooper-Union and Skowhegan.

That was in the 1950s and it runs deeply counter to our current zeitgeist. Today most artists document every stage of every painting on social media. I’m a product of my times and I like the way we work today. However, I did think about Katz recently while counseling a younger artist.

I’ve known G. since she was doing her master’s in art education at a private (and pricey) school in Rochester. She worked as my figure model. For her, grad school was a terrible career move. It didn’t translate into a job. Combined with her undergraduate bills, her loans ballooned to more than a quarter of a million dollars.

“Submission,” by Carol L. Douglas. G. modeled for this when she was an impecunious grad student.

In response, she took the path of least resistance: becoming an economic non-entity. That was one thing when she was a carefree sprite, but now that she has a husband and a child, she wants to work legitimately. She will find this close to impossible in a nation with no secrets. There is a big hole in her work history from when she stopped working in the formal economy. In this age where new employees are subject to credit checks, her overwhelming debt makes her a non-starter.

(I’m seldom nostalgic, but there was something to be said for the past, when a person could hop a train and leave his youthful indiscretions behind. Today our histories are tattooed into some kind of master database. We can never escape them. Even the supposedly-judgmental God of the Bible is far more merciful than that.)

This is, of course, a personal disaster for G. In a way, it’s also a perfect opportunity. She has explored Etsy as a means to making money, but hasn’t had a lightning-bolt idea. Why not take the Alex Katz route and make art as a process of self-discovery? Art can be made with nothing more than a block of wood and a sharp knife. She has both, and lots more. I suggested that she produce and destroy many works. When she finds what she is looking for, doors will open; they always do.

A maquette from the days when I still had time to experiment. Not being able to make money in art is in some ways a great liberation.

I’m the last person to recommend that anyone drop out of the formal economy. But the need to be a productive member of society outweighs our requirement to follow rules.

A few brief mentions:

A reader pointed out to me that several studies have shown that some men do not change their underwear daily. Market research firm Mintel found that “one in every five males do not change their underwear on a daily basis.” UK retailer Marks & Spencer pegged that at around a third of men. And Clorox found that one in every eight guys wear their underwear multiple times between washings.

I’m not sure what she thinks I can do about it.

Remember my post about Britain scrapping the A-Level in Art History? There was such a public outcry that the course has been reinstated. As we were in the middle of an election here, I missed the news about how they mounted their protest. I can’t see art historians rioting at the Palace of Westminster; they’d be much too careful of the furnishings. But I’m sure glad they succeeded.

December 6, 2016

When learning is hard

“Dinghies, Monhegan,” was finally added to my website this week.

I knew a little girl who hated to read. Her mother labored to find books that interested her enough to overcome her dislike. This grew harder as she got older, because things on Deborah’s reading level were often an insult to her intelligence.

I urgently needed to add my drive across Canada, and my shipyard paintings to my website. Website maintenance is my most hated job, and I drag myself kicking and screaming into doing it. I used to use an expensive editing package, but I didn’t understand how it worked. Then my daughter—who builds and maintains complex websites for a living—redesigned my website using Visual Studio Express. I could make simple changes of text, but anything more complicated was beyond me.

“Marshes along the Ottawa River” was added to my website.

Over the years, I’ve gotten a little bit better. As long as I’ve got the existing site as a template, I can clone bits here and there and get an approximation of what I want. Still, I’m always focused on the mechanics, and the content is secondary. When I look at my website, I’m disappointed in its lack of elegance.

This process, I thought, must feel a lot like learning to read feels to a kid like Deborah. The coding/decoding is so much slower than one’s thinking that the brain loses the thread.

In addition to not understanding what I was doing, I’d developed an emotional block. I’d failed at it before. I expect to fail again. Just sitting down to work on it gave me the heebie-jeebies.

And then, suddenly, the picture started to shift. Back in the day, graphic designers sometimes used metacharacters to fix badly-formatted documents. I began to see parallels between these and HTML commands. Tiny bits of text would stop swirling around the page long enough to resolve into an intelligible sequence. I wouldn’t call myself fluent by any means, but I can at least make the changes I need.

“Winch (American Eagle)” was added to my website.

