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Category: Lakewatch Manor

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Day One at Camden Plein Air

Unfinished, Mt. Battie from Camden Harbor. Will either finish it or scrape it out tomorrow.
The first day at Camden Plein Air dawned with great atmospherics—a light drizzle that had fizzled out by 10 AM. Threatened thunderstorms failed to materialize, and scudding clouds to the north over Mount Battie made for a constantly changeable sky.
Painting with a peanut gallery.
I’ve wanted to paint Mount Battie from the harbor since I’ve been coming to Camden.  I’m not sure what I think of this attempt; it’s accurate enough but the composition isn’t doing anything for me. Before I turn it into a floor tile, I’ll take it back to the harbor in the morning and see if I can do something with the lighting.
And then someone either goes and docks a boat right in the middle of your view, or removes one that was critical to your painting…
I met a new friend today, Renee Lammers, who paints on copper panels. She shared a sandwich with me; we watched each other’s backs quite contentedly.
Painting from the deck of a boat has been on my bucket list for years, so when someone offered me the opportunity to try it this week, I agreed enthusiastically. It will require a still day, but I’m excited about the possibility.
An early bedtime tonight!

Join me in October, 2013 at Lakewatch Manor—which is selling out fast—or let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in 2014. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops!
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On the road again

Eco-Warrior 1: my new backpack for Camden Plein Air.

I’ve been home in Rochester just long enough to scrub the tub, check the mail, and break my printer. This morning I’m en route back to Maine. Since this is a painting trip rather than a teaching one, I’ve got two passengers with me—my entire IT department, in fact. (Note to burglars: don’t assume the Duchy has been left defenseless. When I got home from Maine last weekend it was to find two new young people had moved in. Empty, my house has more occupants than the average American household.)

I’m headed up to beautiful Camden to paint in Camden Plein Air, Camden Falls Gallery’s annual paintout and wet paint auction. From Monday, August 26 through Monday, September 2 participating artists from around New England and the mid-Atlantic region will gather to paint picturesque Camden Harbor and the surrounding area.
New work produced during this event will be displayed in the Camden Falls Gallery throughout the week, and a Wet Paint Auction will be held on Saturday, September 7 to benefit four local non-profit organizations.
Eco-Warrior 2: two bikes, my painting kit, luggage and a cooler for three, a bass guitar, and three adult-size human beings. I’ll buy a Tesla when it can do this.
I have wanted to bring my bike to Maine all summer, but could never think up a good excuse to justify it. (The drag on my bike rack cuts my mileage slightly.) This paint-out is the perfect excuse. The contents of my backpack fit perfectly in the plastic milk crate on the back, and I anticipate a week of joyfully pedaling from painting site to painting site.
Because I’m not teaching, I think I’ll be able to blog in real time, but I will be posting a little later in the day than usual.
Join me in October, 2013 at Lakewatch Manor—which is selling out fast—or let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in 2014. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops!
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That “how-to” I didn’t do yesterday…

Megunticook River at Camden, ME, 9X12, oil on canvas, by little ol’ me.
Yesterday I intended to write about how I do field sketches, but distracted myself with raving about a most-excellent new student. Today, then, I get down to business. This is my method of producing a relatively-quick, finished field study with a minimum of “flailing around,” as my pal Brad Marshall so memorably termed it.
My first step is a value study. Whether I do this with charcoal, greyscale markers, or pencil is immaterial—if the value structure doesn’t work, the painting won’t work. 
A value study can be done in charcoal, with greyscale markers, or in pencil.
As I mentioned yesterday, I decided to decompress the center of the painting and omit a wall that encroached on the view from the left, and both—in the end—proved to be the lesser choices. I can’t call those highly-subjective decisions “wrong,” but I did change my mind halfway through.

The Megunticook River wending its way through Camden’s old buildings. Isn’t it beautiful?

 My next step was to draw the picture on my canvas. This is never simply a question of transferring my rough value sketch; nor is it a finished drawing into which I paint. What I do is a carefully-measured map of the future painting. I find this particularly useful when painting architecture, where measurement matters a great deal. I generally do this drawing with a watercolor pencil. I can erase to my heart’s content with water, but when I finally start painting in oil the drawing is locked into the bottom layer.

