learn to draw Archives | Page 33 of 68

May 22, 2014

Come drink beer and admire art

Carol Thiel’s spring landscape.

Painting students of Carol Douglas (that’s me!) will be displaying their work during the month of June at the VB Brewery in Victor. Their friends and family and anyone else who’s interested is invited to join us for an opening gala on Sunday, June 8, from 1-4.

The VB Brewery is the brainchild of Tom and Catherine Bullinger. Catherine is the person who convinced me I should teach painting many years ago, and she was my very first student. Technically, that makes her my longest-enrolled student, although like all retirees, she doesn’t seem to have much time for class these days.

This is Nina Koski’s first-ever class still-life.

This year’s show will feature works by some very new students as well as some old-timers. Several of them have only three or four paintings under their belt as of today. Showing any work at that point is difficult and I applaud them for participating.

This year, several of my Maine workshop participants have offered to send their work in from faraway places. Since they can’t be at the opening, this is generous.

Nancy Woogen is one of my 2013 Maine workshop students from the mid-Hudson region. She is kindly sending this painting for our student show.

The VB Brewery is located at 6606 State Route 96 in Victor. From Rochester, take 490 to Exit 29 (the last one before the toll barriers) and continue east on Route 96. You will go 4.5 miles through the village of Victor. The brewery is on your left.

Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in Maine in 2014 or Rochester at any time. My Belfast, ME, workshop is almost sold out. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops!

May 21, 2014

The cadmium question

The only cadmium in here is cadmium orange. Peppers, 8X6, oils, by little ol’ me.

Yesterday, my favorite color scientist forwarded me this from Golden:

For environmental protection reasons, the European Community is currently considering a ban on cadmium pigments in artist paints. We would like to gather comments from artists concerning the relative importance of these colors in their work, in an effort to better understand the potential effect of this measure.

To complete a brief survey, click here: GOLDEN Cadmium Survey.

I use only one cadmium—orange, For yellows, I prefer Hansa (arylide). For reds, I use naphthol red and quinacridone violet.

That said, losing cadmium orange from my palette would hurt; it’s one of my workhorse pigments in both landscape and figure. I suspect there are substitutes out there, such as pyrrole orange, but I haven’t tried integrating them into my palette.

Mixing your paints and your wine is probably not the healthiest option.

Moreover, the cadmiums are great pigments. Pigments affect technique, and losing the cadmiums, with their great lightfastness and solidity, would be difficult for many painters. Before they toss them out willy-nilly, it’s worth asking what the environmental impact is, and whether their replacements are any safer.

The risk to artists is low, since cadmium poisoning primarily comes from inhalation or ingestion. Unless you’re working in encaustic, you’re unlikely to inhale paint fumes. Pastel artists should already know to use an air cleaner when working indoors. For all painters, gloves or silicone hand lotion is always advisable.

More difficult is that our use of cadmium pigments might endanger others. We all dispose of pigments into the waste stream when we clean brushes. (I just realized this morning that my long-term habit of solidifying waste pigments and putting them in the solid waste stream is counterproductive if my city burns trash for energy.) The stuff also has to be manufactured and milled before it’s turned into paints, and that may be happening in countries where environmental protections are nil.

My palette doesn’t even usually include a true red, for the same reason that it doesn’t include a true green.

Cadmium is present in cigarettes, and the smoking artist inhales dangerous levels of it every time he or she lights up. It is used in the manufacture of plastics, iron, steel, cement, non-ferrous metals and batteries. What percentage of the overall cadmium stream comes from artists, I don’t know, and it’s an important question. I suspect it’s pretty small, but whether that is a moral green light to keep using it, I can’t say.

As for whether the substitutes are safer or not, that’s also an open question. No known health risks are associated with the other red and yellow pigments I ‘m currently using, but the important caveat is that word, “known.” Recent research, for example, has linked azo pigments with basal cell carcinoma.

May 20, 2014

Every good idea I’ve ever had, I cribbed from someone else

I felt so craptastic by the end of the four hours that I asked Sandy to finish my painting for me. As fun as it was to watch her, that really didn’t work, since I’ve never bothered to train my students to be mini-mes. (At G and S Orchards in Walworth, NY.)

Yesterday I challenged another obstacle on the journey back to health—I painted four hours standing up. My surgeon did a fine job of running his knife along an old incision, but it was still abdominal surgery and I’m still recovering.

