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Category: landscape

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Heart of the Andes

The Heart of the Andes, 1859, Frederic Edwin Church
Next month I’ll be down at Olana (the home of Frederic Edwin Church) to paint with friends from New York Plein Air Painters. To prepare myself, I stopped by the Metropolitan Museum to visit his most famous painting, The Heart of the Andes.
This is an enormous canvas—ten feet wide and five feet high—that depicts the whole panoply of earthly conditions, from the peak of Mount Chimborazo in Ecuador in the far distance to the lush jungle landscape lying at our feet.
The Heart of the Andes, 1859, (detail) Frederic Edwin Church, showing the focal tree at the lower left.
Church visited Ecuador and Columbia twice. He was retracing the journeys of a famous 19th century naturalist, Alexander von Humboldt. The Heart of the Andes is a composite view, including topography from many places.  The enormity of the canvas allows him to use more than one focal light. There is human activity, most noticeably on the path that leads us in to the cross, but we are cut off from most of it.
The Heart of the Andes, 1859, (detail) Frederic Edwin Church, showing the remarkably intricate foliage running along the right.
In the month of its first showing (in 1859) more than 12,000 people paid a quarter each to see it, waiting for hours in line.
“Nobody would pay a quarter to see a painting today,” Brad Marshall said as we looked at it. “They’d just look at it online.” But no photograph can capture this painting, particularly the intricate work running through the foreground.
The Heart of the Andes, 1859, (detail) Frederic Edwin Church, showing the church and village in the middle distance. There are worlds within worlds in this painting and the mind boggles at the idea of how he sketched it out.
Church eventually sold the work for $10,000, which at the time was the highest price ever paid for a work by a living American artist.


Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in Belfast, Maine in August, 2014 or in Rochester at any time. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops!
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Gone but not forgotten

Beauty Instead of Ashes, 48X36, oil on linen, 2014, by Carol L. Douglas
Last summer my friend Loren and I went for a hike along the Goose River in Rockport, ME, and discovered vast piles of lime tailings. Rockport is one of America’s beauty spots, but it was once a center of quicklime manufacture. Nature slowly attempts to cover this wound, but it is a slow process.
Midcoast Maine is full of limestone deposits. When limestone is burned, the carbon dioxide burns off and quicklime is left. This is used to make plaster, paper, mortar, concrete, fertilizer, leather, glue, paint, and glass. By the Civil War, midcoast Maine was producing more than a million casks of lime a year.
Eventually God will cover our sins, but it takes a long, long time. Sin can endure through generations, but ultimately, the spirit of the Lord will be with us, “to appoint unto them that mourn in Zion, to give unto them beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness, that they might be called trees of righteousness, the planting of the Lord, that He might be glorified.” (Isaiah 61:3-4)


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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Limping toward the finish line

The Harvest is Plenty, 36X48, oil on linen, 2014, by Carol L. Douglas
Today I put the finishing touches on the above painting and tipped it into its frame.
Jesus sent out disciples two by two, telling them, “The harvest truly is great, but the laborers are few; therefore pray the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into His harvest.” Those of us who spend time in the agricultural world understand this metaphor: we sow seeds, we tend plants, and when the harvest comes in, it’s a lot of work and we’re generally short-handed.
But what if the order of things is interrupted? What if a line squall off Lake Ontario flattens the entire field right before the combine arrives?
When wheat ripens, it has heavy, nodding heads on delicate stems. As summer deepens the wheat assumes a color that has no equal in the artificial world—it has a shimmering beauty that’s impossible to capture in paint or photographs—much, in fact, like human souls. Looking at the field from the angle of the threatening storm, we should stand convicted of our need to get busy.
Ack! I have to teach in this space on Saturday!
Speaking of “tip,” my studio is quickly becoming one. I’m generally pretty neat but framing and painting in the same space is difficult. (I have a wood shop in our garage but it isn’t heated and it’s still painfully cold outside.)
I’m running three fans in the hope that these paintings will be dry enough to transport on Thursday, which is my promised delivery date.
Last painting, detail. I’ll finish it tomorrow and tip it in its frame and then deliver on Thursday. Talk about cutting it fine.
I’m finishing my last canvas—hardly where I expected to be when I started this in November, before unexpected surgery and recovery trashed my schedule. On the other hand, the one passage I’ve finished makes me pretty darn happy.


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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Abstract-Expressionism bails me out

Underpainting of a hailstorm. That’s painting #6 underpainted; one more to go.

When I had a composition problem on this underpainting of a hailstorm, I reached back to an old friend: the color field painter Clyfford Still.

Living on the Lake Plains as I do, I know that a level field is perfect for growing crops, but not so attractive for painting. It resolves into bands—a border of green at the bottom, an expanse of gold, a distant, straight hedgerow of green, and then the sky. (This is the same problem with painting Lake Ontario, with its regular shoreline.)
1956-D, 1956, by Clyfford Still
Clyfford Still’s compositions—while emphatically non-representational—still carry the whiff of the natural world about them. In part, this comes from their texture: they may be of color fields, but they are gloriously impasto. But in part it comes from the shapes themselves, which are evocative of the real world.
One of Still’s devices was to lay a contrasting band right along the edge of his canvas, which is then elegantly and perfectly balanced against the other shapes in his canvas. So when I find myself at a loss about how to deal with that edge band of grass that always shows up in a flat landscape, I go and potter among Still’s paintings for a while.
1952-A, 1952, by Clyfford Still
Perhaps it is because I grew up with them. Buffalo’s Albright-Knox Art Gallery owns 33 paintings dated between 1937 and 1963, and they are as familiar to me as my own skin.
That’s small potatoes compared to his oeuvre. The majority of his paintings were never sold in his lifetime and are now on display at the Clyfford Still Museum in Denver.

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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John Constable, master of plein air

Reverse of Branch Hill Pond, Hampstead, oil on canvas by John Constable, about.1821-22. Recently discovered during relining at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
As everyone knows, the Barbizon and Impressionist painters invented plein air painting—except, of course, that they didn’t.
An Italian trip had long been a requisite of study for the best European painters. They went to study the masters of the Italian Renaissance, but also to draw and paint the artifacts of Imperial Rome littering the Italian landscape.
Among the values acquired in these southern trips was the idea that color was as important as line. This freed painters from a strict drawing-values-color methodology, which in turn got them out of the studio and into the fresh air. By the eighteenth century, oil sketching was widespread throughout Europe. There is a long list of painters who worked outdoors long before the practice was dignified with a name.
Seascape Study with Rain Cloud, John Constable, 1827. Don’t you wish you’d painted that?
One of the finest was John Constable. Recently the Victoria & Albert Museum announced the discovery of a Constable sketch in the lining of his Branch Hill Pond: Hampstead. The latter painting was being cleaned and relined in anticipation of a blockbuster Constable show scheduled for next fall.
Given that the V&A already owned an impressive collection of Constable sketches, I’m saving my pennies to go. (These sketches are published in John Constable: Oil Sketches from the Victoria and Albert Museum.)
Hampstead Stormy Sky,1814, John Constable
Constable worked en plein air from his youth forward. His sketches are as free and fresh as those of any 21st century master, which should humble those of us for whom freshness is the only virtue in painting.
Most of his field brushwork is thin and dry, with a few points of impasto in the foliage or sky. (These spots are frequently flattened in his surviving canvases; Constable, like the rest of us, stacked his field canvases while wet.) He worked on tinted grounds ranging from brown to reddish-brown to pink. He allowed that color to show through as part of his work, and carried that technique into his studio paintings.
Weymouth Bay, with Jordan Hill, 1816, John Constable.
Constable used these sketches for color references, to record cloud formations and their patterns of light and shade, and to record the details of different species of trees. He often noted the location, the date and time, and the wind conditions on the back of his canvas. From this we know that many of these sketches were completed very quickly, often in the space of an hour.
Stonehenge, 1835, John Constable. Watercolor on paper.
At the end of his career, Constable abandoned oil sketching for watercolor, due in part to the privations of age and in part from an appreciation of watercolor’s spontaneity. Constable’s late studio paintings were criticized for “scattering his lights about in a manner that deprives it of repose, and renders it almost painful for the eye to look upon.” (Wilton) That increased reliance on white in his oils may have been related to his increased use of watercolor as a sketch medium. But it also put him squarely on-trend with what would follow, something his critics missed entirely.


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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Such fine paintings

Mist, by Daud Akhriev
I needed to see some inspiring landscape today, since I’m busy hemming dresses and baking cookies for my kid’s wedding. Providentially, I received a link to this slideshow of Frenchboro Island (ME) paintings by Daud Akhriev.
Clarity, by Daud Akhriev
The Maine coast was not (believe it or not) designed primarily for tourists; it is above all a working waterfront, with equipment that is—if we’re honest—rather homely. Akhriev is so inventive in his compositions that he doesn’t need to romanticize that industrial grit out of his landscapes. The surge and motion and energy of the working waterfront is all there.
Akhriev was born in Kazakhstan in 1959. He graduated from Vladikavkaz Art High School and the Academy of Fine Art in St. Petersburg (then Leningrad) Russia, under the tutelage of Professor/Academic Piotr Fomin. Following his graduation, Akhriev moved to the United States, where he lived and worked for 20 years.
Harbor Afternoon, by Daud Akhriev
Currently he lives in Andalusia, Spain, and is an exhibiting member of ASPAS and ESPES. He is a signature member of Oil Painters of America.
His Russian training is apparent in his paint handling, which hews to their tradition of sparking, energetic brushwork. It’s also apparent in his superlative drawing skills.
One more workshop left this year, and it starts next 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!
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How blue is the sky?

Saussure’s Cyanometer. Should put any fears of Prussian Blue being fugitive to rest; he made this in the mid-18th century.
How blue is the sky? Landscape painters know that this varies depending on where one is standing, the season, the weather, and even the direction in which one is looking. Local conditions also apply; for example, here the sky directly to the north often fades to a softer blue from the water vapor that hangs over Lake Ontario.
Then there’s the question of altitude. With the advantage of modern travel, many of us have been to the Rockies. We know that the sky there can achieve an aching blueness that is nothing like what we see here in the east.
Baldy Mountain, Montana
“Why is the sky blue” was not actually answered until the end of the 19th century (which makes you wonder what earlier parents told their pesky children). The question of why that blueness varies in intensity was answered in the 18th century, and it was answered in part by that peculiar little device at the top of this page, the Saussure Cyanometer.
Horace-BĂ©nĂ©dict de Saussure (1740-1799) was a Genevan aristocrat and physicist who grew up climbing and studying nature.  In 1760, he hiked the Chamonix valley in France, making extensive notes and sketches, and climbed the BrĂ©vent, which faces Mont Blanc, the highest point in western Europe. 
A sky in the Steam Valley in Pennsylvania has a very different color.
In the spirit of the times, he measured and recorded everything he could. He was an inveterate tinkerer, making new instruments, including a hygrometer, a magnetometer, an anemometer,  a diaphanometer (to measure the clearness of the atmosphere) and a eudiometer. He puttered with a heliothermometer—a  thermometer to measure the intensity of the sun’s rays—and purportedly built the world’s first solar oven.
Alpine legend held that if one climbed high enough, the sky turned black and one could see into the Void.  Saussure understood, however, that the blueness of the sky was an optical effect that was somehow related to the sky’s moisture content.  
Saussure dyed paper squares with Prussian Blue (which stains terrifically dark) in every shade he could manage between white and black. He assembled these into a numbered circle that could be held up to the zenith at a standard distance from the eye.
Descent from Mont-Blanc in 1787 by H.B. de Saussure, Christian von Mechel, copper engraving, colored.

Saussure made an unsuccessful attempt on Mont Blanc in 1785. After two Chamonix men attained the summit in 1786, Saussure himself made the third ascent of the mountain in 1787. With a servant and 18 guides to lug his equipment, he reached the summit in 3 days. Saussure measured everything he could. The sky was the deepest shade he ever recorded, at 39 degrees blue (out of a rather confusing 52° circle).
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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Sixteen scurvy navvies

The Halve Maen passing Hudson Highlands, 40X30, oil on canvas (also available in Giclée print)
This painting is hanging in Sea and Sky: A Personal Journey, now through October 18 at Lakewatch Manor, 184 Lakeview Drive, Rockland, Maine (call 207-593-0722 for more information).

I painted it to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson’s 1609 voyage in the Halve Maen. He and a small crew of sixteen scurvy navvies sailed from Amsterdam to Newfoundland. From there they turned south, skimming along the Atlantic coast until they eventually made landfall at Cape Cod.

They then sailed to Chesapeake Bay, after which they worked their way north along the coast, poking into bays and inlets. Much of the Hudson River is a tidal estuary of brackish water, so Hudson and his crew must have been thrilled as they headed north, believing they had finally found the fabled Northwest Passage. They sailed up to modern-day Albany before realizing their mistake.

This was the beginning of the end for Henry Hudson (he would be set adrift in a James Bay ice field a mere two years later) but the beginning of European hegemony over what would eventually become New York.
The Last Voyage Of Henry Hudson, John Collier, 1881. I prefer to believe they made it to the south end of James Bay and walked back to habitable climes, stopping at a Tim Horton on the way.
 Had Hudson wandered just a few miles west, he would have come face-to-face with the New World’s greatest military power, the Iroquois Confederacy. It’s fun to speculate whether they would have squashed his small force like bugs, feted them, or merely ignored them.
As far as we know, however, they didn’t encounter the Mohawks. They might have seen the Mohicans near Albany, but I chose to represent them with Lenape men.
The Halve Maen itself is a mere speck in the painting. That tiny speck is the first inflamed node of the Black Plague, the first stomach twinge of a cholera epidemic. It was so small, and so inconsequential, but it represented the ultimate destruction of their Eden. 

Hudson wasn’t the first European the natives had encountered; Albany had a French trading fort in 1540. Verrazzano had encountered the Lenape when he sailed in Hudson harbor in 1524. But these people were not the forerunners of colonists in the way Hudson was. The Dutch, English and Iroquois inexorably displaced the Lenape and Mohicans in the Hudson Valley. Where they failed, smallpox succeeded.

I turned the natives’ faces from the viewer because I don’t want to presume their reaction—probably because I have no idea what my own reaction would be. In making the boat so tiny, I was taking a page from Pieter Bruegel the Elder, who frequently put the significant action of his paintings in a corner of an otherwise panoramic canvas.

Headwaters of the Hudson (Lake Tear of the Clouds), 40X30, Oil on Canvas (Private Collection)

I also painted Lake Tear of the Clouds (which is the headwater of the Hudson) for the same show. Although I used a misty Adirondacks highland setting for it, it is not in fact a pool in which a canoe would likely be abandoned. The canoe in the painting was inspired by one I saw in a tidal pool at the Passamaquoddy Pleasant Point Reservation near Eastport, Me. The connection between the Adirondacks and Maine is deep and not easily fathomed.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, ca. 1590-95. Bruegel frequently put the significant action of his paintings in a corner of an otherwise panoramic canvas, and it’s an idea I love to borrow.

 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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I’ve never painted like this before, but I am finally satisfied.

Completed landscape, Mendon, looking north.

A year in the painting, and it’s finally finished to my satisfaction. My very patient clients are coming tomorrow to see it.

All technique innovations start with an unanswerable problem. In this case, it was capturing the thousand prismatic details of a fallow autumn field. In fall, red leans against purple which leans against gold which leans against teal. Trees seem to be less about volume than about sheer exuberance.
After much experimentation, I ended up dry scumbling layer after layer of pigment mixed with cold wax to create the foliage. This was extremely time-consuming because it required waiting for each layer to dry. (That’s also a great way to lose the thread, I found.) It’s a good way to create impasto, and it will save the client having to have the work varnished, because the wax won’t allow oxidization (or so has been my experience).
Applying paint like this seemed a lot more like working with pastels rather than with oils.
Scumbling detail

 The sky, on the other hand, was painted with a series of thin glazes. The clouds are rather a mix of the two techniques.

It’s a big painting for a big wall in a relatively big space, and it had to have enough character to stand out.
Scumbling detail.

 I don’t know if I’ll ever paint this way again, but overall, I’m very satisfied with this work. I hope they like it as much as I do. I’ll sign it in the morning and it will be on its way.

Scumbling detail.

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.