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Category: learn to paint

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American Exceptionalism

Young Girl Singing into a Mirror, Jean-Etienne Liotard, 18th century.
There’s a lot of conversation about American Exceptionalism in the media today. This is the theory that, because of its unique ideology of liberty, equality, and individualism, the United States is qualitatively different from other countries.
It’s true that our colonial forebears were uncommonly interested in the written word, and that literacy and numeracy were widespread among all classes, in marked contrast to the European nations from which we drew.
Tis to ye Press & Pen we Morals owe
All we believe & almost all we know. (George Fisher, 1748)

Buffalo Newsboy, Thomas Le Clear, 1853. In America, education was never limited to the upper classes.
In New England, about 60 percent of the population was literate between 1650 and 1670, 85 percent between 1758 and 1762, and 90 percent between 1787 and 1795.
And what were these people reading? Well, not technical manuals. Overwhelmingly, education involved ancient languages, ancient history, theology, and mathematics, and most people could sketch and sing or play an instrument because these were fundamental skills in a world without photography or radios.
These New Englanders went on to lead the Second Industrial Revolution, which started with the rapid industrialization during the Civil War and culminated in 20th century American economic hegemony.
RĂ©union de dames, Abraham Bosse,17th century. The salon was a mechanism for continuing education from the 17th century on. 
In other words, it was quite possible to build a technological empire without STEM classes. But is it possible to build the 21stcentury equivalent without the humanities?
Researchers at Michigan State University recently identified a link between childhood participation in the arts and adult success in business. As they put it, “A young Picasso or Beethoven could be the next Edison.”
A Young Girl Reading, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, 1776.
People who own businesses or were granted patents were up to eight times more likely to participate in music and art as children than the general public. “The most interesting finding was the importance of sustained participation in those activities,” said Rex LaMore, director of MSU’s Center for Community and Economic Development. â€œIf you started as a young child and continued in your adult years, you’re more likely to be an inventor as measured by the number of patents generated, businesses formed or articles published.”
“The ability to make art is really critical to the creative mind and getting into the sciences,” added James Lawton. 

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Choosing a watercolor easel

My own contraption, easily assembled from off-the-shelf parts. It functions equally well for oils and watercolors.

This weekend I got a letter from a southern California watercolor artist asking about field easels. I’ve written a lot about oil-painting easels but very little about watercolor easels. However, the same fundamental rule applies: there is no single “right” easel for every person and every situation.

En plein air pro watercolor easel.
For me, a movable mast is an important consideration for watercolor, because I want my work surface to be able to go almost flat for washes. One commercial easel with that flexibility is the Anderson Swivel Easel. The trade-off for lighter weight in aluminum field easels is that they can be flimsy compared to their wooden counterparts, but this is a good alternative to a wooden box-style easel.  At 5’6”, I find it to be slightly too short for me to work standing. But if you work from a seated position, the small storage area and slightly shorter profile will pose no great problems.

Anderson Swivel Easel
I made myself a heavy-duty variation, using a mastfrom Guerrilla Painter, a shelf from En Plein Air Pro, and a ball-head tripod I had from back in the days when we used real cameras. This is the workhorse easel in my collection—it is virtually indestructible, very stable and easy to adjust.  And there’s no assembly needed: just buy the parts and put them together. If you already have a good tripod, you can assemble this easel for less than $120.

Mabef beechwood field easel has a pivoting head. Mine has been amazingly durable and is the first easel I grab for new painting students to try.
The trouble is, it’s quite heavy. That’s no problem for painting from the back of your car, but if you let your friends talk you into long hikes, it’s just too much. For a truly lightweight easel, I’d look at En Plein Air Pro’s line. As I noted above, the trade-off for their light weight is that they are less able to endure the shocks of truly extreme plein air painting.
I also have a Mabef field easel, which is an economical answer to the pivot-head problem for watercolor artists. Its major downside is that you need to bring a table with you, but it’s my most useful teaching easel, and has outlasted a lot of fancier alternatives. While the head doesn’t pivot 360°, it can be turned flat, and that’s enough for most applications.

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Umbrella Revolution

Umbrella Man, by the artist known as Milk.
The â€˜Umbrella Movement’ in Hong Kong may or may not be over but these have been the largest protests seen in China since Tiananmen Square. The protests demand free and fair elections, and public opinion polls during the protests showed about 60% support for the protesters.

