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Category: learn to draw

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Did you miss your calling?

Dr. Seuss was a successful commercial artist when, at age 34, he wrote his first book, “And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street.” It was rejected by publishers dozens of times. He was in his late 40s when he began successfully writing and selling children’s books. He did this advertisement in the 1930s.
This past week I had conversations with two artists about the feasibility of being a full-time artist.
One is a woman with a young family, a mortgage, an MFA and a good (albeit temporary) job. Judging by the work I’ve seen, she has prodigious talent. If given the opportunity for a permanent position, should she take it? Or should she chuck that idea and try to work as a waitress nights and weekends so that she can still make art.
As a working mother, she is already doing two jobs. Adding a third job will be difficult, if not impossible. Until her kids are old enough for school, she’d be smart to do whatever pays best, and save money against the day she drops the day job and takes up painting again. In the meantime, she can carve out a small corner of her house and a few hours a week to nurture her talent, even if it’s by sketching in her spare time.
Anna Mary Robertson “Grandma” Moses, was the poster girl for late-life career changes, having turned to painting in her seventies. Here, Country Fair, 1950.
In essence, that’s what I did. I worked in the marketplace until I was in my late 30s, when a combination of life events made it possible—mandatory, even—for me to resume painting. (There was a time when our society acknowledged that raising children was valuable work. Now, childrearing is supposed to run silently in the background, taking no time or effort at all.)
One of my painting students has an MBA and work experience in an area of business analysis I won’t pretend to understand. She picked up brushes in response to a life crisis and in the process discovered that she has a real affinity for it.
On Saturday, we discussed what the next step might be for a person who wants to start selling paintings. As so often happens with these things, Life answered her question; she was approached about doing a solo show at a local venue.
Vincent Van Gogh didn’t actually start painting until he was in his late 20s, when he only had a decade left to live. Most of his masterpieces were created in the last two years of his life. Wheat Field with Crows, 1890, is generally accepted to be his last painting.
That’s a tremendous affirmation, but as we old-timers know, a show is just a doorway through which you enter the next phase of your work. She still has a long, hard slog ahead of her, but she has the character to endure it.
Neither of these women will find it an easy road. But in both cases, I think they will find something very valuable comes from it.

Come to Maine and learn to paint before it’s too late. I have two openings left for my 2014 workshop in Belfast, ME. Information is available here.
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The real reason I hate Hobby Lobby (and all those other craft stores)

Coral ranunculus at $9.99 a stem on Hobby Lobby’s website. At that rate, a nice floral arrangement would cost what a month’s worth of painting lessons would run you. 
The Census bureau reports that the nation’s international trade deficit in goods and services increased to $47.2 billion in April, as exports decreased and imports increased. (Imported goods and services, by the way, were the highest on record.) The May report will be out at the end of this week, but the news will be depressingly familiar; our trade deficit is about $450 billion a year and it only goes down when Americans are too scared to shop.
I realize that very little of this is from the stuff they sell at craft stores, but what always interests me about these places is how useless most of the stuff they sell is, and how none of it is made in the US.
But why pick on Hobby Lobby? I dutifully put all the stuff necessary to make this Pantone Radiant Orchid Wood Birdhouse in my online Michael’s cart, and it added up to $81.95. That’s about what a factory-reconditioned compound miter saw would cost, and with that you could make something useful.
“Hobby Lobby’s main shoppers are women of all ages. Because of the dependence on disposable income, the company’s stores do best when located in an area with demographics from lower middle class to upper middle class,” reported a shopping center trade rag.
Crafting used to be about saving money: women sewed, we canned, we remade old furniture. Now crafting is a $30 billion entertainment industry. The irony is that none of the stuff in these stores is cheap, and none of it has much to do with either art or craftsmanship.
We are drowning in all the stuff we buy, much of it which will never be used. Many of us then turn to professionals (like Nestle and Bloom, whose photo this is) to put it into some kind of order. That costs even more money.
Meanwhile, crafting’s target demographic carries significant credit-card debt. In 2012, people with incomes of $35,000 or less averaged $5,400 in credit card debt, those making $35,000 to $49,999 averaged $6,700 in credit card debt, those earning $50,000-$74,999 category had $8,900 of credit card debt, while those making more than $75,000 carried $9,200 in debt. And those numbers are down a third from their 2008 highs.
People borrow money they don’t have to buy stuff they don’t need. It clutters up their homes and will eventually be tossed into landfills. It adds to our trade deficit and our dependence on foreign oil. To me, that’s the real moral calculation one has to make before visiting a store like Hobby Lobby.

The heck with that. Come to Maine and learn to paint instead. I have two openings left for my 2014 workshop in Belfast, ME. Information is available here.

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Fifty paintings for a favorite American president

Friar’s Head in Winter, by Michael Chesley Johnson, oil on canvas
2014 marks the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Roosevelt-Campobello International Park. It is one of my own favorite summer destinations, and I first visited it not long after it was made a park.
Duck Pond Marsh Sunset, by Michael Chesley Johnson, oil on canvas
“I’ve spent several years now painting the cottages and the landscape in the Park, and it has become a significant part of my life as a painter,” wrote Michael Chesley Johnson. To honor the park’s anniversary, Johnson has created a series of fifty paintings featuring scenes from the park. The paintings will be exhibited at the Park’s new restaurant, The Fireside, from July 19-August 16.
The Ice House, by Michael Chesley Johnson, oil on canvas
As a child and young adult, Franklin D. Roosevelt summered on Campobello Island, where he sailed, swam, and otherwise generally confronted nature in a way we wouldn’t dream of allowing our children to do today. After his marriage, he brought his young family. It was here in August 1921 that he was stricken with poliomyelitis. He rarely returned after that, but Eleanor Roosevelt and their children continued to visit. 
Snug Cove, by Michael Chesley Johnson, oil on canvas
Although the Roosevelts were a prominent business, social and political dynasty at the beginning of the 20th century, their cottage at Campobello is simple by the standards of the day. It is large (34 rooms), but almost austere; it was a family vacation home, not a mansion. 
The park surrounding it is truly an international park, managed jointly by the United States and Canada. Campobello Island is in the Bay of Fundy, which lies between New Brunswick and Nova Scotia and touches the state of Maine. Roosevelt’s cottage is the centerpiece of the park, but there are other structures and 3000 acres of beaches, cliffs, meadows and bogs.
Glensevern Road Beach Swamp, by Michael Chesley Johnson, oil on canvas
I have two openings left for my 2014 workshop in Belfast, ME. Information is available here.
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Getting it right

Landscape Remembered, 2010, James Morrison, oil on board
James Morrison, at age 82, seems to break most of the conventional rules for plein airpainting. His work is huge, painted on paper boards, and the paint is so thin that I had to check to be certain it was, indeed, painted in oil.
Having never been to Scotland, I am no judge of whether he is true to the landscape, but his work is romantic and monumental and it speaks to me. In some passages it soars with almost negligent disregard for the paint, in others, the detail is overwhelming. It reminds me most of calligraphy in that the open space is as important as the line itself. And of course his draftsmanship and perspective in the glowering clouds is superb.
Half Demolished Tenements, 1964, James Morrison, oil on canvas
My friend Martha Vail recently sent me a book of his work, Land and Landscape: the Painting of James Morrison. I find his perambulations through the decades of his career to be most heartening. He did monochromatic studies of a blackened Glasgow; he did exquisite studies of beeches in the style of Andrew Wyeth; he experimented with op-art and abstract-expressionism.
Perhaps if I live to 82, I’ll get it right, too.
“For any serious artist it is the next work which is the most important and complacency is the negation of creativity,” wrote Guy Peploe, the Scottish Gallery’s director. “So it is for Jim Morrison at eighty. He is lucky, even blessed, with the energy, vitality and curiosity that are creativity’s handmaidens and in this new body of work we can see new departures as he looks again at his favourite landscapes in all seasons and moods.”
Summer Fields, Balgove, 1987, James Morrison, oil on gesso board
Born in Glasgow in 1932, James Morrison studied at the Glasgow School of Art. In 1957, he founded the Glasgow Group of artists with Anda Paterson and James Spence. He is an Academician of the Royal Scottish Academy and a member of the Royal Scottish Society of Painters in Watercolour. He taught at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art in Dundee for 22 years before retiring in 1987 to paint full-time.
I have two openings left for my 2014 workshop in Belfast, ME. Information is available here.
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Back of beyond

Like it or not, we’re all in this web together. This particular web was at Wahconah Falls in the Berkshires, where I plan to stop to paint on my way to Maine in two weeks.
Non-New Yorkers always seem skeptical when we tell them there are vast tracts of our state that are uninhabited. Hamilton County, for example, sprawls over more than 1800 square miles of land, but its population is fewer than 5,000. That gives it a population density equal to North Dakota.
Since I leave—shortly—for the duration of the summer, I took a short trip this past weekend. I’ll be off-grid for much of the time I’m in Maine. I needed a better sense of what was negotiable with these old bones and what I can’t live without. I haven’t done any back-of-beyond camping in more than a decade.
My 2005 Prius–which went over 200,000 miles on Friday–has a perfect smartphone holder in the door. Amazing, since there were no smartphones when it was built.
Yes, I can still sleep in a tent and get up the next morning and be (relatively) limber, providing I have some kind of air mattress. Yes, it’s still a lot of work to camp, what with pitching a tent, hauling water and food and rolling and rerolling bedding. And although I used to like to cook over a campfire, I find it a pain these days.
Since I almost never paint from photos anyway, there is a declining advantage in hauling around my Panasonic DMC-LX5. If I’m just testing viewpoints for a painting–as here–I might as well use my pocket-sized computing device, a/k/a ‘phone’.
What has changed since I last went back of beyond is the nation’s cell phone network. I was on the top of a hill with no running water, no electricity, no septic, no artificial lighting of any kind—and an absolutely stellar 4G signal.
I’m thinking that will change how I interact with you while I’m on the road. Daily blogging without wi-fi or electricity may be difficult (although there are open wi-fi networks everywhere) but Instagram and Facebook are available everywhere. Does that mean my camera, with its beautiful, fast Leica lens, is obsolete in favor of my cell phone? Perhaps.
Of course, going off-the-grid with a party of youngsters is a little different from going with a party of painters. Mainly, the toys are noisier. (What we have here is a convoy.)

I have two openings left for my 2014 workshop in Belfast, ME. Information is available here.
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I may make rotten frames, but I have a perfect nose

My perfect nose. Eat your heart out, Georgia O’Keeffe.
So, it was another bad day, which I won’t go into, because I’m sick of cataloging failure. But when I finished twelve hours on my feet, I consoled myself with reading the Daily Mail, which has to be both the most ridiculous and most entertaining ‘news’ website out there. And the Daily Mail tells me that the perfect, sexiest nose is tilted at 106°.
So I take a selfie and, lo and behold, my nose is perfect. Never mind the wrinkles, the grey hair, the aching feet and legs… according to the Daily Mail, I am hot.
That certainly makes up for a bad day at work, doesn’t it? 
A few other dames with perfect noses.
I have two openings left for my 2014 workshop in Belfast, ME. Information is available here.
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This hasn’t been one of my better days

Usually making frames is my happy place. Not yesterday. This beautiful and perfect gilded frame? I mis-measured the painting.
In my father’s later years, he was a sad guy. Every evening he would say, “This hasn’t been one of my better days.” My husband and I both tend to run on an even keel, but when one of us has had a bad day, we find ourselves telling the other, “this hasn’t been one of my better days.” That’s both a private joke and a reminder that we are, in the bigger picture, blessed in ways my father couldn’t imagine.
Having said that, yesterday was not one of my better days. It started with the tedious business of cleaning and wrapping paintings to go to RIT-NTID’s Dyer Art Center. (I clean every painting with Winsor & Newton’s Artists’ Picture Cleaner before it’s shown.) From there I went into my shop to make frames.

Wrapping and tagging paintings is part of the glamour work of an artist. Mostly for local moving, you worry about the corners.
I love making frames almost as much as I love painting, but yesterday I mangled everything I touched. I made a perfect frame out of some luscious gilded stock, only to realize I’d mis-measured the painting. I had some lovely gunmetal frame stock I’d used for previous figure shows, and I cut a frame for my 36X60 nude and glued it, only to discover that I didn’t have a clamp large enough for it. I ran to the hardware store, which was out of the screws I needed, and ran home with mending brackets, with which I supported and reglued it. Frankly, it looks pretty bad.
Why am I messing up left and right? I want to go to Massachusetts to see my daughter this weekend and if I’m not done prepping for this show, I have to stay home. When I mix family and work, the ante rises fast. I don’t have a solution to this problem, nor would I want to. We should care more about our family than our work.
Then there are those lucky few paintings which have their own fitted packing crates. Those are usually paintings that travel a bit.
Meanwhile, my husband (he’s a programmer) went back to his office at 8:30 PM because he has a project that isn’t working and he also wants to go visit our kid. Some times, you just have to keep your head down and weather the storm.

I have two openings left for my 2014 workshop in Belfast, ME. Information is available here.

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You can paint anything if you can paint greens

View from Catherine’s gazebo, by Anna McDermott. (The color of these paintings is somewhat overblown because it was almost dark when I snapped these shots.)
There are places with gazebos in Rochester, but when there’s electrical activity on the horizon it helps if they’re not too far from a parking lot. Yesterday was a humid, dark day with thunderstorms forecasted for 5 PM. I went over my list of options with my student and pal, Catherine, ending up with the Fairport Library gazebo.
The actual scene she was painting. The greens of summer can be acidic and unvaried in New York.
“No, not that again!” she responded, and I had to agree. Although it overlooks the canal, it’s got boring sightlines.
View from Catherine’s gazebo, by Sandy Quang.
So we met in her gazebo, which overlooks a 10-acre pond. The trouble is, there’s a rain forest between the gazebo and the pond and no amount of chopping seems to keep the sightlines open.
The actual scene she was painting. 
All of which I knew before I got there, but I still love the view, since you’re looking across a thicket of sumacs to a far hillside. Of course, it’s all green, but greens are an excellent challenge. If you can sort out a painting from a thicket of scrubby trees, you can paint anything.
In the Forest of Fontainebleau took Camille Corot five years to complete (1860-65). I gave my students three hours.

I have three openings left for my 2014 workshop in Belfast, ME. Information is available here.
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The first day of summer

Poplar Grove Along the Shore, 9X12, oil on canvasboard, $395, by Carol L. Douglas.
The first day of summer found us huddled up against a cold wind off Lake Ontario, none of us sufficiently insulated against the cold. I’d recommended that my intrepid band of painters—sadly depleted now that the semester is ending—stay out of the direct sun so as to avoid overheating. Foolish me! I should have recommended we wear parkas instead.
It was a mistake to wear shorts. It was a mistake to not wear a parka.
The Great Lakes achieved record ice cover this past winter and we’re still feeling it. The water temperature off Rochester is 58° F, and the winds off the lake pick that up and throw it at us. So even when it was in the high seventies at my house—about five miles from the lake—it was in the low sixties in the shade near the lake.
In Rochester, it’s not too freaky to go to the beach wearing a parka and a bathing suit.
My students borrowed my car and drove to Don and Bob’s for hot drinks and fried food. It didn’t help that Anna then promptly dunked her brush in her tea (it happens), but the onion rings apparently sustained her.
Sandy painting in the poplar grove.

Eventually, we all went home and took hot baths, but it was worth it. A great day of painting!

I have three openings left for my 2014 workshop in Belfast, ME. Information is available here.
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How I’m spending my summer vacation

My show, God+Man, is at Bethel’s AVIV Gallery, 321 East Avenue, Rochester, until the end of June. This is a reprise of a show created for the Davison Gallery at Roberts Wesleyan, and it’s easy to visit: just enter through the rear Anson Place doors across from the Body Shop.

Our student show runs to the end of the month at the VB Brewery, 6606 Route 96 in Victor. (It’s still possible to bid on one of the abstractions there to benefit the Open Door Mission. The brewery is open Wednesday-Sunday.

On July 11, Stu Chait and I open “Intersections: Form, Space, Time & Color” at Dyer Arts Center at Rochester Institute of Technology’s National Technical Institute for the Deaf. The show runs July 7–30. This includes more than sixty paintings. From me, that’s both my studio nudes and plein air paintings; from Stu, that’s mostly abstraction, although he does include a few plein air pieces from back when we first met.
From there I go to Maine, where I’m participating in Castine Plein Air from July 24-26. This event draws 40 juried artists from around the northeast to the historic city of Castine, home of the Maine Maritime Academy.

Next on the docket is Camden Plein Air, hosted by the Camden Falls Gallery. The painting dates are July 31-August 8, and the work will be hung in the gallery during the month of August.
Then my workshopruns from August 10 to 15 in Belfast, ME. There’s still room, but not very much, since I’m only teaching one of them this summer.

Then—after catching my breath for a day or two—I drive to Saranac Lake, New York, to participate in the Adirondack Plein Air Festivalfrom August 21-24. My friend and student Carol Thiel has been telling me about this for a while now, but what really clinched the deal was realizing that many of my Lower Hudson Valley PAP pals would be there.

I’ll be home for Labor Day!

I have three openings left for my 2014 workshop in Belfast, ME. Information is available here.