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Category: learn to draw

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Two Elizabeths

This Bavarian polychrome statue of Elizabeth of Hungary, c. 1520, is so lifelike that she could be the engineer in the next cubicle.
My friend K Dee recently put together a photostream of portraits of women to “help me remember, in case I ever start to forget, which sort of female image I find reflects a healthy civil society, and which I do not.” Today I focus on two Elizabeths.
In popular literature, Elizabeth of Hungary is most known for a miracle of the roses (which is a frequent image in Catholic iconography). She was, however, a real woman who lived a real life of good works.
Saint Elizabeth of Hungary, c. 1365, by Pietro Nelli, tempera and gold on panel, focuses on her miracle of the roses.
The daughter of King Andrew of Hungary, she was the niece, through her mother, of another saint of the church, Hedwig of Silesia. She was affianced to Louis IV, future Landgrave of Thuringia and taken to that court as a young girl so that she might grow up in the culture in which she would reign. At age 14, she and Louis were married.
She must have been a remarkable 14-year-old. As he traveled to meet his liege responsibilities, she ran his fiefdom. She built a hospital and distributed alms during a period when plague, floods and famine ravaged Thuringia. Rather than resenting his wife’s religiosity, Louis encouraged her distribution of his worldly goods.
In 1227, Louis died in Otranto while en route to join the Sixth Crusade. His brother was appointed regent for their young son, and Elizabeth’s power came to an end. That year she left the castle. Elizabeth lived in the strictest celibacy and self-denial for the remainder of her short life, resolutely resisting all machinations by her family to make her another politically-profitable marriage.
Mother Seton lived too recently to be the subject of great art. (In part, contemporary artists are hampered by having some idea of what she looked like.) Here, from a prayer card.
Elizabeth Ann Seton was the first US-born saint. Born in 1774, she was the child of affluent, educated, and well-connected New Yorkers. At age 19, she married a wealthy and prominent businessman. The couple belonged to fashionable Trinity Church, where Elizabeth helped found The Society for the Relief of Poor Widows with Small Children.

In 1802, the family’s fortunes reversed: William Seton declared bankruptcy and sailed for Italy in an attempt to cure his tuberculosis. The trip killed him. It was there that Seton was introduced to Catholicism, to which she converted in 1805.

Impoverished and widowed, Seton tried to start a school for proper young ladies, but her conversion was anathema to the elite of New York. In 1809 Elizabeth took vows of poverty, chastity and obedience and accepted the invitation of the Sulpician Fathers to move to Emmitsburg, Maryland. There she founded the Saint Joseph’s Academy and Free School for the education of Catholic girls and the Sisters of Charity of St. Joseph’s, dedicated to caring for the children of the poor. By 1818, the sisters had established two orphanages and another school. Today six groups of sisters trace their origins to Mother Seton’s initial foundation. Mother Seton herself died of tuberculosis at the age of 46.

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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Great Dames

Boudicca and her Daughters on the Victoria Embankment is the most famous representation of the British queen. Queen Victoria felt a resonance with Boadicea; the work was as commissioned by Prince Albert and executed by Thomas Thornycroft.
My friend K Dee recently put together a photo stream of portraits of women to “help me remember, in case I ever start to forget, which sort of female image I find reflects a healthy civil society, and which I do not.” That in turn reminded me of Lady Antonia Fraser’s wonderful Warrior Queens: The Legends and Lives of Women Who have led Their Nations in War, and I decided to focus on great queens and their artistic representation this week.

One of Fraser’s primary subjects is Britain’s Boadicea. I have a half-finished portrait of her in my studio that I will be working on next week.

  
Her name comes down to us as Boudica, Boudicca, Boadicea or Buddug. It derives from the Proto-Celtic feminine adjective boudÄ«ka, which translates to “victorious” in English. What we know of her comes from the writings of Tacitus and Cassius Deo.
Boadicea’s husband Prasutagus was a client-king of the Roman Empire. Although his will left his kingdom jointly to his daughters and the Emperor, upon his death, his kingdom was annexed to Rome. Boadicea was beaten, their daughters were raped, and Roman financiers claimed the family assets as their own.
Boadicea Haranguing the Britons, line engraving, published 1793, by William Sharp, after John Opie. The engraving is finer than the painting.
Boadicea raised the Iceni and neighboring tribes—estimated to be 100,000 strong—in what would become the longest-lasting revolt against Roman rule by a client state.  The natives sacked Camulodunum (modern Colchester), Londinium, and Verulamium (St. Albans) before being defeated by Suetonius in the Battle of Watling Street. Boadicea committed suicide rather than be captured by the Romans.
Considering that Boadicea is one of the fundamental heroes of early Britain, she is shockingly unrepresented in art. One has to ask why the Pre-Raphaelites, with their consuming interest in British history, gave her such a cold shoulder. Her militancy, her political skill, her energy, and her mastery apparently gave them fits; they were much more interested in the wasting maiden.

