Carol L. Douglas Archives | Page 54 of 75

October 21, 2013

Oh, the places we went!

Rocks off Port Clyde.

“It’s opener, out there, in the wide, open air.”
(Oh, the Places You’ll Go! by Dr. Seuss)

This week, I’m taking a look back at my summer, both in Maine and in Rochester.

There are more places to paint in the Rockland area than we can ever explore in a single week, but here are a few of the ones we visited.

Painting among the trees. (Photo courtesy of Christine Haley)

Beautiful Camden harbor, with its fleet of schooners.

Chickens on Monhegan. (Photo courtesy of Nancy Woogen)

Owl’s Head view.

Tennant’s Harbor view.

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

October 20, 2013

Seven days of wood smoke and crackling leaves—Little Ol’ Me

New York Catskill Farm, pastel. I decided to shun-pike from New York City to Rochester after Rye Painters on Location one year, and found this fantastic site along the way.

I’m in Maine for my last 2013 painting workshop! The frost isn’t quite on the pumpkin (at least not in Rockland or Rochester) but autumn is in the air. I’m leaving some fall landscapes for you.

As I’m fishing through my memory for autumn paintings, I realize I’ve painted a heck of a lot of them myself. Perhaps that’s because the Northeast is so glorious in the fall.

So here is a tour of some places I love to paint. I hope you get a sense of the spirit of place that drives my painting:

Nunda Autumn, pastel. This is the view from the Kellogg farm in the Genesee Valley, and I wish I could get back there soon to paint again.

Finger Lakes marshes in autumn. I have painted in the Finger Lakes more than anywhere else (often with my former painting partner Marilyn Feinberg). It’s where I realized that northeast landscapes are not about depth of field; they are about the tapestry of surface.

The Dugs in Autumn. Right after the Finger Lakes come the lower Adirondacks. This is a marsh formed by a beaver dam just north of Speculator.

Maine Surf. And then there’s Maine. Beautiful in every season. I painted this in Rockport several years ago, during a nice rainstorm.

October 19, 2013

Seven days of wood smoke and crackling leaves— The Heidelberg School

An autumn morning, Arthur Loureiro, 1893

I’m in Maine for my last 2013 painting workshop! The frost isn’t quite on the pumpkin (at least not in Rockland or Rochester) but autumn is in the air. I’m leaving some wonderful fall landscapes for you.

The Australian Impressionists are another group of painters I’ve shamefully neglected. The Heidelberg School derived its name from the then-rural suburb of Melbourne called Heidelberg, where the first painters in this group found their subject matter.

In August 1889, several Heidelberg painters staged the 9 by 5 Impression Exhibition in Melbourne. Most of the 183 works in the show were painted on 9 by 5 inch cigar-box panels scrounged from local tobacco shops. The show received the usual derisory comments from the art establishment but is now regarded as the landmark event in Australian art history.

Moonrise, David Davies, 1894

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

October 18, 2013

Seven days of wood smoke and crackling leaves— Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot

A Road in the Countryside, Near Lake Leman, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, 1845-55

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot was so repressive in his color sensibility that sometimes it’s hard to know what season he was painting in. In a way, that’s no surprise; he had a narrower range of pigments available to him than the Impressionists who followed him. When he was doing his early plein air travels in Italy, there weren’t even paint tubes. (They were invented by an American painter, John Goffe Rand, in 1841.)

Nevertheless, Corot managed to anticipate the major theme which plein air painting continues to mine almost 200 years later—a fresh, vigorous painting style that describes the landscape without getting unduly hung up on the details.

The Bridge at Narni, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, 1845-55

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

October 17, 2013

Seven days of wood smoke and crackling leaves—Arkhip Kuindzhi

A Birch Grove, Arkhip Kuindzhi, 1880

I never give enough attention to the great Russian painters, an oversight I can’t correct here since they deserve a full week of their own. But today I’ll content myself with giving you a rather unusual birch grove by Arkhip Kuindzhi.

Kuindzhi frequently painted the play of light through trees. He painted birches countless times, although this is the only nocturne I’m familiar with (although this being Russia, it could just be late afternoon in late October). His paintings are often simplified, stylized, and monumental, which gives an unreal eeriness to his work.

Kuindzhi was orphaned young and grew up terrifically poor. He was forced to find his own art instruction. As an outsider, he was a natural to join the Peredvizhniki—“wanderers” or “itinerants”—a group of Russian realists who, locked out of the formal Academy, formed an artist’s cooperative. Like the Canadian Group of Seven, these painters used landscape painting to make a case for the beauty and power of their native land.

