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Category: learn to paint

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Heavy weather

Heavy Weather, underpainting, by Carol L. Douglas
For this painting, I am trying to envision a sailboat being hit broadside by a large wave, with the question of whether it will capsize or right itself left unanswered.
My own sailing has been seriously curtailed for decades. That means that if I have questions about what a boat might do under sail, I have to consult an expert. My go-to guy is my cousin Antony. Not only does he get to sail in the southern Indian Ocean, but he’s in a totally different time zone, so hopefully he will answer my questions while I sleep.
The Gulf Stream, 1899, by Winslow Homer.
This morning I was looking for photos of boats in heavy weather. I came across the following, by a blogger who identifies himself only as Joe:
Sometimes the sea can be a very scary place.

A very, very scary place.

Before you undertake a voyage to adventure, make sure you are well trained, have some real sailing experience, and know how to survive if things go wrong. Believe me things can go wrong. Thank God I have my Navy training.

Fishermen at Sea, 1796, J.M.W. Turner
Don’t assume that the guy sitting in his flight suit on the ready alert is going to come and rescue you. You might be out of range.

For God’s sake, learn how to read the weather!

For home work, I made my sailing students keep a notebook chronicling the daily weather. It had to have the forecast from the newspaper with their own observations.

The Fog Warning, 1885 by Winslow Homer
That might be a great idea for my painting students, too.

Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in Maine in 2015 or Rochester at any time. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops! Download a brochure here.
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The Linchpin

Girl falling into fountain while texting, 6X8, oil on canvas
Years ago I had a large brush-pile in my backyard, left over from clearing trees. I would have burned it where it sat, except it was too close to the woods for safety. As the greenwood decayed, it slumped into a solid, stinking mass. I pulled and yanked but got nowhere. After hours of clipping, cutting, shifting and swearing, I was about to quit, when something shifted and the whole thing just came apart.
Beak! Boss! 6X8, oil on canvas
Anyone who’s ever sewn knows that the last seam you put in when you’re overtired will be wrong. And I can’t count how many times I’ve done a computer project only to realize when I was almost finished that there was a faster, easier way to do it.
Art has a steep learning curve because we’re often doing things we’ve never done before. A lot of our time seems to bear no fruit. But stagnation and even falling backward are an important part of the process.
Baby Monkey Riding on a Pig #2 (Abi’s Opossum),  6X8, oil on canvas
Every morning I spend about ten seconds posting my blog pictures on Pinterest. I get the occasional note that something has been repinned, but in general it doesn’t feel like anyone is paying that much attention. Yet I recently got a note that I had more than 26K Pinterest hits in 2014.

Esther is the one of the two Bible books that has no star turn for God. It seems to be a series of human interactions, the majority of which go pretty badly for Esther and her people.  But a seemingly insignificant thing happens—Ahasuerus can’t sleep. The story his courtier uses to put him to sleep turns out to be the pin which releases the salvation of the Jewish people. The events are all worldly, but the net result is miraculous.
Baby Monkey Riding on a Pig #1 (with gumdrops), 6X8, oil on canvas
All of which is to say that our human perception of progress is exceedingly narrow. So keep plugging. You never know when you’ll pull the linchpin.
Pull Up Your Big Girl Panties, 6X8, oil on canvas
Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in Maine in 2015 or Rochester at any time. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops! Download a brochure here.
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Hand over fist

Unfinished, by Carol L Douglas, 16X20, oil on canvas. (The color is distorted because it was dark when I shot this.)
Over the past three years, I have become enamored of the luminist paintings of Fitz Henry Lane. That doesn’t mean I want to paint like him, but I love the space and light in his paintings. I started this boat painting with him in mind, but I did not look at his work. I wanted his technique to suffuse my understanding, rather than push me toward painting like him.
If I’m unsure about the composition, I compare it to this grid I learned in a workshop taught by Steven Assael. 
Sailboats are elegant, and they glide like living creature across the sea. I generally paint them at dock because it is extremely difficult to paint them en plein airin motion, (although I did give it a try at Rye in 2013).
My underpainting. The sky is a complete fabrication. I need to recapture some of the bluntness of this when I finish the painting.
 Last summer, Howard Gallagher of Camden Falls Gallery took Lee Boyntonand me out to see the start of the Eggemoggin Reach Regatta . (It’s a great gallery owner who cares that much for his painters.) It made me passionately want to paint boats in motion.
My reference photo, taken at the start of the Eggemoggin Reach Regatta.
On Monday, I wrote about consistencyand how your style is ultimately your brand. A reader asked how one can experiment, grow and change while still being consistent. Artists know that the creative process never ends; you wrestle through one technical problem only to be faced by another.
Ironically, that was the precise problem I found myself facing. I went back to first principles. I drew and drew the boat until I was confident about its proportions. Since I was unsure of how to divide the space, I used a grid taught by Steven Assael.
Boston Harbor was painted by Fitz Henry Lane around 1850. 
The end result taps into Lane’s luminism, but is by no means a slavish copy. It is both consistent with my work and yet it explores new material. It’s not finished, but it is a good start.

Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in Maine in 2015 or Rochester at any time. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops! Download a brochure here.

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An interstate runs through it

Delaware Water Gap, by Carol L. Douglas. This is almost the only paintable vista left since US 80 was built.
Rumor has it that I’m going to New Jersey on Friday. I love New Jersey, but I’ve seen an awful lot of it this month. All this travel is cutting into my painting time. However, I will drive through the Delaware Water Gap, which is a favorite place and always a great mystery to me.
US 80 owns the Delaware Water Gap now.
A water gap is an Appalachian phenomenon, where a river is so old that it predates the lifting and folding of the landscape, and therefore it cuts across a mountain range. Water being so malleable and rock being so hard, it’s difficult to see how this happens, but the evidence is there on those folded, rocky scarps. Water gaps are particularly common in the eastern part of Pennsylvania.
The Delaware Water Gap, 1861, George Inness
US Interstate 80 runs through the Delaware Water Gap now, making it difficult to find a good painting vantage point. I’ve painted several times from along the river’s edge itself. That doesn’t give you the panorama that you would have if you stood right on the pavement (which would make for a very short painting career). There is an overlook on the New Jersey side that might make for a good long-distance painting, but I’ve never hit the right combination of lighting and sufficient time. It isn’t going to happen in the chilling weather we have this week.
On the Delaware River, 1861-1863, George Inness
George Inness is particularly associated with the Delaware Water Gap. His paintings are a bucolic reminder of a time when tractor trailers didn’t own this particular American treasure.
The Delaware Water Gap, 1857, George Inness
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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Paint what you love

Daddy’s little helper, oil on Belgian linen, 14X18, by Carol L. Douglas
When I’ve laid off painting for a while, I “play scales” to limber up. Usually that’s in the form of a still life, but yesterday I decided to paint my grandson, Jake. Jake is three months old, and painting babies is decidedly out of my comfort zone. But if you want to be energized as an artist, paint what you love.
Yesterday’s post about consistency sparked a lively discussion on Facebook. Cindy Zaglin said, “I’ve been told people should be able to look at a group of work and know it’s yours (or someone else’s.) But I like the freedom of experimenting and sometimes a piece will not look like my other work. I wonder how to marry ‘brand’ and experimentation.”
As always, I start with an oil grisaille. The gridding is because I needed to doublecheck the proportions of that massive head. Even so, in the final rendering, I couldn’t believe it, and I narrowed his head slightly (and incorrectly).
Cindy doesn’t have to worry; her work is iconic and highly recognizable. She has wide latitude in subject because her style is rock solid. That doesn’t mean she hasn’t grown and changed in the decade I’ve known her. The important thing is that those changes were incremental, not a frenzied trying on of different techniques.
If you can put into concrete terms what is unique about your paint handling, then you probably don’t have a style, but an affectation. In other words, “I always leave big patches of raw canvas showing,” would be an affectation, whereas, “I start off intending to be super careful but inevitably a fury takes over and I’m left with this mess” is probably more of a mature style.
No matter what I am painting, I approach it the same way. Same primer, same brushes, same underpainting, same pigments, same medium. For this reason, my portrait of Jake is stylistically linked to my paintings of sailboats at Camden Harbor, even though the subjects are worlds apart. And of course, this painting is slyly political, as so many of my paintings are. (I like the quaint idea of fathers married to babies’ mothers.)
After the gridding, I filled in masses, and from there worked in more detail. In short, the usual, regardless of the subject.
“Brand is both an identifier and a trap,” said Jane Bartlett. “I’ve seen celebrated artists who are trapped by what they have created and become known by, especially painters. The audience they built leaves the moment significant changes are made either in subject matter or paint application. It’s as though they are starting over. The loss of audience drives them back to what they had been doing and often to boredom.”
I think of that as the Hello Kitty-ism of art. Tom Otterness’ The Creation Myth, at Rochester’s Memorial Art Gallery, is a case in point. It’s interchangeable with all his other public works. There are, sadly, too many visual artists who have commodified themselves in this way. They may as well be stamping out engine blocks at Ford.

Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in Maine in 2015 or Rochester at any time. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops! Download a brochure here.
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Consistency
I’m taking an online marketing class from Jason Horejs. It’s free* and so far I think it’s been pretty good. In today’s lesson he spoke about consistency. He’s interested in it from a marketing standpoint: it’s easier to sell work that hangs together, that’s instantly recognizable as being from one artist. This, he points out, is your ‘brand’.

I’m illustrating this post with four paintings by famous masters. I’m sure any of you art-history pros can identify the artists without breaking a sweat. Now, extend that lesson to your own work, and you can see what Horejs is driving at.
As a teacher, I see consistency as a mark of maturity and mastery. All young painters copy; it’s part of the learning process. In so doing, their style tends to waver.
To some degree a certain amount of copying is unavoidable. If your students use the same pigments, the same primer, the same brushes, the same medium as you—well, to a degree their painting is going to look like yours. Still, they need to move past that and find their authentic voice.
Early in my painting education, I took a class from a mediocre teacher. I was having trouble marrying the edges of my paints, and that left big thick lines. “That’s your style,” he exclaimed. No; that was someone else’s style, and for me it was a phase. If I’d followed his advice, I could have ended up being one of those people who jumps from style to style without ever developing my own voice.
Style is not something you apply to your painting. It’s what’s left over when you’ve stripped as many mistakes as you can out of your painting. It’s what happens when you try to look at something and represent it as honestly as you can. If you approach style like that, instead of saying, “I want to paint like so-and-so” you will get to consistency a lot faster.
* With the very minor exception of his book from Amazon, which hardly broke the bank.

Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in Maine in 2015 or Rochester at any time. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops! Download a brochure here.

The works above are:
Water Lilies, Claude Monet, 1917-19
The Incredulity of Saint Thomas, Caravaggio, 1601-02
Dedham Lock and Mill,John Constable, 1820
My Egypt, Charles Demuth, 1927
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Don’t knock it until you try it

Baby Jake, tiny sketch by me while he slept in my lap.

There is a meme panning ugly Renaissance babies. Every time it pops up, I’m reminded that the posters have most likely never painted a baby from life.

Most of my successful artist pals are childless. This makes perfect sense in the modern world, for fine arts is a career path that requires long hours for little remuneration, and that often requires travel or living in a child-hostile place like NYC. This means that children and motherhood are generally not subjects for serious modern painting, except in portraiture.

I’ve done two baby portraits, and both were done from photos. Babies wiggle, they have unreliable schedules, and when they’re not sleeping, they’re often hungry or upset about something inscrutable.

Tiny gesture drawing of baby Jake. His center of gravity is certainly his bottom, although that head weighs a lot, too.
This weekend I had my infant grandson with me. I’d hoped to paint him during my class, but there were too many students. After class, he and I sat down to rest, and he fell asleep on my lap. I was able to fish a tiny (3.5X5”) sketchbook off the coffee table with my spare hand, and do the attached sketches.

A fast sketch of Jake’s wonderful face before he twisted away again. It’s really hard to get the baby head’s proportions right.
When we do gesture drawings in class I tell my students to look for the “axis of power” in the figure—the place from which the subject’s motion is springing. Usually that’s the pelvis; less frequently, it’s the shoulders. In the case of a young infant, I believe that’s usually his rump. He is learning to control his limbs, he pushes himself up with his legs and then collapses, and when he settles down against you, you inevitably end up patting his bottom.

Tiny gesture drawing of baby Jake as he wiggled himself to sleep.
There have been very few painters who focused on children. Mary Cassatt—who was unmarried and childless—was one; Kathe Kollwitz—who had childcare so she could concentrate on her career—was another. It’s a pity that we dismiss a subject that’s of such primal importance, for all of us at one time or another have been babies or parents.
Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in Maine in 2015 or Rochester at any time. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops! Download a brochure here.


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Authenticity

Charity, 1993, watercolor, by Luvon Sheppard
My sister-in-law works in Washington, DC and is no stranger to the many and varied rudenesses of straphanger culture. Yesterday she read aloud from Brittney Cooper’s Listen when I talk to you  in Salon.
Leaving aside Professor Cooper’s self-promotion (she is, after all, a teacher of women’s studies and Africana at Rutgers), these are perilous times in race relations in America.
My friends come in every hue, and they have commented on Ferguson, and their comments have been nuanced and insightful. Why is my experience so different from the reported experience? I live in the urban, integrated north. Moreover, many of my friends are evangelicals, and we have different values from society as a whole.
Title unknown (but it’s Rochester), by Luvon Sheppard
Rochester was the site of one of America’s earliest civil rights era race riots, but it is by and large sitting this out. In September, a shooting killed one cop and injured two others. Last month, I was in church listened to a black woman talking about her fears for her husband, also a cop. It was a sobering testimony, but it reflects the violence in our city and our vulnerability to it.
Title unknown (but it’s Rochester), by Luvon Sheppard
Questions about authenticity are central to art, particularly this year, when a bogus African-American woman was included in the Whitney Biennial. Among the fist-pumpers in this year’s protests is one of my favorite students. His experience is not that of urban black America; his parents are both doctors and immigrants from the Caribbean. I hate to see him appropriate someone else’s story. In doing so, he derails his own.
Rochester is pretty much sitting out the current wave of anti-police violence. Photo by Chip Walker.
Sometimes a teacher teaches best by getting out of the way. I introduced this young man to Luvon Sheppard at RIT. Luvon is black, a native of Rochester, and lived through the race riots. In addition, he’s one of the best painters to ever come out of Rochester. He will have more to say to this gifted young artist than I ever can.

Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in Maine in 2015 or Rochester at any time. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops! Download a brochure here.
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Taking stock (part 2)

Happy New Years!  6X8, Carol L. Douglas
Yesterday I wrote that I was surprised that I’d met my goals for 2014, with the exception of selling my house (deferred so my son could finish high school in Rochester).Here are my goals for 2015:
1.       To do a better job with this “accountability partner” thing. I got lucky last year.
2.       To finally learn to update my own website so I don’t have to whine at my children to do it for me.
3.       To identify meaningful ministry and pursue it. To have a talent is nothing if one doesn’t do something for one’s fellow man with it.
4.       To identify and purchase an investment property in Maine, one that will generate income while allowing me a place to rest my tired head.
5.       To create a master schedule of plein air events I want to do. While I realize I could just ‘follow the wind’ and still be working every week, it would be nice to be a bit more organized.
6.       To paint and show a series about wooden boats under sail.
7.       To get stronger and fitter so that I’ve got more energy when the summer painting season comes around again.
8.       To make this year’s Sea & Sky workshop a great experience for my students.
Angel, 6X8, Carol L. Douglas
Whew, that’s a lot of goals!
Somewhere out there, my accountability partner is schlepping her way home from New Jersey. After she recovers from the traffic and the noise, I hope she has a chance to email me hergoals.
Double Rainbow with Unicorn, 6X8, Carol L. Douglas
What about you, fellow painters? Are you willing to commit your professional goals to ink this year?
Santa (blonde), 6X8, Carol L. Douglas

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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Taking stock

Any summer spent in Maine is a good summer.

In 2014, I had an accountability partner. Last January, we agreed to check in with each other once a month to review our goals. This was a flawed plan because she is a recluse and I hate talking on the phone. Then I lost my notes to myself and forgot about the whole thing.

Kaaterskill Falls, 8X10, oil on canvasboard, by Carol L. Douglas. In June, I painted in the Catskills with NYPAP members from across the state. Another iteration of Paradise.
Nevertheless, because no thought on the internet is ever really gone, I was able to find my 2014 goals. They were modest:

–Regain my fitness levels from October, 2013, in terms of health and work;
–Finish and hang my show at Roberts Wesleyan opening 3/24;
–Get a workshop schedule together for 2014 and market it;
–Get my house on the market.

      My on-the-road shoe drying rack.
      I started the year just a few days out from cancer surgery, so at the time I wrote these goals, I could barely walk, let alone work. Despite this, I finished the show for Roberts Wesleyan, and it opened to plaudits. I went on to have another solo show at Aviv Gallery downtown, and a duo show with Stu Chait at RIT’s Davison Gallery, plus showed and sold many other pieces in galleries.

      Dead Wood, 48X36, oil on linen, 2014, by Carol L. Douglas, from God+Man show.
      Likewise, my workshop managed to get marketed; in fact, it sold out. And my fitness levels are good—until I got the creeping crud a few weeks ago, I’d have said they were better than in October, 2013.

      The last week of summer I spent painting with these amazing women in Saranac Lake, New York. From left, Mira Fink, Crista Pisano, me, Marlene Wiedenbaum, Laura Bianco, Kari Ganoung Ruiz, Tarryl Gabel.
      In fact, the only thing on this to-do list that I didn’t get done was selling my house. And that wasn’t due to my inactivity, but because my son decided he wanted to finish high school here. Since it wasn’t a critical matter, we deferred selling for a year. That meant, of course, that I lived alone in Maine for the summer months, which convinced me that I don’t like living apart from my family.

      Teaching, whether in Rochester or Maine, is my first love, and I’ve gotten to do a lot of it this year.
      Note that none of these goals were financial. In my life, it seems that if I take care of the work itself, the money almost takes care of itself.

      Tomorrow: goals for 2015.

      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!