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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When the going got tough…

This Dardanelle, Arkansas, Post Office WPA Mural is not much different from the one in my home town, except that the crop is cotton.
The logical successors to the Ashcan school were the Federal Art Project painters. This was the visual arts part of the New Deal Works Progress Administration (WPA) during the Great Depression. At no other time in American history has government made such an effort to support the arts in all forms. While autocrats sometimes employed art to create an ethos for their state, democracies do not, in general, use art and artists like this.
Whereas this WPA Office Mural from Arlington, Massachusetts is distinctly northern in character, and refers back to our original settlement stories.
Since non-representational artists—still considered the avante garde—were not making much of a living in the Thirties, you can imagine what a boon government support was for them. But most of the WPA art was representational, and most of it was local. We remember the WPA for the murals in our post offices, libraries, schools and hospitals, not because it supported the likes of Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock before they became famous.
Could this be from anywhere else but America’s heartland, celebrating corn as it does? In this case, Mount Ayr, Iowa.
Yesterday I wrote that art is primarily a reflection of the aspirations and values of the society that created it. The WPA art is an example of art as a change agent. In the midst of the Great Depression, America needed to be reminded of her exceptionalism. In government buildings across the country, painters did just that.

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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Does art reflect society or society reflect art?

McSorley’s Bar, 1912, by John Sloan. McSorley’s is the oldest Irish tavern in New York City. It only admitted women after being forced to do so in 1970. I got into my last-ever bar fight there, with an undergrad from NYU who imagined I’d slighted his girlfriend. “I can take him,” I insisted to my husband. “Who expects a roundhouse from a blue-haired church lady?”
Yesterday a reader asked, “Does art reflect society or society reflect art?” It seems to me that art is primarily a reflection of the aspirations and values of the society that created it. That is not to downplay the importance of social justice in art, and it doesn’t mean that artists can’t change people’s minds. Think of the tremendous courage it took for Émile Zola to publish J’accuse, and the influence it has down to this day. But even that was responsive to a reality: the injustice of institutional anti-Semitism.
By the turn of the 19th century, America had recovered a bit from its earlier unbridled optimism. This could be seen in its literature, with writers like Theodore Dreiser, Stephen Crane, Willa Cather, and Frank Norris describing the dark side of the American experience. The painterly equivalent was called the Ashcan School.
Steaming Streets, 1908, by George Bellows. The Ashcan painters did not gloss over the filth and danger of our cities.
The Ashcan painters opposed both American Impressionism and the highly polished work of painters like John Singer Sargent. They were darker, rougher, and harsher. They were not just interested in light and air; they also wanted to paint the grime, the frozen manure and the poverty that were also part of our urban reality.
From the standpoint of trendiness, their moment was short-lived. The Cubists, Fauvists and Expressionists took over the avant garde high ground with the Armory Show of 1913, and suddenly the Ashcan painters were lumped in with all those boring old realists from the 19th century.
Eviction (Lower East Side), 1904, by Everett Shinn (gouache). Shinn had watched the eviction of an old musician from his apartment, which inspired this picture of misery and despair.    

That should not minimize their artistic and social importance. Painters like Robert Henri, George Bellows, George Luks, John Sloan, and William Glackens cast a long shadow. They were the first painters to admit that America was not Elysium, and the flaws they painted have only gotten more noticeable with time. 
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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American naturalism

High-Jake Game, c. 1861, by Thomas LeClear. Before official colored regiments were formed in 1863, several volunteer regiments were raised from free black men, including freedmen in the South. The Confederacy had passed a law stating that blacks captured in uniform would be tried as slave insurrectionists in civil courts—a capital offense with automatic sentence of death. Many captured black soldiers were summarily executed without even the pretense of a trial. For this young man, this is a high-stakes game indeed.
Before there was an Ashcan School, there were genre painters. Thomas LeClear’s most famous painting, Buffalo Newsboy, is dear to all who grew up visiting the Albright-Knox Art Museum. LeClear was contemporary with Honoré Daumier and Jean-François Millet but the difference between their worldviews is striking.
This difference derives not from talent or temperament, but from place. The French naturalists described a society where there was limited social mobility. The working poor expected to remain poor forever. LeClear, on the other hand, described the boundless optimism of a people who believed poverty was a transitory state and that anyone could go from rags to riches. LeClear’s newsboy is saucy, healthy, energetic, and not the least bit fazed by his low beginnings.
Buffalo Newsboy, c. 1853, by Thomas LeClear, is a favorite of Buffalonians. It harks back to when Buffalo was a boomtown. 
LeClear painted some of his most famous canvases during the Civil War. By concentrating on children, he could obliquely point to difficult issues of democracy and emancipation. That he was able to retain his optimism during this cataclysm speaks volumes about his, and the nation’s, character.
Thomas LeClear was born in the village of Candor, Tioga County, New York. In 1832 his family moved to Ontario. A few years later LeClear became an itinerant portrait artist and decorative painter traveling in a range across New York and as far west as Green Bay, Wisconsin.
Young America, c. 1863, by Thomas LeClear.  â€śThe locality is a street in Buffalo, and the man on the sidewalk evidently engaged in counting up his gains is a portrait of a well-known operator in stocks, who goes by the name of “three cents a month,” a contemporary, Henry T. Tuckerman, wrote. 
In 1839 he moved to New York City, where he studied with Henry Inman. By 1847 he had begun to win substantial recognition for his work. That year, he moved to Buffalo in a calculated move to increase his income. At the time, Buffalo was a boom-town and LeClear quickly acquired many wealthy patrons
In the early 1860s LeClear moved back to New York City. He was elected to full membership in the National Academy of Design in 1863. He became a prominent portrait painter as well as a genre painter.

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 poorest of the poor

The Laundress (La Blanchisseuse), c. 1863, by Honoré Daumier. This painting exists in another two versions, one of which is owned by the Albright-Knox Art Gallery.
In the context of art, naturalism is a kind of painting that attempts to look reality square in the face. It seeks to depict people and their transactions with as much honesty as is possible. Since naturalism arose in tandem with the Industrial Revolution, it frequently investigated the changes which the Industrial Revolution wrought.
The Third-Class Carriage, 1863-65, by HonorĂ© Daumier.  While Daumier has us focus on one family—a mother with her infant child, a tired grandmother and a sleeping boy—they represent all of the working class, with their solid bodies and weary stoicism.

Mid-19th century French painters were particularly good at this, and nobody was more incisive than Honoré Daumier. Daumier was a bit of an artistic polymath, excelling at printmaking, caricature, painting and sculpture. He was tremendously prolific, producing more than 6000 pieces of work in his lifetime.

The Uprising, c. 1860, by HonorĂ© Daumier. Daumier was unique in seeing the nascent labor movement as a fitting subject for art. Daumier is very spare with the details here, driving our attention inexorably to the figure in the center. In this, he suggests the coming Impressionist movement.
In Daumier’s era, washerwomen did their work at lavoirs, which were public places set aside for clothes washing.  It was dismal and hard work. Duamier lived on the Quai d’Anjou on the ĂŽle Saint-Louis. This afforded him many opportunities to see the washerwomen at their work along the Seine.  His washerwomen, would have been amused by the modern conceit of “Take Our Daughters And Sons To Work Day” since it was a fact of life for the 19th century poor. They are tired, but they are strong, and they exhibit the same monumentality as Millet’s gleaners.
The Burden (The Laundress) c. 1850-53, is another look at the same subject. Again, the figure is monumental and impressionistic, but here she and her child are both driven. The paint handling clearly suggests the next generation of French painters, particularly Van Gogh.

Having grown up in a working class household himself, Daumier was uniquely sensitive to working class life. However, he did not just paint the poor; he depicted (and caricaturized) the whole gamut of French society.

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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It could always be worse

