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Category: masterpiece

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How long did it take you to become a genius, anyway?

Mastery is a moving target. Occasional moments of greatness are a byproduct of that continuing struggle.

Autumn farm, evening blues, oil on archival canvasboard, Carol L. Douglas

“How @#$% long does it take great painters to learn to paint?” asked a student recently, with only the slightest hint of frustration in his voice. “I’m not looking for affirmations,” he added. “I really would like some perspective.”

In the age of apprenticeships and less-flexible standards of art, that was an easier question to answer. Titian started his apprenticeship somewhere around age 10-12, and finished it around ten years later. Diego VelĂĄzquez did a six-year apprenticeship starting at around age ten. Peter Paul Rubensdid a 7-year apprenticeship starting at age 14. The British portrait painter George Romneydid only four years, but he started at age 21, with watchmaking and drawing experience under his belt. Most women at this time studied with family members.

Vineyard, oil on canvas, 30X40, Carol L. Douglas

These budding artists made learning their craft a full-time occupation during their apprenticeships. They were also responsible for elements of painting we don’t bother with today, such as preparing panels and grinding pigments, along with the scut-work of any successful business. In addition, their master (or more probably, his wife) taught them the necessary skills for living.

By the end of the 18th century, the apprenticeship system was dead. Painters were more likely to come up through atelier training. Many artists of this period, including Édouard Manet and Vincent van Gogh, came from affluent families. They had the liberty to direct their own destinies and well-heeled friends to buy their first paintings.

Mary Cassatt is typical in that she had a good liberal education (including exposure to great art in Europe) before enrolling at the  Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts at the age of 15. She spent four years there. It was not coincidence that atelier training took about as long as a humanities degree; artists had transitioned from being craftsmen to intellectuals.

Midsummer, 24X36, oil on canvas (plein air), $3188 unframed, Carol L. Douglas

By the 20th century, the down-and-dirty craftsmen in the art world were illustrators. Norman Rockwell also spent four years studying art, but he didn’t have the advantage of a Grand Tour. He started art school at age 14 and was working for Boy’s Life at 18.

The 20th century was a confused time for art education in the western world. Grant Wood is representative of mid-century painters in that he moved around through various schools and collectives learning his craft. Andy Warhol, on the other hand, had a BFA from Carnegie-Mellon. Those who came up outside the formal art world, like Jasper Johns, still put in a lot of years perfecting their craft.

There have always been outliers. N.C Wyeth had a fairly typical art education for his time, with Howard Pyle and others. However, when it came to the next generations, Andrew Wyeth and grandson Jamie Wyethwere both tutored at home. This hearkens back to historic family painting dynasties like the Brueghelsor Gentileschis.

Termination Dust, oil on archival canvasboard, Carol L. Douglas

We love stories of instant success, but most, like Grandma Moses, were working hard at art for decades before their discovery. Moses spent a lifetime doing fine needlework until her arthritis forced her to take up a brush at age 78.

My student’s question presumes there’s a point at which the painter says, ‘whew, I’ve made it!” Every credible painter I know is simply striving to be good at what he or she does, but the goal keeps moving. Greatness is merely a by-product of that continuing struggle.

Historically, masterpiece had a specific meaning. It was a work produced to earn membership in one’s guild. Velazquez’ first Waterseller of Seville was such a painting, done to prove that he was good enough to hang out his own shingle. It was the start of his professional life, not its culmination.

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Monday Morning Art School: Where is the “me” in that painting?

Every line we paint, if we paint it honestly, tells the story of us and our feelings about the subject.

Sometimes it rains, by Carol L. Douglas, available through Ocean Park Association.

My husband is a stylish bass player. He says that he seldom thinks about style; instead, it’s that space between what he is technically capable of playing and what he’s visualized. I recognize that the same thing is true in my own painting.

I never get into questions of style with my students. It’s ineffable. I once had a teacher who lauded the heavy lines in my painting. “It’s your style,” he said. Actually, I didn’t like it but I hadn’t learned to marry edges yet.

Jennifer Johnson rode up to Schoodic Institute with me yesterday; this is her fourth year at my Sea & Sky workshop. She’s learned to produce a competent painting in a reasonable amount of time. “But how do I put my own emotion, my own self, into my painting?” she asked me. I had to laugh. Her paintings are as lively and quirky as she is.

Tom Sawyer’s Fence, by Carol L. Douglas, available.

No two artists paint the same scene the same way. Coincidentally, most of my plein air class on Tuesday chose the exact same long view to paint: a majestic vista down Clary Hill’s blueberry barrens. Each painting was markedly different.

Every line we paint, if we paint it honestly, tells the story of us and our feelings about the subject. Style is not something you add into a painting; it’s a reflection of your personality.

That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t paint deeper subjects. I don’t paint boats just because they’re beautiful, but because they’re meaningful symbols of the human journey. But the essential self-expression happens not in the content, but in the paintwork itself.

Blueberry barrens, Clary Hill, by Carol L. Douglas. Available through Maine Farmland Trust Gallery.

I’ve noticed that artists—myself included—often want to obliterate the very things in our painting that are most honest and autobiographical. Our brushwork can feel crabbed to us even if other viewers see it as intense or lyrical. We want to make things that are smooth, refined, and loose even when we’re uproarious or unsettled.

Yet the painters we most admire are often the ones who were most self-revelatory. For every Van Gogh, Toulouse-Lautrec, Seurat, Pissarro, Monet, or Manet, there were hundreds of other painters hanging around Paris whom we don’t remember. They trotted out carefully produced, well-designed, even stylish canvases that have no ability to move us today.

Any decent critic can tell you what makes a good painting. It’s harder to identify what makes a great painting, but I think it must include big concepts: tragedy, sublimity, beauty, ugliness, joy, terror. A masterwork is of course a product of its time, but to transcend that, it must tell essential truths that transcend time and place.

Mountain fog, by Carol L. Douglas. Available.

For those to be in your painting, they must be in you in the first place, and you have to be willing to be honest. I’ve learned to set aside paintings that irritate me and revisit them in the future; like Wildfire(which I wrote about here) they sometimes have the capacity to surprise me. This is why I discourage people from tossing ‘failed’ paintings too soon. Sometimes our conscious minds need time to catch up with our sympathetic intelligence.

None of this negates the importance of instruction, by the way. We all learned to write in cursive in the same way, but every person’s handwriting ends up so individualized that experts can determine when it’s forged.

I’m teaching my annual Sea & Sky workshop in Acadia National Park this week—two months later than its usual August date. After that, there’s Find Your Authentic Voice in Plein Air in Tallahassee, Florida, in early November, and a few more plein air classes in Rockport, ME. From there on in, it’s all Zoom, Zoom, Zoom until the snow stops flying.