Drawing in watercolor pencil is something I borrowed from my pal Kristin Zimmermann. It affords better control than charcoal and is completely erasable with a wet paper towel. It’s not appropriate for every setting, but here where I wanted to study the architecture of an individual tree, it was great.

It was pretty painful to paint standing, and that’s sadly apparent in my painting. But it’s something I have to master before we’re truly into summer, because painting from a seated position is so limiting.

The shelf on my tripod was Jamie Grossman’s idea. The panel carrier was suggested by Marilyn Fairman. Using a waterproof stuff sack for my palette… well, I think I came up with that on my own.

While cleaning up, I mused on how much I’ve borrowed from the ideas of others. The pill container I keep my paints in was a gift from Jamie Grossman, who also showed me the tripod shelfthat allowed me to ditch my pochade box once and for all. The PanelPak carrier is something Marilyn Fairman showed me, and although I balked at spending the money on them, they’ve proven to be worth their weight in gold.

Jamie Grossman also came up with this idea for carrying paints. Since I buy mine in jars, it saves me a ton of time and money on tubing, and it’s easier to manage in the field than tubes.

Using watercolor pencils to draw on my canvas allows me to make fast erasures with a wet rag, but that wasn’t my idea either—it was something my pal Kristin Zimmermann came up with. Kristin is also the person who drilled into me the importance of understanding pigments.

And here it is, another future doorstop.

Brad Marshall has recently been quoting Anders Zorn to the effect that we are not competitors, we are colleagues. So true, Brad.

May 19, 2014

Freaky coincidence or what?

Jingwei Yang’s painting from Anna’s garden.

I’ve known Anna since she was a mere slip of a girl. She’s married now and two months ago she and her husband bought a lovely home in the city. Anna has always been musical but never, to my knowledge, interested in making visual art. I was most surprised when she called me about a month ago to ask about painting lessons. Most people ease into painting gradually, but she went out to Hyatt’s and got all the necessary tools and has been practicing at home.

Sandy Quang’s painting from Anna’s garden.

Last week I took my class to Anna’s new home to paint her small backyard pocket garden. It is clearly the garden of an artist. She told us the former owner was an art teacher at Rochester’s School of the Arts and her late husband was also an artist.

Nina Koski’s painting of Anna’s garden.

After class, Anna gave me a tour of her house. About halfway through, I realized the late husband in question was Peter Berg, who was a well-known Rochester painter around the time Anna was born. I never knew him, not living here at the time, but I knew of him from my friend Sari Gaby.

I do believe houses can have a spiritual temperament, and I wonder if Anna’s house has a painter’s temperament. Perhaps those old pantiles and oak pocket doors gave her a gentle nudge toward painting.

Nate Tomlinson’s painting from a different garden day.

May 16, 2014

Back in the saddle again

Flowering apple trees at G and S Orchards. Wee (9X12) and by little ol’ me.

Yesterday I painted en plein air for the first time since my cancer diagnosis last winter. Yes, I was rusty. Yes, I forgot to bring essential stuff. Yes, I was limp with exhaustion when I was done. No, I did not paint a masterpiece, but I did a nice little field sketch and learned something about young apple trees.

I’ve been fascinated with orchards all winter. This spring I made a cold call to G and S Orchardsin Walworth. The owners promptly invited my class out to paint. I went out there again yesterday and had a few hours before the rains swept back in (although the winds were high enough to do a little free microdermabrasion on my face).

I hope they don’t get sick of me any time soon, because I’ve got a season’s worth of paintings scoped out.

I’ve photographed the steps of a plein air painting for my beginning students to study before Saturday’s class. Sometimes it’s easier to understand a process in pictures.

After doing a sketch, I map the painting on my canvas. I’ve been using watercolor pencils, because they’re easy to erase, but any pencil or charcoal works as well.

Then I map out the branches (which are the darks) using a mix of ultramarine and burnt sienna. This view was a little strange because the darks were a grid, but it’s important for me to note the branch structures, even though I obliterate them for the most part.

The next step is to mix a matrix of greens. I need all the help I can get to differentiate greens in a field of identical trees in absolutely flat light.

Then it’s time to map out the color, working from the darkest to the lightest. After this, you can paint as tight or as loose as you want; the initial steps work for every finishing style.

I didn’t want to paint a global view without exploring a few trees first, but isn’t this a sweet scene?

May 15, 2014

The large, angry crustacean is on his way to Maine.

The finished buoy. You can buy this!

When I blogged last month asking for suggestions about what to paint on my 2014 buoy for Penobscot East Resource Center’s fifth annual lobster buoy auction, I received four texts in rapid succession:

“Mom! Paint a giant lobster battling the Kraken!”

“Mom! Paint an enormous lobster destroying a city!”

“Mom, paint a big lobster eating New York!”

“Mom, paint a lobster battling an army in the style of the Bayeux Tapestry.”

The major change I made was adding Black Hawk helicopters.

When your four most severe critics all come up with the same idea at the same time, you have to run with it. And it fit with the idea that I had been turning over but wasn’t sure how to paint.

Signed and titled by the artist, as always.

It’s no secret to Mainers that lobster prices steadily tanked from 2005 to 2014. At the same time, restaurant prices for lobster remained high. That’s a fascinating disconnect—one I think is beautifully explained here—but the bottom line is that lobster costs more in New York because consumers haven’t a clue what’s happening in local commodity markets. That means there’s an artificially big profit being made, and it isn’t happening on the docks of coastal Maine.

When you live in a Magical Duchy, you don’t need to go to the Post Office. You just put your package on the back of the truck and it miraculously gets mailed.

A situation that needs fixing but seems to be out of the range of mortal ken calls for a superhero. Who better than a large, angry crustacean from the Atlantic depths?

I like painting from life, but that’s a little difficult in this case.

Last week I was reading about the influence of 19^thcentury Japanisme on western art and thinking I was absolutely free of it. But I have to admit that I owe a nod to Godzilla, and maybe to King Kong as well. (After all, the Empire State Building is somewhere in that mish-mosh.) The Black Hawk helicopters, however, are just modern America.

Looking around for pictures of lobsters last month, I came across this rhyton from the Met, c. 460 BC, in the shape of a lobster claw. Good to know lobsters are an eternal verity.

The auction will be held Tuesday, August 5th, 2014 at the Fishermen’s Friend Restaurant in Stonington, ME. If you’re in Stonington this summer, you can stop by and see all the buoys and vote for your favorite (as long as it’s mine). You’ll also be able to bid on your favorites online. Watch this space for more information.

May 14, 2014

Comparing yourself to others

Romance of Autumn, 1916, by George Bellows. I’m leading with a painting that makes me squirm every time I see it, to make a point: if you judged Bellows by this single painting, you’d think he didn’t know how to mix or apply paint. But he knew exactly what he was doing, as his catalogue attests.

The other day Brad Marshall jokingly asked us whether he or Anders Zorn was better looking. We of course immediately said that Brad was. “Oh, well, Zorn was the better painter,” he replied.

“Not better, just different,” I answered.

As mature artists, most painters have achieved mastery over their materials. What we react to isn’t their technical skill, but how they speak to us. When we don’t like their work, it’s usually more a question of not responding to their worldview than that they are technically deficient.

Illustration to Dante’s Divine Comedy, Hell, by William Blake. Blake was painting his edgy, uncomfortable, oddly-drafted work at a time when the highly-finished Grand Manner was in vogue. No wonder that his work was almost forgotten until he was rediscovered by Victorian England. Today he is widely recognized as one of the greatest artists England ever produced.

It’s only in the learning phase that one painter is ‘better’ than the next, and even that is transitory. Some of us are faster learners than others, but that doesn’t mean we’ll be better painters in the end.

Last weekend, one of my beginning students got very frustrated. She was having trouble understanding why I asked her to lay down paint in a specific way. It didn’t help that her classmates were sailing through the exercise.

“I feel like everyone is doing a great job except me,” she said.

Childhood’s Garden, 1917, by Charles Burchfield. His genius lies in his spirit and vision. He is often called the dark Edward Hopper, but many of his paintings radiate happiness.

Like most artists—experienced or not—she really has no idea where her strengths lie. She is emotionally transparent, so what she feels vibrates through her drawing. When she’s happy, her trees dance, the pavements sing. When she’s not happy, her canvas glowers.

That is a kind of talent that can’t be taught or bought, but can only be nurtured like a seedling set out in a garden bed. And it’s so easy to knock such a talent apart, because it comes from one’s inner vision, and that’s a fragile thing.

May 13, 2014

Oh, buoy!

Day #2. Will finish today. I love this fundraiser for Penobscot Bay Resource Center almost more than anything else I do!

If I were gonna make a habit of painting on buoys, I’d find some way to hold them steady. I painted on this one for five and a half hours yesterday, and it wasn’t my painting hand that was tired, it was the hand clutching the buoy.

I haven’t got a table per se in my studio, so I sat in the dinette in my kitchen to work on this. That had the advantage of being more comfortable, but it had the disadvantage of exposing me to my peanut gallery.

How can you tell the lobster is attacking New York? Because that’s the Brooklyn Bridge!

“Do you really think a lobster could stand on his tail like that to attack the city of New York?” asked my son.

“A lobster could theoretically grow that big,” noted my daughter, who is a biomedical engineering major and presumably au courant on matters of biology. “Unlike humans, who have a finite number of cell replications, they can keep growing forever.”

Even my engineer husband and daughters haven’t found a way to make working on this buoy comfortable. Any suggestions?

“However,” she added, “I think the lobster should be lighted from the bottom. He is, after all, in the City.”

I hate when my kids are right. But I also plan to finish this painting today, so they can have it in Stonington, ME, by May 15.

May 12, 2014

Barrier-free plein air painting

Schoen Place, even though it’s a reworked old industrial space, is very accessible to the less-mobile painter.

As much as I loved teaching at the Irondequoit Inn and Lakewatch Manor, neither of them were barrier-free. I have a student here in Rochester who wanted dearly to come to Maine with me, but the staircases kept her away. So when we booked into Belfast’s Fireside Inn, which has a lift, she signed up right away.

Ironically, my home studio in Rochester isn’t barrier-free, so V. only studies with me in the summer. When we first met I thought plein-air handicapped-access was probably not a workable concept. But in fact here in Rochester it works very well. We find a location, V. spins her walker around and uses it as a seat, and we’re good to go. We’ve painted at Lake Ontario, along the Erie Canal, at High Falls and at many other places.

Durand-Eastman is another place that’s more accessible than it seems at first glance. It has a paved path along the waterfront.

It’s just a matter of avoiding places with really soft gravel, or places that require too much walking. Realistically, if it’s not safe and pleasant for V, it’s not going to be pleasant for someone schlepping 15 pounds of painting supplies on his or her back.

It’s not something I ever thought of before I met V, I’m ashamed to admit. But since I’ve been paying attention, I’ve realized that barrier-free is something smaller cities like Rochester have done better than other, trendier places in my orbit. We have the space to reinvent ourselves.

Highland Park is another place with excellent, paved paths, and it’s possible to circumnavigate the space without using stairs.

I think it’s going to work just fine in Maine, too. (I am almost sold out for this workshop, so if you’re on the fence about coming, you really should do something sooner or later.)

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!

May 9, 2014

The internet and art

The Romans kept their ancestor-geniuses in boxes. (Okay, they were actually shrines.) This one, from the House of the Vettii in Pompeii, shows two Lares (or guardian angels), flanking the household’s ancestor-genius.

When I went looking for Iván Ramos’ photos, it was very easy to come up with them, because he is practicing an open-source business model. When I went looking for Van Gogh paintings of an orchard on Tuesday, I had no problems, because Wikipaintings is open source.

Open source started off as a software development model, but has become more generalized. It means universal access through free licensing, and universal distribution, including subsequent iterations. For artists, it’s about sharing your process and it means not worrying too much about the low-res images of your work that are spinning around on the internet. (That’s not too difficult, since we sell paintings, not images of paintings.)

We keep our geniuses in different boxes: Wikipaintings, for one, which claimed to have 75,000 paintings on line as of June, 2012.

That’s pretty much the norm in my world of visual arts, where painters are happy to share process and images of their work. But it is not universal.

I would love to show my students how Andrew Wyeth set up his paintings. But the Wyeths are very protective of their intellectual property, so if you want to study them in breadth, you have to hie over to a museum that holds their work.

I would love to show you Jamie Wyeth’s Seven Deadly Sins, which uses seagulls as models. However, the Wyeths are very tight with their intellectual property, and so you’re unlikely to see the series on the internet. Here are some ravens in Maine instead, which aren’t out of copyright and which Wikipaintings displays under fair use principles.

What does this exposure do to the Cult of Genius that has elevated the artist since the 18th century? Hopefully, it destroys it forever, since the idea of the artist locked in his garret and thinking brilliant but ultimately solitary thoughts, is pretty terrible for the actual production of art.

Artists never worked in a vacuum.

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!