Portrait of Ă‰mile Zola, 1868, by Édouard Manet
My friend Martha recently told me, “Taxes are the price you pay to live in a free society.” I’m doing my taxes this week and debating what I should post while I’m off in the land of spreadsheets and illegible receipts I never got around to entering.
I’ll start with some French realism today, to remind myself that things could always be worse. We could be struggling to heat our homes and our children could be executed for stealing crusts of bread. Officers could be convicted of heinous crimes simply because of their Jewishness.
Let’s start with Manet’s portrait of Émile Zola, who was France’s most important social realist writer. Zola was nominated for the first and second Nobel prizes in literature (which were won, characteristically, by nobody you ever heard of). He is remembered chiefly for his championing of the falsely-accused French artillery officer Alfred Dreyfus.
But that was still in the future when this painting was conceived. It was a thank-you gift for Zola’s passionate support of Manet’s work. The setting is Manet’s studio. On the wall is a reproduction of Manet’s scandalous Olympia, tying this painting very clearly to Manet’s gratitude. Zola is seated at his work table. The book, inkwell, quill, books and papers tell us he is a man of letters.
Jean-François Millet’s The Gleaners, 1857. Note how the figures are dehumanized by their faces being obscured and how they are separated from the prosperity in the distance.
The French Barbizon painters championed realism as a painterly technique (in response to the accepted Romanticism of the time). But they were also social realists, taking an unflinching look at the vast poverty that endured in rural France.
Hunting Birds at Night, 1874, by Jean-François Millet.
Unfortunately, social realism can be tough to appreciate over time, because appalling poverty starts to look quaint when we are distant from it. This is the fate that has overtaken Jean-François Millet’s The Gleaners. In its day, it was an electric criticism of French society. The wealthy (who tend to buy paintings) seemed to get a whiff of the tumbrels of the French Revolution and it made them decidedly uncomfortable.  â€śHis three gleaners have gigantic pretensions, they pose as the Three Fates of Poverty … their ugliness and their grossness unrelieved,” wrote one reviewer.

Short on money, Millet sold this painting at a sharp discount. A century and a half later, it is one of the most recognized and beloved paintings of all time.

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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Back to the studio

There were visitors to the gallery all evening long. The show is up until April 11.
You can be the belle of the ball on Friday night, but you’re still a painting teacher on Saturday morning. It was a great opening with a fabulous turnout, and lots of insightful questions. There were crowds until 10 PM, at which time I stumbled home to bed, because Saturday mornings are always a rush.
Teressa’s been drawing on and off with me for a few years, but she finally bit the bullet and did her first painting this weekend.
Painting classes, I’ve noticed, are split between two populations. There are the forty- and fifty-somethings who always wanted to paint but never had time, and young people from their mid-teens to mid-twenties. This makes for a nice mix of people in the studio, but it also tells us something about our times. Nobody in the prime working years has time. They’re running flat out. Between grasping the brass ring and raising children, everything else takes a back seat.
My own Mary, who’s a talented artist but majoring in biomedical engineering, graced my studio with her presence. I am afraid I will have to ask her for some lessons in drawing with a tablet one of these days.
It’s kind of a pity that we’re so frenetically busy from our mid-twenties to our mid-forties. The time to be reflective shouldn’t be a luxury of the old and the young.
So it’s back to business as usual, but I’ll have the flowers to remind me of a wonderful evening. Thanks, guys!

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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All about me, all the time

The Davison Gallery is lovely and contemporary, and conducive to spare design. Sue moved the show graphic to the floor, which allows the paintings room to breathe. It looks fantastic.
Tonight is the opening of my show, God + Man at the Davison Gallery at Roberts Wesleyan. As you know, I’ve been painting like a dervish to get ready for it, and it was awfully satisfying to watch it come together under the highly-skilled hands of gallery director Sue Bailey Leo.
Sue and her assistant Allysa installing the floor graphic.
This is the second show of my work that Sue has managed, and I’m humbled by how good she makes me look.
A woman and a hammer… invincible! Here Sandy Quang learns how to use a plumb line to level paintings.
I frequently tell people that “it’s all about me.” This weekend, it actually is. I have three solo shows up across the Rochester metro area. When does that ever happen?
Mary Brzustowicz offered to help me move canvases. Little did she know she’d be pressed into service popping air bubbles.
You are welcome to tonight’s opening, from 6-10. Ignore your mapping software; it will take you to the center of the campus. Instead, take US 490 to Buffalo Road west. Pass Westside Drive and the athletic fields at Roberts Wesleyan. You will see the Howard Stowe Roberts Cultural Life Center on your right; there is ample free parking, including parking lots on the west and northeast sides of the building.
Sandy temporarily interned as a lighting assistant, and did a great job of it, too.
The gallery is also open Monday-Friday, 11-5, and Saturday, 1-4. The show is up until April 11.
If you’d like to see my secular landscapes, this is the last weekend they are up at VB Brewery at 6606 State Road 96 in Victor. (Yesterday I stopped there with my friend Mary, who pointed out that the brewing smelled like warm feed for horses. It was delectable.)
Be there, or be square.
And my Stations of the Cross are up at St. Thomas’ Episcopal Church at 2000 Highland Avenue. Since they’re part of the Lenten worship experience, you’ll need to call the church at 585-442-3544 to make an appointment.


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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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!