Autumn Impassibility of Roads, Arkhip Kuindzhi, 1872

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

October 16, 2013

Seven days of wood smoke and crackling leaves—Winslow Homer

The Veteran in a New Field, by Winslow Homer, 1865

To say that a work is the greatest painting of a great painter is presumptuous, but I think this painting is Winslow Homer’s best. It was painted at a black moment in our nation’s history: Robert E. Lee had surrendered and President Lincoln had been assassinated just months earlier. The nation was just starting to look at the scope of its loss: almost half a million dead, another quarter million wounded.

This demobbed Union soldier holds his scythe like the Grim Reaper. We know too clearly the nature of the implied harvest. And yet there is something redemptive and hopeful in it, an echo of Isaiah’s “they will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks.”

The Pumpkin Patch, by Winslow Homer, 1878 (watercolor)

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

October 15, 2013

Seven days of wood smoke and crackling leaves—Vincent Van Gogh

Autumn Landscape, by Vincent Van Gogh, 1885

This painting is one of Van Gogh’s earlier landscapes. He hadn’t stepped into his mature style, and was still painting more or less as a traditional impressionist. Nevertheless, it works, largely because of the magnificent drawing.

He wrote to his brother Theo about this painting: “You know those three pollard oaks at the bottom of the garden at home; I have plodded on them for the fourth time. I had been at them for three days with a canvas the size of, lets say, the cottage, and the country church-yard which you have.

“The difficulty was the tufts of havana leaves, to model them and give them form, color, tone. Then in the evening I took it to that acquaintance of mine in Eindhoven, who has a rather stylish drawing room, where we put it on the wall (gray paper, furniture black with gold). Well, never before was I so convinced that I shall make things that do well, that I shall succeed in calculating my colors, so that I have it in my power to make the right effect.”

Falling Autumn Leaves, by Vincent Van Gogh, 1888

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

October 14, 2013

Seven days of wood smoke and crackling leaves—Sir John Everett Millais

Autumn Leaves, by Sir John Everett Millais, 1856

Sir John Everett Millais was an English painter and illustrator and one of the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. However, as he matured as an artist, he left the rigid constraints and intellectual conceits of that movement behind, much to the critics’ dismay (and our benefit).

Millais may have been making a comment about the social divide between the two girls in middle-class clothing (modeled after his sisters-in-law) and the two working-class girls—or he may have felt that putting two girls in black on the edge of the canvas would overbalance his composition. Likewise, the little girl’s apple may be a comment on original sin, or it may be just an apple.

A Waterfall in Glenfinlas, by Sir John Everett Millais, 1853

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

October 13, 2013

Magic Carpet Ride

Lacey autumn shadows at Highland Park in Rochester.

I am back in Maine and left you a week’s worth of posts, except that yesterday was too wonderful in Rochester to ignore—about 70° F, still air, lovely sky, and good friends. So why not share our perfect autumn weather so you can enjoy it vicariously along with us?

Virginia draws Lyn painting the Conservatory.

A tropical bougainvillea sneaks its way out of the Conservatory window. It’ll be pulling that finger back inside soon enough!

Rumor has it that it will continue all week, at least here in Rockland. The Northeast in autumn means cool nights, warm days, clear skies, and leaves that crackle underfoot and powerfully scent the air. We’re at the height of fall foliage, so if you can somehow catch a magic carpet ride to Maine and join us for this week of painting, you will not be disappointed.

Carol Thiel painting in the shade.

It was a gorgeous sunrise, there is a clearing sky, and I am off to organize my car and welcome our guests. Blessings! Peace!

Carol drawing in the shade. The power of modern graphics–she reminds me of the start-up screen on my Kindle.

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

October 11, 2013

Paint By Numbers

Cigarette Butts, 2013. Depicts 139,000 cigarette butts, equal to the number of cigarettes that are smoked and discarded every 15 seconds in the US.

Running the Numbers is a series of digital montages by artist Chris Jordan that looks at American culture in terms of raw numbers. Each image portrays a specific quantity of something across a finite length of time: e.g. the number of gallons of gasoline burned across the US each minute.

“My hope is that images representing these quantities might have a different effect than the raw numbers alone…” he wrote. “Statistics can feel abstract and anesthetizing, making it difficult to connect with and make meaning of 3.6 million SUV sales in one year, for example, or 2.3 million Americans in prison, or 32,000 breast augmentation surgeries in the U.S. every month.”

Three Second Meditation, 2011. Depicts 9,960 mail order catalogs, equal to the average number of pieces of junk mail that are printed, shipped, delivered, and disposed of in the US every three seconds (and which none of us ever look at).

One more workshop left this year, and it starts on Sunday! Join me or let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in 2014. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops!