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Category: Carol L. Douglas

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Reconnoitering

Castine from Fort George, 1856, by Fitz Henry Lane.
 It always helps to have seen a place you’re planning to paint, so I took a run up to Castine today in anticipation of next Saturday’s 2013 Castine Plein Air Festival. I packed both oils and watercolors, figuring I’d do a bunch of test sketches. At the last minute I emailed my only contact in town. I suggested we get together for coffee, not really expecting she’d check her mail.
That, my friends, is not a boat, but a ship. A retired navy man told me today that a ship can carry a boat, but a boat cannot carry a ship.
I am familiar with West Brooksville (which is across the mouth of the Penobscot River), so I figured I’d have some idea of the lay of the land. Turns out I was wrong.
Many of the picturesque towns of the Maine coast are strung like pearls along US 1. That is their main business street, with small side streets leading down to coves or harbors. The architecture runs from iconic drawn-out Maine farmhouses to Greek Revival Capes to Federal to Victorian to Foursquare, arranged organically around a harbor or river mouth. I can usually navigate them fairly quickly. That isn’t to say they reveal their treasures instantly, but that I have a method for finding good views.
A breathtakingly beautiful private garden in Castine. My green thumb was itching.
Castine isn’t on Route 1, and its streets are laid out in a grid. Greek Revival mansions march down its slope in imposing rows. It looks like a smaller, well-maintained version of Eastport (which is one of the most atmospheric places in all of Maine). One arrives in Eastport along a causeway from the mainland; one arrives in Castine via a narrow spit of land between two coves. Both places feel as if they never grew into the entire space allotted to them.
Iconic Maine.
I drove to the public dock and along the waterfront streets and rapidly realized that Castine wasn’t going to give up its treasures very easily to an outsider. Feeling a little daunted, I parked in front of the museum, intending to ask the staff for help, when my phone rang. It was my contact. “I never check my email during the day,” she said.
We had coffee and she offered to take me for a ride around the town. I couldn’t have asked for a better guide—she walks about five miles a day and has a great eye for the picturesque. I came home with 20 sites in mind that would each yield a fantastic painting, and a new friend!
I will not be painting this for next Saturday’s 2013 Castine Plein Air Festival, because the tide won’t be right, but I will paint it sometime soon.
Castine predates Plymouth Colony by seven years; its first European settlement is dated to 1613. It is ringed by historic sites, having been fought over by the French, Dutch, English, and Americans. I asked my friend’s husband why Castine was so important. “It’s a deep-water port,” he answered. I suppose that also explains why it puts me in mind of Eastport.

The second of my Maine workshops starts Sunday. If you’re signed up for it, you can find the supply lists here. (If you’re not, you’d better make arrangements super-fast!) August and September are sold out , but there are openings in October! Check here for more information.

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What a difference a week makes!

Amy drew her cat. It’s a lovely likeness of a cat in motion.
Last week I challenged Amy Vail to let me teach her to draw, after she told me she “lacked the gene” to do it. Amy has never had a drawing lesson before. I want to show you her progress, because it’s amazing and wonderful.
“I noticed that shadows of balls are also circular,” she told me. “They are not just amorphous shapes of dark.”
We started with plain old measurement, using our pencil as a ruler: “The rock you are looking at is two units wide and one unit long.” She got that right away, and understood that she could scale her drawing on the paper. (This is not the simplest concept, and one that often trips people up.)
“I thought measuring was cheating,” she said.
A tomato, by Amy. Note that she is getting into shading intuitively. Note her fantastic natural line.
Why do people believe drawing must be a matter of subjectivity and instinct, when it is based on rules that are as rational and systematic as are mathematical rules?
“I have not one recollection of ever having been taught a thing about drawing in school,” said Amy, which goes a long way to explaining why she believed she couldn’t ever learn to draw.
Amy drew her aunt’s Christmas cactus while waiting for said aunt to finish a phone call… that’s devotion!
“Look! That rock looks like a sleeping lion,” I said.

“No, it looks like TWO sleeping lions,” she responded. She was right. I knew at that moment that she could make the intuitive jumps that separate draftsmen from artists, and that separates art from math.

Amy drew her foot. She got the angle of the ankle and the overall shape perfectly.
This is a person who believed—eight days ago—that she couldn’t draw. But she is off to a wonderful start!
And in her first week of intentional drawing, Amy tackles the ellipse of an egg cup. Without ever hearing a word about how to do it, she draws the ellipse of the lip very accurately… which leads me to her next homework assignment, below.
 The last sketch shows Amy’s homework for when I’m away in Maine: she is to practice drawing cups or other vessels with ellipses. She is to practice shading.  
I can’t imagine what she will be doing when I get home. Or a year from now.
Amy’s homework while I’m in Maine is to work on observing values and to practice drawing cylindrical things with ellipses. (I would draw wine-glasses; she will probably concentrate on her egg cup.)

Do you believe you can’t draw or paint? Amy’s just shown you that’s not true.
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Top ten seascapes of all time!!!

A recent Guardian columnsought to identify the ten best sea pictures of all time. I propose an alternative list, not the “best”—because the idea of “top ten paintings” is in itself ridiculous—but ten equally brilliant and perhaps less famous seascapes, here presented in no particular order. (My apologies to Turner and Monet; I only omitted them because everyone knows they’re brilliant.)

Have you any to add to this list?

Fitz Hugh Lane, Becalmed Off Halfway Rock (Casco, ME), 1860
Fitz Hugh Lane painted a narrow repertoire—ships and the ocean—but he perfectly captured the atmospherics of the sea. Long after the fact, he and his contemporaries would be lumped together as “luminists.” It’s a good description of Lane’s aerial perspective on tranquil, hazy days.
Frederic Edwin Church, The Icebergs, 1861
Frederic Edwin Church is also called a luminist, but he’s very different from Lane in that his compositions are never tranquil. He was one of the first artists who actually traveled to see what he was painting. The Icebergs was done in studio from sketches he made during a one-month schooner cruise through the North Atlantic. (A painting which mines the same material but is stylistically different is Caspar David Friedrich’s The Sea of Ice. Note that both include broken boats, symbolising the reaches of man’s endeavors.)

Richard Diebenkorn, Seawall, 1957

A first-generation Bay Area Figurative painter, Richard Diebenkorn moved from abstract expressionism to figurative painting back to abstract expressionism.  His ability to simplify his paintings into brilliant, recognizable parts simply amazes me.

Jamie Wyeth, Smashing Pumpkins, Monhegan, 2007
Like the writer Haruki Murakami, Jamie Wyeth can make you simultaneously marvel at his technique and laugh out loud. When I saw this painting in person, I boggled at how convincing the water is; that is somewhat lost in this rendering.
JoaquĂ­n Sorolla, Bulls in the Sea, 1903
There is another version of Joaquin Sorolla’s Bulls in the Sea at the Hispanic Society in New York that I actually like better for its composition. But I can’t find a well-lighted version online. (No surprise there; the Hispanic Society gallery isn’t well lighted, either.)
Sorolla painted countless paintings of the sea, and it’s tough to choose a favorite. Work, play, child, adult, misery, fun—he catalogued it all. But I think I love these paintings as much for the sails as for the bulls.
Pieter Bruegel the Elder,  Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, c. 1558
Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s “Icarus” has to be the seascape about which the most poetry has been written. “Landscape With the Fall of Icarus” by William Carlos Williams is here, and W.H. Auden’s “Musee des Beaux Arts” is here. Both are wonderful.
The painting employs Bruegel’s signature move: the most important part of the painting takes place in a relatively inconspicuous corner of the canvas.
Frank Carmichael, The Bay of Islands, 1931
Canada has more coastline than any other nation in the world (265,523 km) so it stands to reason that their Group of Seven painters made a lot of pictures of it. The Great White North is inseparable from the sea. I adore the Group of Seven, so I’ll give you two of them, including Frank Carmichael, above.
Lawren Harris, Off Greenland, Arctic Sketch XIX, 1930
Lawren Harris’ plein air field sketch, above, sold in 2011 for a whopping $1.77 million Canadian. (Gotta love that!) Like Rockwell Kent, Harris’ seascapes are deceptively simple.
John Singleton Copley, Watson and the Shark, 1778
John Singleton Copley never visited Havana and probably never met a shark (seeing as this one has lips). But this commemorative painting—commissioned by Brook Watson, the shark attack victim—is compelling in its sheer liveliness. The young Watson was not rescued until the third try. He lost his leg in the attack. I bet he dined out on that story for the rest of his life.
Édouard Manet, Moonlight over the Port of Boulogne, 1869
Édouard Manet is another artist who frequently painted the sea. Would the stars indeed have been this bright in a port city in 1869? Does it matter?
I’m off to the sea myself in the morning, to teach the second of my Maine workshops. If you’re signed up for my July workshop in mid-coast Maine, you can find the supply lists here. There’s one more residential slot left; I’m dying to know who is going to fill it. August and September are sold out , but there are openings in October! Check here for more information.
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Painting and politicians

Winston Churchill, The Goldfish Pond at Chartwell, 1932. I think any artist would be proud to have painted this.
When we were painting in Camden at my first workshop last month, an elderly gentleman asked Sandy if he could take her photo with her painting. “After all,” he said, “you could be the next Winston Churchill.”
One presumes he meant Winslow Homer, but I suppose he could have meant Churchill. Churchill was a fine amateur painter.
Winston Churchill, A View From Chartwell, 1938. Storm clouds may have been gathering over the Sudetenland, but Chartwell remained Churchill’s personal Garden of Eden.
“Whether you feel that your soul is pleased by the conception of contemplation of harmonies, or that your mind is stimulated by the aspect of magnificent problems, or whether you are content to find fun in trying to observe and depict the jolly things you see, the vistas of possibility are limited only by the shortness of life. Every day you may make progress. Every step may be fruitful. Yet there will stretch out before you an ever-lengthening, ever-ascending, ever improving path. You know you will never get to the end of the journey. But this, so far from discouraging, only adds to the joy and glory of the climb,” wrote Churchill.
Of course, Churchill’s nemesis, Adolf Hitler, was also (famously) a painter. In Mein Kampf, he wrote about his rejection from the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna.  Later, he tinted and sold postcards of scenes of Vienna, and haunted Munich artists’ cafes in the vain hope that other artists might help forward his career. He was alleged to have told British ambassador Nevile Henderson, “I am an artist and not a politician. Once the Polish question is settled, I want to end my life as an artist.”
Adolf Hitler, Perchtoldsdorg Castle and Church.
Hitler had drafting ability and might have succeeded in his aspiration to become an architect, had he been able to muster up the academic credentials to get into school. But there is something excessively sentimental  about his painting. Combined with the rigidity of his drawing, his work is, indeed, very off-putting—and I don’t say that just because he was one of history’s great mass murderers.
Adolf Hitler, Alter Werderthor Wien
A third titan of WWII also took up painting, albeit after his tenure as Supreme Allied Commander in Europe. Seeing his friend Churchill at work may have influenced General Dwight D. Eisenhower to take up painting, or he may have been influenced by watching observing the artist Thomas E. Stephens paint Mamie’s portrait. Maybe he just had time on his hands after the war.
President Eisenhower at his easel.
Eisenhower wrote to Churchill in 1950: “I have a lot of fun since I took it up, in my somewhat miserable way, your hobby of painting. I have had no instruction, have no talent, and certainly have no justification for covering nice, white canvas with the kind of daubs that seem constantly to spring from my brushes. Nevertheless, I like it tremendously, and in fact, have produced two or three things that I like enough to keep.”
Dwight D. Eisenhower, The Telegraph Cottage, 1949
Eisenhower’s self-assessment seems apt, but the question of talent is beside the point. Whatever the merits of their painting, Churchill, Hitler and Eisenhower are going to be remembered for their other achievements.
The painterly impulse isn’t completely unknown among modern politicians. A few months ago, a hacker revealed daubs by former president George W. Bush. (I wish he’d take one of my Maine workshops; he would really benefit from it.) But in a world where politicians seem more likely to go in for sexting and rent boys, painting seems like a quaint past-time.

Even though Rockland is just up Route 1 from Kennebunkport, I am kind of doubting George Bush will be in my class. But if you’re signed up for my July workshop in mid-coast Maine, you can find the supply lists here. There’s one more residential slot left; I’m dying to know who is going to fill it. August and September are sold out , but there are openings in October! Check here for more information.

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Mostly, what’s changed are the trees…

Safe Harbor, 20X24, oil on canvasboard, almost finished.

I started this during the last year in which my painting partner Marilyn Feinberg was still in Rochester. It is as big a canvas—20X24—as I ever do en plein air. That size usually takes two or more sessions to finish, but without Marilyn around to schlep up to Irondequoit with me, I seemed to lose the thread. The painting sat on my counter for two summers before I got around to finishing it. (Of course the first time I went out to work on it this summer, I was rained out.)

The Port of Rochester is my favorite place to paint in Rochester, but I don’t do it as often as I should. It’s in the northwest corner of the city; I live in the southeast corner. It seems like I have to travel cross-lots to get there. But once I get there, I wonder why I’ve stayed away so long. (I am grateful to the folks at Genesee Yacht Club for allowing me to paint on their property; they’ve always been gracious.)
My new set-up makes larger canvases more manageable.
Buffalo is at the end of Lake Erie. Its weather blows off the lake and funnels through the city. Rochester is on the side of Lake Ontario. That occasionally produces east-west bands of different weather. This was true today: overcast at my house; raining lightly at Ridge Road; sunny and clear at the lake.
One of the reasons I love painting at the Port of Rochester is that it’s never boring. It’s one of two ports on Lake Ontario that accepts cement by freighter, so sometimes one sees a freighter pushing its way upriver past the recreational boat slips. And I saw two trains pass by within feet of the boat slips today; none of the summer people seemed remotely fazed by them.
Most of the boats were just as I left them (although some were reversed in their slips), and the clouds were piling up to the southwest exactly as they were the last time I was there. Surprisingly, the mature trees across the channel had grown noticeably. I texted Marilyn to tell her that. “It’s one of the things I always notice when I come home to visit,” she responded. “It’s a weird feeling.” I agree. We think of those big trees as timeless and the human structures as changeable, but that’s not exactly how it seems to work.

I have a little more work to do (the reflections, modifying light levels, painting the rigging) and it’s done.
If you’re signed up for my July workshop in mid-coast Maine, you can find the supply lists here. There’s one more residential slot left; I’m dying to know who is going to fill it. August and September are sold out , but there are openings in October! Check here for more information.
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A Sunday Afternoon on the Ontario Beach Park Jetty

Georges-Pierre Seurat, Un dimanche après-midi Ă  l’Île de la Grande Jatte, 1884-1886
I have young nephews visiting. It seemed on this blistering hot day that a day at Ontario Beach Park would be a good way to burn off some of their energy. They went swimming and I sat in the shade sketching.
As they strolled slowly along the boardwalk between the bathhouse and the jetty, my neighbors reminded me powerfully of Seurat’s Un dimanche après-midi Ă  l’Île de la Grande Jatte (A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte).
The boardwalk at Ontario Beach Park.
Seurat saw women with parasols; I saw a woman wearing a leopard-print micro-bikini, her hair dyed an impossible neon pink. Seurat depicted a pet monkey on a leash; we saw beach volleyball. Seurat’s Parisians were uniformly white; my fellow Rochesterians come from all corners of the globe.
Georges-Pierre Seurat, Une baignade Ă  Asnières, 1884-1887. Today we swim in mixed company in far skimpier outfits, and then some of us amble over to Abbott’s for ice cream in the same outfits, or lack thereof.
But the most striking difference is that Americans display considerably more tattoos and less clothing than holiday-makers on the Île de la Jatte 130 years ago. It’s not just a question of too much flesh on display as too much flesh overall. There’s nothing erotic about it; in fact, it is almost the antithesis of eroticism.
If you’re signed up for my July workshop in mid-coast Maine, you can find the supply lists here. There’s one more residential slot left; I’m dying to know who is going to fill it. August and September are sold out , but there are openings in October! Check here for more information.
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Join me this Saturday for Wine and Watercolors in the garden

Saturday, July 20, 2013, 4:30pm until 7:30pm
Hollyhocks, by little ol’ me.

Summer is just bustin’ out all over, and it makes me want to paint!
Join me for an afternoon of laughter, stories, and painting some sweet little greeting-card-sized watercolors in Lakewatch Manor’s lovely gardens. (There will be an indoor studio option if weather threatens.) Our innkeepers will have—as they always do—lovely wine, flower essence iced tea, and delectable morsels, which will encourage painters of all skill levels.
Rumor has it that daylilies are edible, but I’d rather just do tiny watercolors of them, thanks.
LIMITED SPOTS require an advance reservation. $40 covers all supplies and refreshments. Bring a friend and you each pay $35.00. Call 207-593-0722 for reservation or questions.
The poppies and peonies will be finished, but there is always something in bloom in the northeast during the summer.
The next day is the first day of my July workshop in mid-coast Maine. There’s one more residential slot left in July; I’m dying to know who is going to fill it. August and September are sold out, but there are openings in October! Check here for more information.

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Amazing new diet plan! Take up drawing!

Watermelon & Cherries, by Brad Marshall, oil on canvas board, 11×14. Executing this luscious painting probably elevated Brad’s mood by 22%, but who can tell when he’s already so darn cheerful? It’s for Rye Art Center’s annual Painters on Location in September, and I imagine it will elevate the mood of some lucky collector too.
A report in the Journal of Behavioral and Brain Science suggests that drawing pictures of so-called comfort food can also have positive effects on mood, reportedthe Wall Street Journal.
It’s hard to imagine drawing Texas-style comfort food like King Ranch Chicken Casserole or Frito Pie, since they basically look like lumpy stew. So it’s a good thing this research was done at St. Bonaventure University (here in upstate New York) where “comfort food” means pizza and cupcakes.
Wayne Thiebaud, Four cupcakes, 1971. Oil on canvas, 27,9 x 48,3 cm. Is Thiebaud a very happy man? He certainly should be; he painted enough cakes.
Drawing pizzas improved the subjects’ mood by 28%, while depicting cupcakes and strawberries boosted spirits by 27% and 22%, respectively. Drawing peppers improved moods only by 1%.

Peppers, 6X8, oil on canvasboard, by little ol’ me. They made me more than 1% happier to paint, I swear.
 
Maybe it’s because they made the poor test subjects do their drawings on empty stomachs, but I find it hard to imagine that drawing anything would fail to elevate one’s mood. Especially peppers.

I know one thing that’s going to make me very happy: my July workshop in mid-coast Maine. Nothing is happier-making than painting with great friends in a brilliant place. There’s one more residential slot left in July; I’m dying to know who is going to fill it. August and September are sold out , but there are openings in October! Check here for more information.

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Looking forward to next weekend in mid-coast Maine

Rockwell Kent, Late Afternoon, Monhegan Island, collection of Jamie and Phyllis Wyeth
It is a warm, sluggish summer day. My thoughts are already jumping ahead to this month’s Maine workshop. Our day trip to Monhegan Island was cancelled in June because of weather, so I’m doubly excited.
A chance word by a FB friend got me thinking about Rockwell Kent’s smashing paintings of Mañana from Monhegan—a view which we’ll be painting, exactly, since our site is next door to Kent’s former home. Looking at them is more bracing than a gin-and-tonic, sweeter than an ice cream cone!
Rockwell Kent,  Winter, Monhegan Island, Metropolitan Museum of Art
Rockwell Kent, Monhegan (c.1948) 12″ x 16″ oil on board, Tom Veilleux Gallery
Rockwell Kent, Blackhead, Monhegan Island, Maine, private collection
Rockwell Kent, Toilers of the Sea, 1907, New Britain Museum of American Art
And one Hopper painting, for contrast:
Edward Hopper, Blackhead, Monhegan, Whitney Museum of American Art
If you’re signed up for my July workshop in mid-coast Maine, you can find the supply lists here. There’s one more residential slot left; I’m dying to know who is going to fill it. August and September are sold out , but there are openings in October! Check here for more information.

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“I can’t draw a straight line.”

Street in Saintes-Maries, ca. July 17, 1888, by Vincent van Gogh–done as a mature artist. 
The good Lord willing and the creek don’t rise (which is, sadly, not wholly rhetorical right now) I will have a new drawing student this week. My friend has internalized the message that she can’t learn to draw; in fact she told me that she “lacks the gene to draw.” I think that is absolutely wrong, and I challenged her to let me teach her. She has risen to the challenge:  “I have a special brand-new sketch-book and a special old and beloved pencil all in readiness.”
I am not a big believer in an art genius, any more than I’m a believer in a math genius or a language genius.* People are more facile at some things than others, but almost everyone can learn to draw, just as almost everyone can learn to do sums, conjugate verbs or sing.
An early drawing of houses at 87 Hackford Road in London by Van Gogh. He was an adult when he drew this, but untutored. Good thing he never told himself “I can’t draw.”
My friend has a PhD in Classics, can rattle away in several antique languages, and has been entrusted with the molding of impressionable minds at a Catholic college. On that evidence alone, I doubt she is learning-impaired. So I am confident she will learn to draw very quickly.
Imagine if we taught other subjects like we teach art:
Here is Drusilla in English class. Her teacher encourages the class to write down words that express their feelings, without ever discussing spelling, syntax, or structure. Having no notion of grammar, Drusilla gets herself totally balled up in ‘can and could/may and might/shall and should/will and would,’ and throws down her pencil in frustration. “Oh, Drusilla,” says her teacher in a sad voice. “That’s OK. Not everyone can learn to write.”
Here is Drusilla in math class. Day after day, her teacher stands at the board calling out numbers in vast, voluptuous streams of ever-changing patterns. Drusilla, however, wants to calculate the volume of a sphere. “Oh, Drusilla,” says her teacher in a sad voice. “That’s OK. Not everyone is good at mathematics.”
Exploring creativity is instructive for five and seven year olds. By age 13, a kid needs to be taught the tools of art if he or she is going to succeed. We have, by and large, abdicated teaching those tools. We place self-expression above craft, and the results are predictably poor.
Oddly, virtue is another subject where the educational establishment has decided it has no right to impose standards. Virtue is unquestionably a learned discipline, as any person who’s ever struggled to civilize a child can tell you. Is the decline in teaching art somehow related to the decline in teaching ethics?

There is only one slot open for my July workshop at Lakewatch Manor in Rockland, ME, and August and September are sold out.  Join us in July or October, but please hurry! Check here for more information.

*Speaking of “genius,” the word originally referred to a tutelary god or guardian deity or spirit. Using it to refer to a person of outstanding ability is the product of the Renaissance, which shows how our thinking has morphed over time.