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Category: Carol L. Douglas

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How to Draw a Tree (for Sandy)

Along the Bridle Path, by little ol’ me. Early spring in a place I used to ride, a long time ago.
We tend to see trees as silhouettes instead of three-dimensional objects. This is because the branches that move toward us in space become smaller as they get closer, obviating the primary visual clue of perspective—that things are bigger the closer they are to us. The trick to drawing a tree is to see it as a three-dimensional shape rather than a silhouette.
Here are some common 3-D solid shapes that you can recognize in nature, in the human form, and in architecture. Often, the crown of a tree conforms to one of these shapes, or a combination of these shapes.
Learning to see common shapes in nature will advance your drawing chops.
When the hidden lines are shown, as below, these are called “wireframe” renderings. Being able to interpolate the hidden lines of shapes is an important part of perspective drawing.
Rendering those shapes as wireframe drawings will help you see the perspective.
The woody parts of plants are essentially tubes constructed of xylem (wood) which moves water. These tubes are covered with phloem (bark) which carries sucrose.
Since we know that a tree is a system of tubes, we realize that the cylinder is the fundamental wireframe shape we encounter in drawing it. I have taken this handsome white oak and rendered it as a series of cylinders:
A beautiful old white oak in Nassau, Rensselaer County, New York. How do I know it’s a white oak? By its branching pattern, its crown, its bark, its leaves, and the fact that it’s on the grounds of the now-defunct Camp White Oaks.
Drawing it as a series of tubes allows you to render it in three dimensions rather than as a silhouette.
The white oak above, rendered as a wire-frame drawing of tubes stacked on tubes. I do this every time I draw or paint a portrait of a tree.
We can identify the species of a distant tree from the shape of its crown (which is also three-dimensional), the texture of its bark, and its branching pattern. Paying careful attention to these attributes will make your trees more realistic.

Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in Maine in 2014 or Rochester at any time. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops!
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Daydreaming

Canoeing with Shirley and Carol at Adirondack workshop. Life can’t all be fun and games.
I set out this morning to write something deep and serious, but events overtook me. (It’s a temporarily rocky road I’m on.)
Sue and Brad painting in my front garden during roses-and-peony season.
What I really want is to think about painting outdoors in the summer, so here are some scenes from previous seasons. I’ve painted at 10°F—indeed, I’ve painted at 0°F—but not this year.
These are just a small sample of the many people I’ve been privileged to paint with and/or teach over the year, but just looking at good weather and good company reminds me that Spring is—indeed—right around the corner.
Teressa at the swing bridge, Rochester side.
Catherine in my garden.

Kamillah at Lock 32 on the Erie Canal.
Jake and Sam at the Pont de Rennes bridge in downtown Rochester. Can you tell they’re related?
Cindy at her own farm.
Painting on the porch at the Irondequoit Inn.
Quick draw on the floating dock at Camden.

Nancy, Matt and Pamela painting on Monhegan.
Shirley painting at Owl’s Head Light.

A break with Lynne and John at Owl’s Head, ME.
Resting on the Monhegan ferry.
Break time at Camden harbor.
Matt in Highland Park in Rochester.
Painting with Brad at Rye.
Garrett at Port Clyde, ME.

And Kamillah freezing in a late Spring snowstorm in the Adirondacks. A good place to finish this up!
Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in Maine in 2014 or Rochester at any time. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops!
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Twisted

Among the missing: Vincent van Gogh’s Vincent on his way to work / The painter on his way to Tarascon, Property of Kulturhistorisches Museum in Magdeburg, Germany (formerly the Kaiser-Friedrich Museum). Missing from the Stassfurt salt mines art repository near Magdeburg, Germany, on April 12, 1945.
When I was doing art festivals, I never worked very hard to secure the inventory. Most other painters took the same approach. While jewelers and other craftsmen sometimes had things stolen, paintings were immune. Most working artists sell paintings to people who have an emotional response to their work, and that’s something that would be blunted if the work in question were acquired dishonestly. Artwork at this level hasn’t been commodified in the same way that collectible masterworks are.
Among the missing: Emil Nolde’s Red Poppies. Purchased for Sl. Dr. Koch, documented on artist’s list (“Purchaser List”). Lost at Hamburg harbor (Überseehafen) in 1939. Painting appeared again in the 1980s and went from a northern Germany collection into a North German Gallery (Kiel or Hamburg?), and after not selling at auction was sold through the Austrian art market (Salzburg) to an unknown purchaser.
That’s vastly different from one of the main moral dilemmas facing our age: the problem of repatriating paintings stolen by the Nazis. Today’s announcementby Federal officials that an eighteenth century painting has been returned to Poland was timed to coincide with the release of George Clooney’s The Monuments Men.
“If members of the American public question the provenance of cultural objects from World War Two in their possession, they are urged to call Homeland Security Investigations,” said Nicole Navas, a spokeswoman for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Right. The bald fact is that, sixty years after the fact, most Nazi loot is returned only reluctantly.
Among the missing: Claude Monet’s Manet painting in Monet’s Garden, Property of Martha and Max Liebermann Collection. Bought by Max Liebermann in France in 1898; visible in a photo hanging in the salon of his Berlin apartment at Pariser Platz, in 1932. It remained in the possession of Liebermann’s widow Martha until it was confiscated and sold in Berlin in 1943.
The Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg or ERR was dedicated to stealing cultural property from subdued nations, Jews in particular. It managed to steal 20% of the known art in Europe, operating in France, Belarus, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Greece, Italy, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Ukraine and the Baltic states.
A vast amount of that was recovered immediately post-war; however, there are still hundreds of thousands of items that have never been returned to their rightful owners (or their descendants, since those owners are mostly now dead).
Among the missing: Raphael’s Portrait of a Young Man. Property of The Czartoryski Museum in Krakow, Poland. Confiscated by Nazi officials in September 1939 for Hitler’s Führermuseum, Linz, Austria. Last seen in Dr. Hans Frank’s chalet in Neuhaus on Lake Schliersee, Germany, in January 1945.
Somewhere there is a rich collector who goes to his basement vault to revel in possessing the spectacular haul from the never-solved Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum heist of 1990. That person is pretty twisted. But the unrecovered Nazi loot is far, far worse, in part because of its scale. There are hundreds or even thousands of people out there holding on to it. They eat off silver and crystal in dining rooms graced with paintings that were bought and paid for with the blood of millions of genocide victims. That’s beyond simple theft; that’s absolute perversion of the soul.

Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in Maine in 2014 or Rochester at any time. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops!
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Painter of the Running Stream

At Quimperle, 1901, Fritz Thaulow. 
Where I could plan around expected surgery, an unexpected hospitalization left me unprepared, and I haven’t had anything for you the last few days. Sorry about that.
I’d say you have to get up pretty early in the morning to find a painter I’m not familiar with. It figures, then, that a British friend—five hours ahead of us—would come up with one: Fritz Thaulow.
Alkejegeren, 1892, Fritz Thaulow. It was the ripple pattern from the oars in this painting that first caught my attention.
Johan Frederik “Fritz” Thaulow was a Norwegian impressionist who specialized in painting water. He was one of the earliest of the Skagen Painters, a group of artists who gathered in Skagen in the last decades of the 19th century. Skagen, in northernmost Denmark, was a summer holiday destination. Its scenery and quality of light attracted artists to paint using the plein air method of the French impressionists. Its fishing industry attracted them to paint social realism in the style of the Barbizon painters.
A Factory Building near an Icy River in Winter, pastel, 1902, Fritz Thaulow. 
In 1892, Thaulow moved to France, where he lived until his death in 1906. By that time, Thaulow was well-known in America. “He was the painter of the running stream, of the effects of light upon the snow, of the twilight that suggests more than it reveals and softens and etherealizes what it clothes,” F.E. Grant wrote in requiem.
On a French River, 1893, Fritz Thaulow. He was the painter of the running stream, indeed.
I understand the impulse to relocate to the center of the known art world, since I live on the periphery of the New York art scene. But I’ve also wondered why the art world is so centered on certain places—Paris and San Francisco and London and New York—that great painters from elsewhere end up as historical footnotes. Australia’s David Davies and the rest of the Heidelberg School, for example, are fundamentally unknown in the United States, and undervalued as well.

Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in Maine in 2014 or Rochester at any time. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops!
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How to scale up a small sketch to a large painting

A large canvas transferred from a 9X12 sketch.
When working on a very large canvas in a normal-size room, I start with a smaller sketch (either in oil or graphite) and scale it up. There just isn’t enough space to stand back far enough to draw directly on the canvas.

I realize many artists are math-phobic, but there are times when an eensy-weensie bit of arithmetic can save  you a lot of work. I’ll try to make this painless.

The first step is to work out whether the aspect ratio of the sketch is the same as the canvas. This is the proportional relationship between height and width.
Usually I grid in Photoshop because it’s faster and I can just delete the lines with a keystroke. But you can grid just as well with a pencil on your sketch.
Sometimes this is very obvious, such as a 9X12 sketch being the same aspect ratio as an 18X24 canvas. But sometimes, you’re starting with a peculiar little sketch drawn on the back of an envelope or something. You can use a trick you learned back in elementary school.
Remember learning that ½ was the same as 2/4? We want to force our sketch into a similar equivalent ratio with our canvas.
Let’s assume that you’ve cropped your sketch to be 8” across, and you want to know how tall your crop should be to match your canvas.
Write out the ratios of height to width as above.
To make them equivalent, you cross-multiply the two fixed numbers, and divide by the other fixed number, as below:
Use your common sense here. If it doesn’t look like they should be equal, you probably made a mistake. And you can work from a known height as easily as from a known width; it doesn’t matter if the variable is on the top or the bottom, the principle is the same.
The next step is to grid both the canvas and sketch. You could spend a lot of time calculating the distances, but I prefer to just divide it in quarters in each direction. I use a t-square and charcoal, and I’m not crazy about the lines being perfect; I adjust constantly as I go.
This was gridded in eighths instead of quarters because I wanted to be sure I got the water in the bottom right in the correct spot. But usually, I just divide the canvas in quarters in each direction.
The last step is to transfer the little drawing, square by square to the larger canvas. I generally do this with loose paint, in raw umber. It’s time-consuming, but with big paintings it saves a lot of work in the long run.

Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in Maine in 2014 or Rochester at any time. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops!
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Three painters, three problems

Carol T’s Adirondack Lake, not yet finished. I suggested she put the two of us in her canoe.
I discourage my students from working from photos, but last Saturday three of them had compelling reasons to do so.
Carol T. can draw and paint with almost perfect fidelity. She is so accurate that her drafting skills can become a liability. In the summer, the constant vagaries of plein air protect her from obsessing about details, but when she works from a photo, she can become so focused that she overrides her own emotional response.
Christine, on the other hand, is working on portrait of two men talking on a porch. Christine’s drawing skills are as strong as Carol’s but tend toward the emotive side. In this painting, she felt a strong (and natural) impulse to pull the figures closer together than they really are. But the beauty of her idea was in part in the careful distance the figures kept from each other.
Brad had taken the perfect reference photo—of a fox in his backyard. It would have been a shame to not paint it.
The solution to each of their problems was different.
Brad’s fox painting, also unfinished.
To Carol, I recommended carefully studying her reference photos and then putting them aside while she drew. She did several iterations in this way. By looking at her sketches without the ‘noise’ of her reference photo, we were able to determine that she was placing her horizon in the exact spot it would appear in a snapshot. Moving the horizon meant moving her tree masses and boat, but the end result promises to be gratifying.
In Christine’s case, gridding the figures was the only way to get them correctly spaced on the canvas. This required quite a few cropping drafts and some invention, since her photograph didn’t match the proportion of her canvas. But in the end, her drawing had the impact she intended, and I look forward to seeing it interpreted in paint.
The fox before Photoshop. The only change necessary was to bring that tree on the right in so the photo could be cropped to the same aspect ratio as the canvas. 
For Brad, the easiest solution was to circumvent a sketch altogether. It took only a few minutes to make the necessary changes in Photoshop.

Brad’s fox after Photoshop. Sapling gone, tree moved to the left.
I generally grid from a sketch, not a photo. But every once in a while, there’s a good reason to grid directly from a photo.
Tomorrow: how to grid.
Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in Maine in 2014 or Rochester at any time. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops!
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The rest is just details

Underpainting by little ol’ me.
I’m now five weeks out from surgery and would expect I’d feel a little more spiffy than I do. On a good day I can now sit at my easel for an hour at a time. Yesterday I spent that hour limning out the darks in a large (36X48) painting; today I spent it setting in the snow whites.
If this phase works, it would be hard to wreck it. If this phase doesn’t work, there’s no salvaging it.
Halfway through. I like this look, personally.
From here, I’ll set this aside and spend the next two days doing the same underpainting for my next painting, and on and on until all the drafts are finished.
Those flowers are definitely worth painting!
 Of course, I still can’t muscle my easel around. Luckily, Sandy is “resting” between iterations of her master’s thesis, so she is available. To amuse herself between my countless requests, she’s painting the lovely flowers my husband brought me this weekend.

Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in Maine in 2014 or Rochester at any time. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops!
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Why I paint

Love and Deceit, Zhostovo papier-mache tole tray painted by Sergei Fillipov
Fine art is what you have left when you’ve removed all practical application from an art form. The quality of the work has nothing to do with it. Thus an exquisitely painted tole tray like the above is considered a fine craft item, whereas a mediocre landscape is a fine art item.
I can inhabit the practical sphere, but I tend to focus on the intangible. That is why I’m a fine artist. I’m a painter because that’s the talent God has given me.
Several of my friends sent me this piece on why Christians should create.
The Servant, by Carol L. Douglas. Not all nudes are meant to be provocative, of course.
There are, believe it or not, many Christians who are opposed to Christian art. I’ve heard it all, and at times their criticism has stopped me from working: nudes are bad (obscene). Representations of God are bad (graven images). Painting is a waste of time. You could be doing more important work. (By this last they mean, of course, fine crafts.)
In many ways, fine artists are more like preachers than they are like craftspeople. They structure their life and work around an internal reality that is invisible to outsiders. Nobody asks preachers why they spend time describing the Kingdom of God through words, but a lot of people question why artists think they should do it through images.
Storm clouds, by Carol L. Douglas. Landscape not only celebrates creation, it can be a profound metaphor for our spiritual life.
The bottom line is that this is the talent God has given me. Painting and teaching painting (and, yes, writing about painting) are almost the only things I do well.
Martin Luther said, “Love God and do as you please.” When he told me that, Rev. John Nicholson added that Colossians 3:23 says: “whatsoever ye do, work heartily, as unto the Lord, and not unto men.”
To me, that’s pretty much the last word on the subject.


Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in Maine in 2014 or Rochester at any time. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops!
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The artist in winter

I asked four of my summer workshop students how they’re coping with this unusually cold winter, and what they’re working on.
SUE LEO
“My typography class all semester long thought the angry feminist featured in the movie Helvetica was absurd, as she blamed all the wars and strife in life on this typeface. There are actually hate sites for this font. This woman became a running joke all semester in class and the phrase ‘what the Helvetica’ became a saying. In our last class this week, somehow inspiration struck us,” wrote Sue Leo.

I am currently teaching graphic design, motion graphics and web design at Roberts Wesleyan College as well as managing the Davison Gallery. I recently developed an Art Educators Exhibition at the Gallery to showcase artwork by art educator working in K-12 settings. The goal is for this show to become an annual event. We attracted a wide variety of work and had an opening reception last Friday. The show is up in the Davison Gallery until February 14th. Happily the event was a success for our school and also for the teachers who participated.

LOREN BROWN

Loren Brown working on an abstraction.
For my sixtieth birthday my wife suggested that I take a course with Carol Douglas in the Adirondacks. Having no art training since the age of six, I balked while secretly edging closer to working on my bucket list. Carol’s encouragement and patience fostered a no fear environment for an introduction to “seeing” in a new way.  Experiencing light and color in my familiar, natural scenery and  reflecting that through the medium was at once a technical challenge and a great thrill.
 I have been rambling through efforts in watercolor, acrylic, oil and tempera all lacking much discipline, but much delight. One of my greatest joys was sharing several classes with my youngest daughter who has much talent and has not been actively painting for many years. Carol encouraged her to try oils and in her first attempt created a frame-worthy seascape which she gave to me.
The sheer joy of moments spent contemplating beautiful landscapes, composing a setting to share with fellow students and indeed the internal process of creating art is sublime and wonderful. I spend a lot of time just observing nature in its dance through the seasons, watching the light play an unfolding beauty and majesty. I have asked Carol to endure several more attempts at training me this year in coastal Maine settings. I look forward to the opportunity.
NANCY WOOGEN

Sky oil painting by Nancy Woogen
There are such fond memories I have of my workshop with Carol this past summer in Maine. The surroundings were beautiful but so was our amazing instructor in many ways. Her encouragement and expertise greatly inspired me. I always take a few things away from each workshop. In Carol’s workshop I took more than a few.
Since taking Carol’s workshop, I have been on a roll for sure with my oil painting. I do my watercolors, acrylics and pastels still, but I seem to thrive on oils.
After a glorious and colorful autumn season of plein air painting in oils, I am on a roll with my sky oil painting series in my studio.
Prearranging and premixing tints and shades on my pallet as taught by Carol, I take my pallet box from freezer to studio and paint my heart out. This has made my oil painting more accessible and allowed me more freedom in utilizing colors.
PAMELA CASPER

Nest tornado by Pamela Casper
Winter is a good reason to work inside my studio in Manhattan without having to justify why I am not outside painting.  Over the years I have developed an approach to working indoors which internalizes my outdoor observations of nature and mixes them with my imagination and the worries and concerns I have about the future of the planet.
The first work which employed this approach, in water color on paper, began with the “Tornado series.” This utilized the leitmotif of a tornado as a central formal element. The themes riffed on the metaphor of the tornado as life force, both positive and negative, within the natural world. The subjects went from the disappearance of the bees, fracking and global warming to the natural cycles of death and rebirth.
Recently my work has branched out to include sculptures made of found materials such as barbed wire. Inspired from one of my ‘Nest Tornado’ paintings, I focused on the circular form of the nest and its meaning as a place of life and nurture which is instinctively created by the animal or bird.  I began to wonder what would happen if a species would continue to create nests even if they no longer found wood and grass.  I surmised that yes they would; but the species would not necessarily thrive.  These sculptures are more a warning to safe guard and protect our natural resources.  A bleak outlook; perhaps, that is the effect of winter on the artist.
Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in Maine in 2014 or Rochester at any time. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops!
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Three Ladies of Spain

Portrait of Elizabeth of Valois by Sofonisba Anguissola.
Elizabeth of Valois (1545 to 1568) was the eldest daughter of Henry II of France and Catherine de Medici. She was described as timid but close to her formidable mother.
Elisabeth was married by proxy to Phillip II of Spain at age 14, as part of the peace treaty that ended the Habsburg–Valois War. Phillip II was more than twice her age and already had been married twice.
The Departure of Elisabeth of France for Spain, after 1858 by Eugène Isabey, shows the young Elisabeth, dressed like a widow, swooning as she leaves for Spain. But this painting is perhaps less about Elizabeth’s reality than about 19th century European sword-rattling.
One can imagine how thrilled this young girl was to be handed off as war booty.  But it turns out that Phillip II wasn’t a bad husband.  He was apparently charmed by his bride and within a short period of time had given up his mistress. His sensitivity can be seen in his choices of ladies-in-waiting. These included the aristocrat Ana de Mendoza and the painter Sofonisba Anguissola.
Unattributed portrait of Ana de Mendoza, Princess of Éboli, showing her very rakish eye-patch.
Ana de Mendoza was distinguished by her intelligence and her eye-patch; legend says she lost her eye to an épée. She herself had been married at the age of 12 (but did not bear her husband children until she was eighteen). She lived in Elizabeth of Valois’ household until the young queen’s death in childbirth. 
Her later career gives some hint of her character. After bearing her husband ten children, she entered a convent upon his death. Three years later she returned to public life, getting herself involved in treason. She died after thirteen years of imprisonment.
Unlike many women painters, Sofonisba Anguissola was not the daughter of an artist; in fact, she was from a noble family. Her father encouraged his daughters to cultivate their talents. Four of them became painters and one a writer. At age twenty-two (and unmarried) Anguissola went to Rome, where she met Michelangelo, with whom she studied informally for several years.  
Self-portrait at the easel, 1556, by Sofonisba Anguissola.
By age 26, Anguissola was established as a painter. In Milan, she painted the Duke of Alba, who in turn recommended her to Philip II. He invited her to join the Spanish Court.
Elizabeth of Valois was herself an interested amateur portraiturist, and part of Anguissola’s remit was to teach her painting. After Elizabeth’s death, Phillip II paid Anguissola a dowry of twelve thousand pounds upon her marriage to Don Francisco de Moncada. The couple settled in Palermo, where Don Francisco died in 1579.
Portrait of Massimiliano Stampa, 1557, by Sofonisba Anguissola.
At the age of forty-seven, Anguissola met and married the considerably younger captain of the ship on which she was traveling (Orazio Lomellino). Her amassed fortune allowed her to paint, teach, and mentor other artists through her long and exceptional life.

Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in Maine in 2014 or Rochester at any time. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops!