Elissa Gore Archives | Carol L. Douglas

October 12, 2018

The number one key to success as a plein air painter

It not only gets you through terrible weather, it keeps your brain supple.

Eventually, my easel fell into this manure pile. Of course.

The end of this week is dripping, sloppy and cool in the northeast. Nevertheless, there are painters trying to knock out paintings at events on Cape Ann and in the Hudson Valley. When they’ve committed to paint, they don’t have much choice but to succeed.

“100% chance of heavy rain tomorrow. more sun but much colder and windy on Friday. Cold and windy and cloudy on Saturday. Sunday there’s a reception in Middletown; that’s the day its sunny, but cold,” Elissa Gore noted on Wednesday. That’s a forecast that has the artist scrambling to pack every possible contrivance against the weather. Their only comfort is that every person in the event is facing the same lousy conditions.

Watch Her Paint! by Ed Buonvecchio. He painted this as we sheltered inside during a torrential downpour. (Private collection.)

Wind makes you wish you had five hands, because, outdoors, every item in your kit has the potential to go airborne. We can weigh down our easels, but umbrellas are useless. It’s difficult to clamp down a large canvas, so we switch gears and paint smaller. Or, we huddle in the lee of our cars, sacrificing the best view for what is possible.

Last week my class painted at a blueberry barren in Union, ME. The forecast was for fog, and when we arrived the clouds were kissing hilltops. My students’ value studies were developed accordingly. By 11 AM, the sky was clear, and the scene had changed entirely. It takes flexibility to salvage a painting in such radically shifting light. But it can be done.

Obstacles can include a garbage truck, as in here, in Manhattan.

Rain and snow are almost impossible obstacles for watercolorists. Even under cover, their paper just won’t dry. It’s almost as bad for oil painting. Once the moisture settles on your paints, any mixing creates a rigid emulsion of water and oil.

If you set up in a public place you stand the risk of something or someone getting between you and your view. It’s one thing if it’s a person. It’s another if it’s a delivery truck.

Or, a lovely boat is in harbor when you arrive and you decide to include it. You’re half-finished when you realize the lobsterman is preparing to leave. Even without people, boats move constantly on the water, and always according to their own mysterious plan.

Or the obstacles might be tourists, as here, in Camden harbor.

So how do you avoid coming home with a fistful of half-finished paintings? You learn to be flexible, to sub in other details for the ones that just vanished. You learn the cycles of places: the rotation of boats on their moorings, or when the food truck arrives and departs. You get creative about draping and bracing your easel to protect it. And, above all, you learn to paint fast.

All of those are signs of cognitive flexibility. This is the ability to switch your thinking or focus, or entertain multiple ideas or viewpoints at once. It’s an important part of learning and thinking. It’s one that declines through adulthood, sadly. The young brain is simply more plastic than the older one.

But your brain responds to exercise just like your body responds to yoga. The more you have to scramble, the better you get at it. Next time your easel falls down, remind yourself that you’re not just there making brilliant work. You’re exercising your cognitive flexibility.

February 22, 2018

The mysterious perfection of watercolor

It can be either deliciously finicky, or wildly out of control. Or, in a perfect world, both.

St. Elias Mountains, Yukon Territory, by Carol L. Douglas. Think you can’t paint from a boat? This was done from the passenger seat of a car.

Yesterday I got an e-blog that read, “Want looser watercolors? Pour your paint.” Well, I like pitching, throwing and otherwise making a mess with watercolors, so I opened it in great anticipation. What it was really talking about was drawing a meticulous cartoon, blocking off the light areas with masking fluid, and then setting the darks with a wallowing, graduated wash that gets a little bit psychedelic by virtue of watercolor’s great sedimentation qualities.

That’s a beautiful technique, but nothing that starts with masking fluid can be described as loose. We can’t use these shadowy washes in field painting, unless we’re willing to hang around all day reblocking paper and waiting for it to dry.

A field sketch of Houghton Farm (New York) by Winslow Homer.

Watercolor is a curious medium. It’s quite capable of the ultimate control, as in Albrecht Dürer’s Large Piece of Turf, 1503. It’s equally capable of insouciance, as in Maurice Prendergast’suntitled seascape, below. You can go anywhere you want with it.

Untitled seascape by Maurice Prendergast.

Frank Costantino is a painter who manages to pull off meticulous renderings in watercolor in plein air events. Frank’s drawings are spot-on and his framing is clever. On the other end of the spectrum is Elissa Gore, whose field sketches always burble in the style of Ludwig Bemelmans.

You know my pal Poppy Balser, who shares my adoration of boats, the sea, and color. Although she’s primarily an oil painter, Mary Byrom does lots of sketching in watercolor.

Large Piece of Turf, 1503, Albrecht Dürer.

There hangs the moral of my tale. Every one of these painters works in more than one medium—in Frank’s case, watercolor and colored pencil, in the rest of them, watercolor and oils. That’s true of me, too.

I first learned to paint in watercolor. That was standard procedure in the mid-century, when no right-minded teacher was going to hand a kid a box of toxic chemicals and tell her to go to town. It’s a private possession for when I travel or when I’m thinking. I never sell my watercolors, and I don’t intend for them to be shown. Watercolor, for me, is deeply personal.

Preparatory sketch of Marshall Point, by Carol L. Douglas.

But it’s also the perfect travel medium, which is why I took it to Australia and to London and plan to bring it along to Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi in March. When it’s just you, your suitcase and a Prius, you want to travel light.

All of this has been much on my mind recently as I’ve debated the best sketchbooks to buy for my Age of Sail workshop on the American Eagle, in June. I’ve tried many myself. As with everything else, each one has its plusses and minuses. One friend suggested that I cut down sheets of paper and make my own, but I want every student to have a takeaway book with a nice binding.

I plan to have students working in both gouache and watercolor. I need to find the right paper for both. So every time a friend posts a new work in a sketchbook I query him or her relentlessly on the materials. And I’m narrowing it down, slowly but surely.

February 2, 2017

It’s not that I can’t do it, it’s that I don’t always want to.

The Wreck of the SS Ethie, by Carol L. Douglas.

You all know the Facebook game where artists are asked to post a painting every day for a week and tag another artist each day, right? (The one where, on the fourth day, you forget and never finish.) I love that game. I’m insatiably curious about other artists and their work.

Recently, my friend Elissa Gore played. She posted work from across her career, which has spanned four decades. Her early work was more detailed than her current paintings. That’s no surprise, since almost all of us are taught to paint literally before we learn to paint emotively.

Sometimes people who don’t paint make the error of thinking that non-realistic painting is somehow easier than strictly representational painting, that photorealism is the apotheosis of painting. “That looks just like a photo!” is not, in most cases, a compliment. Art is not about duplicating reality, but learning to step past reality and take your viewers with you.

The multi-colored shingle at Martin’s Point in Gros Morne National Park.

The problem with a subject like The Wreck of the SS Ethie is that it is already playing games with your head. The shingle on this lonely coast in Gros Morne National Park in Newfoundland is wildly-colored. What’s left of the boat is not an elegant wooden corpse subsiding into the surf, but its steel guts scattered down the shore. Simplifying or abstracting in my usual frenetic style would just confuse the viewer.

I love geology almost as much as I do painting. Each year when I do my workshop, I point out the basalt inclusions in Acadia and how they now shape the erosion of the granite bedrock. Sand might be easier on the feet, but rocks are exciting.

At times, rocks can be conveyed as rough, slashing brush strokes, but that only works for ‘normal’ scenes, where your mind can fill in the gaps. For the out-of-the-ordinary, more information is needed. The rocks at Gros Morne have been ground in the surf so hard, they look like they’ve been through a rock tumbler. Many are striped. That requires time and patient attention to detail.

Weathered parts of the Ethie are thrown everywhere.

While I wouldn’t want to paint like that every day, it felt good.

You can read about the wreck of the Ethie and the brave Newfoundland dog who saved her passengers here. I wrote about the abstraction that was the basis for this painting here. And you can read an ode to the wee pup himself here.

January 5, 2017

Holiday greetings from famous artists

Elissa Gore

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

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

Renee Lammers

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

Nancy Woogen

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

Bobbi Heath

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

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

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.