A banner from the Umbrella Movement.

Unlike the Occupy protests in the United States, the Hong Kong protesters have been noticeably tidy, polite, and nonviolent. The term ‘Umbrella Revolution’ was adopted by the media because protesters brought umbrellas with them to protect themselves from pepper spray. However the protesters themselves rejected it, because they do not want to be seen as revolutionaries. Their request is a finite one: they want open and fair elections.

A nonviolent banner from the Umbrella movement.

This movement has been accompanied by a flowering of extemporaneous art. The most-widely reported example is a large statue created of wooden blocks, called Umbrella Man. He stands ten feet tall and clutches a yellow umbrella in his hand. His face is white, to represent the tear gas and pepper spray endured by student activists.

One of many thousands of Post-It note messages in Hong Kong.

Umbrella Man faces a wall of bright Post-It notes. News venues show these walls in many places, representing many thousands of hand-penned messages.
 

A “Lennon Wall” with Post-It note messages.

A protest movement so gracious that it has time for art—what a contrast with the Occupy movement in America.
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Hobby losses

The Au Sable River at Jay, 12X9, oil on canvasboard. Painted on the side of the road in Jay, New York.
I once had the following discussion with an IRS auditor:
She: “Your mileage log doesn’t identify destinations. You need to show destinations.”
Me: “I’m a plein airpainter. There are no ‘destinations’. I drive until I find what I want to paint, and then I paint it. The best I could come up with is something like ‘cows at the side of the road’.”
She (unmoved): “For the purposes of a mileage log, you need to show destinations.”
Teaching on the side of a road somewhere near Lincolnville, ME.
At the end of the interview, she suggested to me that I’d better start showing a profit or the IRS would consider my work a hobby. She was (contrary to popular opinion) very nice. But I am keenly aware that my tax returns are a red flag: we have high W2 income and Schedule C losses.
That’s actually typical for artists. Even the most successful of us usually do something else, like teaching or graphic design, to cobble a living together. But if you ask us our profession, we are artists. The big money on our work will be made after we’re dead. Denying us the tax advantages other businesses get is adding insult to injury.
Sunset over Saranac Lake, by little ol’ me. Painted on the side of a road somewhere in the Adirondacks.
In 2010, the IRS accused Professor Susan Crile of underpaying her taxes by more than $81,000, saying that her work was not a profession but something she did as part of her job teaching Studio Art at Hunter College. (See Forbes’ coverage hereand here, and the NY Times’ coverage here.)
The IRS’ determination was based on her lack of a written business plan (!) and the idea that she made art not primarily to sell but to keep her job as a teacher. Never mind that her work hangs in the Metropolitan Museum, the Guggenheim, the Brooklyn Museum, the Phillips Collection, the Hirshhorn, and at eight colleges and universities. 
Painting at the side of the road near Lake Placid, NY.
Mercifully, the judge saw it differently:
She has worked for more than 40 years in media that include oil, acrylic, charcoal, pastels, printmaking, lithograph, woodcut, and silkscreen. She has exhibited and sold her art through leading galleries; she has received numerous professional accolades, residencies, and fellowships; and she is a full-time tenured professor of studio art at Hunter College in New York City. (Judge Albert Lauber)
“Bottom line is that, in general, lawyers have much better educations than accountants,” wrote Peter J Reilly. He went on to note that Judge Lauber holds an MA in Classics from Clare College, Cambridge.
Painted at the side of a road in Camden, ME. (Available from Camden Falls Gallery)
While Professor Crile has prevailed on the Section 183 (hobby loss) question, she still has to answer the question of how much of the quarter million or so in losses she claimed over the last five years will be deemed legitimate. That’s a reminder to us to be honest, even conservative, in our bookkeeping.

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Dance of Death

The Triumph of Death, c. 1562, Pieter Bruegel the Elder
I admit that I’m fascinated by pandemics, and am morbidly curious to see how the Ebola epidemic works its way through the First World.
Doktor Schnabel von Rom, engraving by Paul FĂŒrst, 1656. Plague doctors were hired by towns to control epidemic. Some wore a beak-like mask which was filled with aromatic herbs designed to prevent the spread of disease through “miasma” or putrid air.
The mother of all pandemics was the Black Death, which peaked in Europe in 1346–53. It killed between 75 and 200 million people at a time when the world’s population was only 450 million people. (Amazingly, it wasn’t until a few years ago that the pathogen responsible for it—the Yersinia pestisbacterium—was definitively identified.)
The Triumph of Death, c. 1446, fresco, Palazzo Abatellis, Palermo
Originating in the plains of central Asia—the ‘Stans’—it traveled down the Silk Road to the Crimea. From there, it was carried into Europe by fleas on the rats on merchant ships. It is estimated to have killed 30-60% of Europe’s population.
Knight, Death and the Devil, 1513, engraving by Albrecht DĂŒrer
The plague returned repeatedly in Europe through the 14thto 17th centuries. It came to the United States as part of a 19thcentury pandemic that started in China. It is still active today, although treatable with antibiotics; each year a dozen or so Americans are diagnosed with it. Rather more worrisome, a drug-resistant form of the disease was found in Africa in the 1990s.
Murder of Archbishop Ambrosius in the Moscow Plague Riot of 1771, engraving by Charles Michel Geoffroy, 1845. The Archbishop had attempted to prevent citizens from gathering at the Icon of the Virgin Mary of Bogolyubovo in Kitaigorod as a quarantine measure.
The plague caused great social upheaval in Europe. Those with means left their urban homes and shut themselves off from the world—the first recorded ‘survivalists’. The dead received perfunctory attention, since their corpses were dangerous. Faith was bifurcated: some abandoned it in an ‘eat, drink and be merry’ hedonism, while others became more frenzied.  Local and global trade was frozen, resulting in shortages and spiraling inflation. On the other hand, the sudden, extreme shortage of laborers led to the end of the manorial system of serfdom and the beginning of a wage-based economy in Europe.
Danse Macabre, Bernt Notke, end of the 15th century, St. Nicholas’ Church, Tallinn, Estonia. The Danse Macabre is a medieval art genre which tells us that—no matter our station in life—Death unites us all. 
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Second Sleep

Squash stored in the off-the-grid compound. Wish I would be here in the winter.

My current travels have made me think about segmented sleep—the idea that we sleep in two separate chunks during the night. Over a twelve-hour time frame, people historically slept for 3-4 hours, were awake for three or four hours, and then slept again for three or four hours. This is not a new idea, and a lot of research supports it.

Sea captain carved by a Maine ship’s carpenter some time in the last century. A few pieces by him in the off-the-grid compound.
Like all kids do, my new grandson Jake came out of the womb as a nocturnal creature. Listening to him fuss during the night, I was reminded that the first, most pressing job of new parents is to train their children to sleep at night. I remember this as the hardest job of parenting, and my own children effectively wrecked my ability to sleep through the night. I’m still a cyclical insomniac.
I’m in Maine looking for locations for my 2015 workshops. Here’s surf at Popham Beach.
We’ve spent the last two nights off the grid, where the only light from 6:14 PM to 6:38 AM comes from the moon and stars or candles and flashlights. Since a lot of hay has been made about how electric light, TV, radio, and the internet confuses modern man’s sleep cycle, being off line should help, right? Honestly, I don’t think it has, but perhaps a few nights here and there can’t erase a half-century of bad habits.
Granite blocks at Ft. Popham State Historic Site, a Civil-War era fort.

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What I do in my down time

The whole Northeast is beautiful this week, but my camera is broken, so cell phone pictures are what you’re getting.

Having been in the Berkshires this week, I thought I’d run up to Maine and look at a few possible properties to host my 2015 workshops. Again, I’m staying in the cabin off the grid, but this time I have my husband with me.

Off the grid is so much nicer when you have your Significant Other with you.
And he loves the place. “I figured that outhouse was half a mile away, through the woods,” he teased. And then, “I’d like to come back here in the winter.”
It’s easier with company; the coyotes don’t seem so close, and reports of a mountain lion aren’t quite as terrifying when you’re walking on wooded path on a moonless night.
So many places one could host a workshop… this is just one of my dream homes that isn’t on the market.
That was last night. This morning dawned clear and cold and he got a tiny taste of what winter in the woods might be like. And he’s still enthusiastic. Go figure.
The Maine landscape is so varied that I could move my workshop up and down the coast for years and it would never get stale.
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Bicycle artist

Rat, Michael Wallace, 2013. The pictures are by necessity crude, and the charming wobble comes from the accuracy of GPS, which records changes of a few feet.
Michael Wallace draws pictures using his bicycle, his Samsung Galaxy smartphone, two GPS apps, and the streets of Southeast Baltimore. It’s a simple concept: his phone records his rides (the double apps are in case of crashes). In five years, he has completed nearly 500 drawing-rides.
Wallace prints out Google maps and sketches his route over them. Then he consults Google Maps Satellite View to verify that the route he’s planned actually exists. In an online interview, Wallace said he doesn’t climb or jump fences. When obstacles require changes on the fly, Wallace consults the printed map he’s carrying.
Downtown Crab, Michael Wallace, 2013.
Wallace isn’t blindly following his GPS; the act of mapping out the pictures makes him memorize the route. This is analogous to what happens when an artist draws a subject before painting; he can draw it again, much faster and more expressively, because he has memorized the subject. In some way, Wallace is duplicating this drawing process, but while using his whole body.
Sailboat, Michael Wallace, 2013.
I have the same phone and a bicycle. I’m going to try this when I get back to the Duchy.

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Smart kids

 
“The smartest kid in class, by contrast, is not an expensive problem. A boy or girl who finishes an assignment early can be handed a book and told to read quietly while the teacher works on getting other children caught up. What would clearly be neglect if it happened to a special-needs child tends to look different if the child is gifted: Being left alone might even feel like a reward, an acknowledgment of being a fast learner.”
When I came across that in a recent Boston Globe pieceon educating gifted kids, I had to laugh. Having once been the smartest kid in my public school class, I was anything but a cheap problem to fix; in fact, my parents ended up sending me to a private school to finish high school. I’m a great example of high intellect swamped by low expectations.
Fast-forward a generation to my own kids’ educations. You would think it would be better, but it’s not. Gifted and talented programs—all the rage before No Child Left Behind—have (if they still exist at all) become shock troops in the military boarding school approach to education we’ve adopted. More seat work, more homework, no time for things like art and music.
Busy work is the bane of the bright child’s existence. It teaches him to blow off his homework and rely on test-taking skills to get by. Moreover, it ignores developing the synthetic, intuitive parts of his brain, which are developedby studying art and music, and, yes, by daydreaming.
I have a friend who’s a classicist, living in penury as an adjunct professor. I’ve often thought that our school district should send three kids to her and pay her the roughly $65,000 it gets for educating them for a year. After four years, they would know history, music, the arts, Greek and Latin.
And before you tell me that’s not enough, America was built by people with exactly that education.

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Will your neighborhood art historian be replaced by a robot?

The most expensive painting on record is currently Paul Cezanne’s The Card Players, which sold for an estimated $259 million in 2011. (The exact price is unknown.)
In a paper entitled Toward Automated Discovery Of Artistic Influence, Babak Saleh and his Rutgers team claim to have used imaging software and ‘classification systems’ to automate the process of identifying artistic influences.
Last week, Apollo Magazine askedwhether robots can indeed replace art historians. They reached the same conclusions as did I—nope—but for different reasons.
The second most expensive painting on record is currently Jackson Pollock’s No. 5, 1948, which sold for $140 million in 2006.
The international art market moved $66 billion last year, so the experts in authenticating and analyzing paintings are valuable. And when they work at museums and galleries, art history majors are not badly paid. In 2009, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, museum curators and archivists made slightly more than $45,000 a year.
But the rub is when art historians enter the academic stream. While post-secondary teaching jobs are expected to growin the next decade, even the BLS admits that many of these jobs will be for adjuncts, or part-timers. In fact, more than Ÿ of college professors are adjuncts, and their wages are abysmal: between $1000 and $5000 per course. As Salon pointed out this month, that leads to professors with PhDs earning the same amount as the average full-time barista—who’s not expected to do curriculum development or grade papers on his own time.
The third most expensive painting on record is currently Willem de Kooning’s Woman III, which sold for $137.5 million in 2006.
Why does the United States tolerate a system where university educations are obscenely expensive at the same time as they’re being provided by slave labor? Beats me. But there is no reason to automate intellectual disciplines when we pay them atrociously. Your art history degree is safe for now.


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