We like doing what we’re good at; we hate doing things that are very difficult. I would never have persevered with the website if I’d had anyone to hand it over to, but I’m glad I did. I don’t know whether I’ll ever end up enjoying it, but it’s less excruciating than it used to be. There’s a life lesson in there for me.

I’ve lost track of Deborah, but I hope she ended up in the same place.

December 5, 2016

Reflecting on the Oakland fire

“High Falls, Rochester,” by Carol L. Douglas

Years ago, I rented studio space in a converted warehouse dedicated to artists. For the most part its tenants were serious mid-career professionals who worked there by day and lived elsewhere by night. However, there were also squatters, artists who lived there illegally.

The presence of these squatters was an open secret. The fire department visited regularly to try to flush them out, but the squatters had a sixth sense. In the entire time I rented there, the woman living in the space next to mine was never caught. She worked, which meant she was never around during the day when inspections are carried out.

A clothing designer rented the space on the other side of my studio for her inventory; her workshop was in the next space over. Garment manufacture is a dusty and flammable business. My own studio had shelves full of oil-based solvents and varnishes. We were on the top floor, and the rafters of our 19^thcentury building were soaked in creosote, which would drop in fat strings through the still air of hot summer days. Even with sprinklers (which we had), a fire would have been disastrous.

I have been reading about Oakland’s tragic fire in an artist’s collective. There is always a fringe of people in every art community whose major life work appears to be being “arty.” Their spaces are chaotic and, since they’re not great respecters of rules, their stuff often spills out into public areas. Their over-sized personalities make them charismatic, and they draw others into their orbit. It doesn’t surprise me that a pair of middle-aged poseurs thoughtlessly led so many young people to their deaths.

“View from my studio window, North Rochester,” by Carol L. Douglas

Many artists are terrifically poor. With that comes social isolation. When you’re already paying rent for a studio, it is tempting to move a futon into a corner, add a cook top and refrigerator, and then sort of drift into living there, especially when your friends are doing the same thing.

That is so dangerous. The same building codes that protect people in residential units also raise the cost of building and maintaining those units, but you get what you pay for.

In a nutshell, young artists, if you’re thinking of squatting in your studio, don’t. And if you’re invited to an after-hours party in a collective building, think carefully about whether the space is safe.

Anyways, you have work to do. Being an artist is not a lifestyle; it’s a job. Art poseurs make real artists look shallow and unrealistic. Their talk is just so much hot air. Your real future lies in producing consistent work and finding venues in which to sell it.

December 2, 2016

Bucksport Cyber Gallery

“Rattlesnake Falls (version 2),” John Killmaster

One of the nicest things about social media is how much art I see. In particular, I love a feature in my Facebook newsfeed: Keith Linwood Stover’s The Cyber Art Show.

Stover is from Bucksport, ME. He started The Cyber Art Show as a Facebook page; today it’s a freestanding website with a few thousand Facebook followers.

“Snows above Lucky Peak,” John Killmaster

he Cyber Art Show features landscape painting by mid-market artists. Its painters are usually still in the striving-and-discovery mode. They’re exploratory rather than polished. That makes The Cyber Art Show’s online gallery much more interesting than those that just trot out the masters.

This week The Cyber Art Show featured a painter who astonished me: retired art professor John Killmaster of Boise (ID) State University. Killmaster combines a Group of Seven sensibility with uproarious energy and a remarkable flair for composition. The result is kind of like rolling down Mt. Battie’s cliff side wrapped in a picnic blanket.

“Early Spring, Just North of Boise, Idaho,” John Killmaster

“My interest as an artist is to be witness to the gifts of life and vision; to capture not only that which my eye confronts, but to record my interaction both visually and emotionally, with the world around me,” Killmaster wrote. He certainly succeeds in that.

Killmaster holds an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan. He began teaching at Boise State in 1970. Now retired, he is a member of Boise Open Studios and teaches in his studio in Middleton, ID. In addition to painting, he is known as a large-scale mural enamellist.

“Below the Glaciers,” John Killmaster

I regret I never had Killmaster as a teacher, but I can spend some time this weekend studying his compositions and the way he uses color to push the viewer through the chaos. For all the criticism of the internet as a purveyor of fact, it has freed up access to art. I would never have known about John Killmaster had it not been for The Cyber Art Show. I particularly like the idea that Keith Linwood Stover reached out from Bucksport to Boise to teach a Rockport artist something new.