Not a transfer of my value study; not a “drawing” per se. A map for the finished painting.

 From there, I blocked in the big shapes, paying attention to preserving the values of my sketch, and working (generally) from dark to light. This is especially important if you plan to take more than a few hours to do a painting, because it allows you to paint through significant changes in lighting.

I say “big shapes,” but while I focus on these, I do not obliterate all the drawing I did earlier.

It was upon reaching this degree of blocking that I realized how little I liked this scene without the wall on the left pushing in against it. Putting it in over wet paint (without a drawing) resulted in it being somewhat vague compared to the rest of the painting, but I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing. (Whenever I do something like this, I amuse myself by speculating on what art historians might adduce as a ‘meaning’ of my painterly screw-ups.)
I plan to repaint this scene next week, when I participate in Camden Falls Gallery’s Plein Air Wet Paint Auction. But more on that tomorrow.

Join us in October, 2013 at Lakewatch Manor—which is selling out fast—or let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in 2014. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops!
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Painting side by side with a beginner, you learn things

My painting (left), my student’s painting (right).
I had the opportunity this week to paint side-by-side with a student. He has painted exactly three observational pieces in his life, all under my tutelage. However, as a lifelong builder, he actually has pretty decent drawing chops; he just hasn’t dignified his sketching by calling it art.
The Megunticook River runs beneath and between old mill buildings in Camden, ME.
I set out to do a how-to post about my technique for developing a field sketch. He just happened to be standing next to me, or so I thought.
The Megunticook River runs underneath and around old mill buildings in downtown Camden, Me. I loved the light on the water and the shimmering reflections of the white buildings in the background. However, I felt that it would be better to decompress the gap between the far buildings and remove the building that squeezed the scene down from the left. My student chose to represent the scene exactly as he saw it. About halfway through the painting, I realized that my editorial changes—intended to let the scene “breathe”—had in fact robbed it of its idiosyncratic charm. I would not have realized this had I not been looking at his painting taking shape next to mine.
Working a pretty narrow view, in a pretty narrow space.
The owner of the business next door stopped by several times to see what we were doing. He raved about this man’s painting. But my student—like so many of us—couldn’t hear that praise as genuine, or doesn’t understand how truly gifted he is to be able to do this on the third try. 
His palette, acrylics.
“Someday, they’ll be talking about you as the new Grandma Moses, and I’ll be a footnote in your personal history,” I told him.
His finished painting. 
Sometimes you need to see a painting dignified with a frame; it is as if it puts on its tuxedo and is ready to perform. So I tossed his painting in a frame while I framed mine. I think he suddenly realized just how good it is and was shocked.
Later this week, I’ll post my step-by-step instructions. After all, technique is important; the joy of painting… well, that is something far greater.

Join us in October, 2013 at Lakewatch Manor—which is selling out fast—or let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in 2014. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops!
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Three paintings on the block in Castine, ME

Midsummer Reverie, 6X8, oil on canvas.  One of three paintings for sale at Castine Historical Society today.
I finally figured out what I like so much about Castine, Maine—it reminds me of Lewiston, NY, where I spent a good deal of time in my salad days.
Anyone who knows Lewiston will recognize a parallel with this from Castine’s history: “In 1607, Samuel de Champlain, the great French explorer and colonizer, sailed up the Penobscot River and wrote of the beauty of the river and its shores. Four years later Father Pierre Biard, a French Jesuit, met here with a group of Indians…”
Owl’s Head Light, 8X10, oil on canvas.  One of three paintings for sale at Castine Historical Society today.
That was three years after Champlain went through Lewiston, but WNY’s Jesuit didn’t arrive until 1640 or thereabouts. Lewiston had RenĂŠ-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle and Fr. Louis Hennepin; Castine had Jean-Vincent d’Abbadie de Saint-Castin.
Both regions were contested territory long before the surrounding forests were of much value, because both were on navigable routes into the interior. That means that both places have a great depth of native, French and British pre-colonial history packed into them.

Rising Tide at Wadsworth Cove, 12X16, oil on canvas.  One of three paintings for sale at Castine Historical Society today.
I have three paintings in the Castine Historical Society Art Show and Sale, which ends today. (One of the downsides of not blogging while traveling is that you don’t stay current.) I also recently heard that my mermaid buoy for the Penobscot East Resource Center auction was purchased by a Vinalhaven fisherman. There’s something darn authentic about that.
Join us in October, 2013 at Lakewatch Manor—which is selling out fast—or let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in 2014. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops!
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This is your world without art

This is your world without art.

My little corner of the world was rocked yesterday by a report that a staggering number of young New Yorkers are deficient in math and languages, according to new state tests. The district in which we live—which was once among the very top schools nationwide—achieved a piddling 59.8% language and a 52.7% math proficiency rating. (That is still far higher than our state and county averages.)

We moved to this district for its reputation for iconoclasm and excellence. As administrators chase the brass ring of higher test scores, our district lags. I’m almost resigned to that. What really irks me was this paragraph I read in Valerie Strauss’ excellent essayin the Washington Post:

The rationale here is muddled at best, but the detriments are obvious. For instance, young students in New York State who are developing as they should will be placed in remedial services, forgoing enrichment in the arts because they are a “2” and thus below the new proficiency level.               

In other words, these ‘deficient’ students must devote all their free time to raising their math and language test scores, leaving no time for such luxuries as art or music. Our kids already receive minimal arts education. Schools operate as if the only legitimate form of education is intellectual gavage. This is despite the fact that there’s absolutely no proof that this force-feeding does anything to improve test scores or, more importantly, create educated, aware, productive citizens.

Art is a luxury only if civilization is a luxury.  We are fools to believe we humans don’t live primarily in the emotional and physical realms. (Maslow’s Heirarchy of Needs is a curiously intellectual way of expressing this truth.) Ignore the physical and emotional needs of children, and watch just how much they don’t learn.

This is all depressingly familiar. Rochester’s School of the Arts (SOTA) has been a fantastically successful school in an otherwise moribund district. Its graduation rate was comparable to the best suburban districts at a time when the district as a whole could graduate fewer than half its students. Yet when the district needed to cut costs, it started with SOTA.

American visual arts and music have turned into one long booty call. That is not the fault of the arts themselves; it is the fault of a civilization that declines to teach art.

We can’t afford art? The as-yet blank check for implementing Common Core standards is estimated at anywhere from $1 billion to $16 billion nationwide.

Scads of money are being made on Common Core—including by the textbook publisher Pearson, which is being paid by the Gates Foundation to create materials which they will then sell at a profit to schools nationwide. On top of that, there will be fat consultancy fees paid by districts to learn the system, and a panic of tutors relentlessly drilling students found to be deficient.

Schoolchildren may no longer have time to draw and paint, but we do. Join me in October, 2013 at Lakewatch Manor—which is selling out fast—or let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in 2014. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops!

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The one thing every plein air painter should know

If I were asked to list the most important skills for a plein air painter, they would include cleaning brushes, packing efficiently, and drawing (of course). But I would add a skill taught to me by my young assistant, Sandy Quang.

Every artist worth his or her salt carries plastic shopping bags. (Here in Rochester they are called Wegmans’ bags but they probably have a different name in your neck of the woods.) They can be recycled in any number of ways: as trash bags, as emergency wrappers for damaged tubes of paint, or to schlep dirty brushes back home. I always pack three in my backpack, and another half dozen in my teaching bag. They’re really annoying in their natural state, however.

In its natural state, a plastic shopping bag is a pain. It bounces around, wraps itself around stuff, and generally takes up far more space than its real volume.
First, smooth the bag out so the corners are flat and the handles are straight.
Then fold the bag in half…

And half again.
From the bottom, start folding it in triangles…
...until you reach the handle.
Almost there!
Fold the handle back toward the bag, also in triangles.
And stuff it in the gap.
Yeah, like this.
Voila! A perfectly neat bag to drop in your backpack.
And if you keep a stash of them, you might qualify as OCD Painter of the Year.
But THIS, my friends, is the sound of a new computer installing Adobe Creative Suite. Tomorrow I might actually start to make sense again!
 Join us in October, 2013 at Lakewatch Manor—which is selling out fast—or let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in 2014. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops!
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Oh, the places we’ve been!

This may be a first in computer history: a blog entry written by hand, using a pen. I don’t recommend it; it’s cumbersome and slow and when you’re done you just have to type it in again. Plus, I’m not sure anything I wrote made any sense.

If the puff of blue smoke and whiff of brimstone hadn’t convinced me, the Last Rites performed by the IT department proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that my laptop had suddenly morphed into a doorstop.

It’s possible that my computer expired rather than look at any more dresses on the Internet. However, I recently received a chunk of change in exchange for a painting. My dear Prius is eight years old and has been gunning for a spa day. It’s a very smart car, so I knew enough to walk to the bank to deposit the check. But it never dawned on me that my laptop might actually pay attention to what I enter into its spreadsheets.*

It is now time for that most painful of tasks: comparison shopping. There are a million ways to make a wrong choice in today’s marketplace. (Some people enjoy shopping. Imagine that.)

Should I get a tablet? I travel a lot; my luggage is always too big. My IT department immediately vetoed that. I can hardly argue since he programs on both platforms. “A tablet will never give you the power you need and the apps are still primitive in comparison,” he said.

Former laptop, now doorstop or paperweight. Goodbye, Old Paint.

I purchased this laptop before the Great Crash of 2008. That’s a good long life for a laptop, but my kids have had the same brand and their laptops both had catastrophic fails. So brand loyalty alone is no guide.

At this point, someone always suggests that I buy a Mac. Been there, done that. I don’t want to pay the premium for the hardware or buy new software. PC architecture allows my IT department to upgrade hardware every time I start whining. (He has to; he’s married to me.)

We keep a spare laptop for emergencies. I can type on an old version of Word but there’s no card reader and no way to access any of the 15,000 or so photos on my hard drive. “This is why I tell you to store your photos on the server,” grumbled the IT department. Then he fished around and found me an old external card reader.

I always look for the silver lining. Perhaps my new computer will allow me to comment on my own blog, I mused. And I was chuffed to realize that my go-to guys for computer advice—besides the afore-mentioned IT department, of course—are my three daughters.

*I know inanimate objects watch carefully to see if you recently got paid, but how does my dentist know when I’ve suddenly come across a little gelt? He just told me I need a new crown.

Join me in October, 2013 at Lakewatch Manor—which is selling out fast—or let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in 2014. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops! If you want to study in Rochester, drop me a line here.

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The art of practice, the practice of art

Carol Thiel’s field sketch of Durand Lake, done last Wednesday evening. About 9X12, and about three hours from easel up to easel down. If you read yesterday’s blog entry, you know that I was amazed she could get any kind of a painting out of the scene.
This morning a young woman named Cherise Parris led worship at our church. She is the daughter of two accomplished and well-known Rochester musicians (Alvin and Debra Parris) and she’s been singing since she first drew breath. She has a powerhouse voice.
Cherise uses her voice like an extension of her own self, as a tool to express an idea. I’ve had voice lessons and I’ve sung in choirs, but I’ve never gotten past the point where I’m focused on creating a tone. On the rare occasion when I forget, I usually get a jab in the ribs and a sharp hissed “Mom!” Here’s the truth: I just don’t care enough about singing to actually practice.
There’s a meme based on Malcolm Gladwell’s “Outliers: the Story of Success” that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to make a craftsman. The number seems arbitrary to me, but there’s certainly truth to the idea that, as Thomas Edison is alleged to have said, “Genius is 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration.”
I got two pictures by email today from Carol Thiel. Carol took my workshop last October, and has since taken my classes when her work schedule permits. One painting was done before she started studying with me; one was done last Wednesday evening in my class.
A painting done by Carol Thiel last year at the Adirondack Plein Air festival, right before she took my workshop. A nice painting, but she has developed a more sophisticated palette and value structure over the past year.
“They were sitting near each other and I was struck by the difference,” she said. “Both were painted in approximately the same amount of time,” she added. “The Adirondack painting had different conditions—a very dull, cloudy day—but nowadays I would be able to see some other colors in the clouds, darken the darks, etc.”
I appreciate that Carol sees value in my instruction, but there are two parts to this. The first is good teaching, but the second is that she listens to and practices what she learns.
It takes a long time to get to the point where you use a paintbrush as an extension of yourself. I asked Sandy Quang today whether she is there yet. (She’s been studying with me on and off since she was sixteen; she’s 25 today.) “Half and half,” she answered. And I think that’s about right.
All of which reminds me of that old saw: “How do you get to Carnegie Hall?” “Practice, practice, practice.”

If you want to take a workshop with me, join me in October, 2013 at Lakewatch Manor—which is selling out fast—or let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in 2014. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops! If you want to study in Rochester, drop me a line here.
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When good painting locations go bad

Carol’s set up of Durand Lake. Nice mackerel sky, heralding rain (correctly, as it turns out).

 I’ve painted at Durand-Eastman Park for years. I’ve painted on the beach, along Zoo Road, and most often on the embankment facing Durand and Eastman Lakes. These are steep-sided glacial fingerlings reaching back from the shore of Lake Ontario, separated from their mother lake by a narrow strip of land. 
This location is handicapped-accessible. It has picnic tables. It has parking. It had a Porta-Potty, and it’s always several degrees cooler than inland.
Speaking of skies, this was what we had at sunset. Not all that paintable, but interesting for having that fine spun cotton below the altocumulus layer. That Lake Ontario skyline is inexorable, however, and it is matched by an equally flat shoreline. If the clouds don’t cooperate, you have a whole lot of nothing.
With a little manipulation, one could create the illusion* of the stillness of the Adirondacks. Durand Lake seems to disappear through a twisting inlet that gives the impression of limitless possibility. A tree trunk curves fetchingly over the inlet and the sun would often etch that line in lovely contrast to the still, golden water below.
  
So when Carol Thiel and I were kicking around ideas for painting spots, it seemed like a reasonable option for a particularly gorgeous summer evening: limpid, luminous, neither hot nor cool, with ever-changing clouds. It held the promise of a great sunset.
That thud-thud-thud is the sound of jet-skies.
But what the heck happened to my reliable view? The tree that had once dangled fetchingly over the inlet was obscured by new growth. The forms of the lake-shore were overrun with undergrowth, monotonously green in color. The duckweed that usually provides a golden-chartreuse foil was in extremely short supply.
Carol painted it, and did a credible job of finding interest in the scene. Virginia and Lyn turned their backs on it and painted Lake Ontario instead. Now, there’s a thankless painting! The person who can find a composition on the Rochester shore of Lake Ontario—outside the harbors themselves—that’s anything other than a series of horizontal bands punctuated by scrubby trees wins a prize: a freeze-pop in your choice of colors.
One thing we are never in short supply of here in Rochester is trees, so Catherine was wise to default to drawing them. (This park is home to Slavin Arboretum, which is an awfully interesting tree collection.)
And, if you can believe it, they took away the Porta-Potty.  And as sunset moved in, so did a dense, obscuring cloud cover. I really should complain to the city.

“We haven’t come across a Lock 32 this year,” said Catherine, by which she meant that we hadn’t found a painting location that mesmerized us. It must be easily accessible from the city, it must be handicapped-accessible, it must have a bathroom, and it must be interesting. I hate to reprise hits from the past, so I ask my Rochester friends: do you have any brilliant ideas?   
*Durand-Eastman is a particularly noisy park. The traffic on Lakeshore Drive is usually drowned out by the ever-present jet-skis rumbling along the lake. But paintings don’t have soundtracks, thankfully.

Join us in October, 2013 at Lakewatch Manor—which is selling out fast—or let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in 2014. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops!