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Category: Painting

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Altering Magic Cards

Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing by Aaron Boucher. It really does look less threatening.
My son-in-law Aaron Boucher is a pretty talented kid, although he doesn’t have much formal art training. I’m never going to turn him into a full-time painter (at least if my daughter has anything to say in the matter), but when he expressed an interest in altering Magic: The Gathering cards, I gave him some Golden Fluid Acrylics and fine brushes to work with. Golden Fluid Acrylics are sheer enough to work well on the flimsy cardboard cards, and he spent a happy afternoon painting.
Rampage at the State Fair by Sandy Quang.
Altering Magic cards perfectly fits my personal definition of fine art: the expression of creative imagination in a format that is completely without usefulness. That’s different from my definition of fine craft, which I think means the expression of creative imagination in a format that’s primarily useful. (Other than that, I make absolutely no distinction between art and craft.)
Portrait of Madame X, by Aaron Boucher is an extension alter.
The project worked out great for my Labor Day weekend. Nobody suggested a ten-mile hike over broken terrain. I got to read a novel, my daughter got to cook, and my husband took a long nap.
Mesmeric Eyes, by Aaron Boucher.
Happy Labor Day! Message me if you want information about next year’s workshops. Information about this year’s programs is available here.
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Fifty paintings for a favorite American president

Friar’s Head in Winter, by Michael Chesley Johnson, oil on canvas
2014 marks the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Roosevelt-Campobello International Park. It is one of my own favorite summer destinations, and I first visited it not long after it was made a park.
Duck Pond Marsh Sunset, by Michael Chesley Johnson, oil on canvas
“I’ve spent several years now painting the cottages and the landscape in the Park, and it has become a significant part of my life as a painter,” wrote Michael Chesley Johnson. To honor the park’s anniversary, Johnson has created a series of fifty paintings featuring scenes from the park. The paintings will be exhibited at the Park’s new restaurant, The Fireside, from July 19-August 16.
The Ice House, by Michael Chesley Johnson, oil on canvas
As a child and young adult, Franklin D. Roosevelt summered on Campobello Island, where he sailed, swam, and otherwise generally confronted nature in a way we wouldn’t dream of allowing our children to do today. After his marriage, he brought his young family. It was here in August 1921 that he was stricken with poliomyelitis. He rarely returned after that, but Eleanor Roosevelt and their children continued to visit. 
Snug Cove, by Michael Chesley Johnson, oil on canvas
Although the Roosevelts were a prominent business, social and political dynasty at the beginning of the 20th century, their cottage at Campobello is simple by the standards of the day. It is large (34 rooms), but almost austere; it was a family vacation home, not a mansion. 
The park surrounding it is truly an international park, managed jointly by the United States and Canada. Campobello Island is in the Bay of Fundy, which lies between New Brunswick and Nova Scotia and touches the state of Maine. Roosevelt’s cottage is the centerpiece of the park, but there are other structures and 3000 acres of beaches, cliffs, meadows and bogs.
Glensevern Road Beach Swamp, by Michael Chesley Johnson, oil on canvas
I have two openings left for my 2014 workshop in Belfast, ME. Information is available here.
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Back of beyond

Like it or not, we’re all in this web together. This particular web was at Wahconah Falls in the Berkshires, where I plan to stop to paint on my way to Maine in two weeks.
Non-New Yorkers always seem skeptical when we tell them there are vast tracts of our state that are uninhabited. Hamilton County, for example, sprawls over more than 1800 square miles of land, but its population is fewer than 5,000. That gives it a population density equal to North Dakota.
Since I leave—shortly—for the duration of the summer, I took a short trip this past weekend. I’ll be off-grid for much of the time I’m in Maine. I needed a better sense of what was negotiable with these old bones and what I can’t live without. I haven’t done any back-of-beyond camping in more than a decade.
My 2005 Prius–which went over 200,000 miles on Friday–has a perfect smartphone holder in the door. Amazing, since there were no smartphones when it was built.
Yes, I can still sleep in a tent and get up the next morning and be (relatively) limber, providing I have some kind of air mattress. Yes, it’s still a lot of work to camp, what with pitching a tent, hauling water and food and rolling and rerolling bedding. And although I used to like to cook over a campfire, I find it a pain these days.
Since I almost never paint from photos anyway, there is a declining advantage in hauling around my Panasonic DMC-LX5. If I’m just testing viewpoints for a painting–as here–I might as well use my pocket-sized computing device, a/k/a ‘phone’.
What has changed since I last went back of beyond is the nation’s cell phone network. I was on the top of a hill with no running water, no electricity, no septic, no artificial lighting of any kind—and an absolutely stellar 4G signal.
I’m thinking that will change how I interact with you while I’m on the road. Daily blogging without wi-fi or electricity may be difficult (although there are open wi-fi networks everywhere) but Instagram and Facebook are available everywhere. Does that mean my camera, with its beautiful, fast Leica lens, is obsolete in favor of my cell phone? Perhaps.
Of course, going off-the-grid with a party of youngsters is a little different from going with a party of painters. Mainly, the toys are noisier. (What we have here is a convoy.)

I have two openings left for my 2014 workshop in Belfast, ME. Information is available here.
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My White Trash Family

Rawlings Lowndes, 2013, by Kim Alsbrooks
I tend to take artist’s statements with a grain of salt, so when Kim Alsbrooks writes, “The White Trash Series was developed while living in the South out of frustration with some of the prevailing ideologies, in particular, class distinction,” the skeptic rises in me. But the work is more fun than the artist’s statement would have you believe.
Jane, 2014, by Kim Alsbrooks
After all, the artist is like a bowerbird, always collecting and repurposing junk. Who hasn’t seen flattened aluminum cans in the street and wondered how they could be useful? Like all metal painting surfaces, they’re inert and stable, so I guess they’d make a great painting surface.
Adriana on Fanta Orange, 2014, by Kim Alsbrooks
I really think her work is more about the juxtaposition of old and new than about Southern class distinctions. But as a base for landscapes, they would be awfully powerful. I see flattened cans all the time on my perambulations; maybe I’ll give this a try. After all, art is largely appropriation, right?


There are still a few openings in my 2014 workshop in Belfast, ME. Information is available here.
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Sunset at Olana

Clouds over the Hudson, by little ol’ me. $795, framed.

 A select group of New York plein air painters—my pals—have been in the Catskills painting this week. On Wednesday, Nancy Woogen and Johanne Morin saw a bear swimming in a lake, a rainbow, and a painted turtle laying eggs. I saw only one of those things (the turtle) and was awed by it; they must have been gobsmacked.

Sunset over the Hudson, by little ol’ me. $795, framed.
Last night, I was leaving the grounds of Frederic Church’s Olana at dusk, having painted the sunset. I was completely alone. I sometimes have an intuition that there is wildlife close by. I slowly coasted the lanes out of the historic site, hoping to glimpse a bear. No dice so I sped up to 55 MPH as I entered the road—only to narrowly miss a bounding doe.
To amuse myself, I attempted to paint just like Jamie Williams Grossman. That really didn’t work so well; we’re too different, but it was a fun experiment and I think I might show my students how to start indirectly like she does.Here are our easels, side by side.
We’ve been surrounded by crazy numbers of tourists as we’ve painted this week. Nothing unusual in that for me, except that it usually happens on the Maine coast, not in an untamed wilderness. Plein air painters have a different relationship with nature than most visitors. Tourists hike up trails, they linger on sunlit rocks, and then they head down to their cars to drive to the next vista. Nothing wrong with that—I love hiking myself. But it is unlikely that you will come face-to-face with nature that way.

Painting at Olana! Oh, my!
Meanwhile, we’re in our corner, struggling with our paint. Most of the time, that’s an introspective thing, and we’re concentrating on the canvas. But because we are essentially still, and we’re there for a long time, the woodland has a tendency to sneak up on us. Still, at the end of the day we get in our cars and drive away, the windshield separating us from the wilderness as it does everyone else.
This week’s painting has been made more difficult by heavy pollen after this cold winter. My asthma, which has been well-controlled for years, is rampaging. Yesterday, I capitulated and called a doctor, and not a moment too soon.  I’m wheezing like an ancient church organ.
Still, I have allies—a group of tremendous friends who helped move my pack today. I couldn’t have done it without them.


There are still a few openings in my 2014 workshop in Belfast, ME. Information is available here.

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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.


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!
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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!
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Art that moves me

These are my cousin’s Black Angus, on his farm in Gippsland, Victoria, Australia.  This photo actually took first place in a county fair art contest, so I can legitimately say I’m an international award-winning artist.
Yesterday I was looking at paintings by friends on Facebook. When I’m just “browsing the catalogue” in this way, the art that interests me is often aspirational. For example, last week, I found myself lingering over paintings with a hint of spring color. It’s been a brutally long winter and I long to see the shrubs and trees leaf out.
Of course, one man’s banality is another man’s inspiration. There was a time when I was fascinated by the glacial eskers and bogs in the landscape here. After twenty years spent living on the hip of a glacial moraine, I have to admit they no longer fascinate me so much.
Black Angus painted through a fence somewhere in New Jersey. You’ve got just a few minutes to get cow to canvas; don’t fret about the details and keep on crooning. (By little ol’ me.)
So what am I finding inspirational this spring? Oddly enough, it’s cows.
They say there are horse people and there are cow people. I think that’s nonsense; I’ve kept both, and both have their place. But it’s easier to paint a cow than a horse, because it’s easier to sucker a cow than a horse.  If you stand at a fence crooning, cows will almost always walk up to try to figure you out. And they’ll spend enough time doing it that you can quickly splash a few dots of paint down and capture the essence of their cowness.
These fellows are on Sweets Corners Road in Penfield.
In contrast, you’d better bring a sketchbook and pencil if you want to try the same trick with horses. Oh, they’ll be interested in you, but horses are wilier. Either my song repertoire needs work or they have more sophisticated taste than cows. They’ll come to the fence and crop grass, but they’ll never relax, and they’ll never stay in one place long enough to get paint on the canvas. But you can get decent drawings of horses this way, if you move fast.
When I was a youngster, Western New York was dotted with dairy farms; sadly, most of them are now gone, and the ones that remain keep their cows inside. The best place to see dairy cows now is in the barns at the New York State Fair. There’s not enough room for an easel, but you can bring your sketchbook. A resting dairy cow, carefully groomed and loved by her teenage 4-H keeper, is as beautiful as an odalisque, and probably a better conversationalist.

Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in Belfast, Maine in August, 2014 or Rochester at any time. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops!
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Giving it away for free—the journalism question

Low Bridge (Erie Canal), oil on canvas, by Carol L. Douglas. Go ahead, copy it, print it, and hang it on your wall. Satisfying? I doubt it. But you can contact me and buy the original, and I guarantee you it will bring you joy.
No discipline has suffered more from the internet than journalism. Its unemployment rate is higher than that of art historians, even though it was once the “something practical” that artists were told they should major in.
I worked as a stringer for a local paper in the late ‘80s. I made fifteen bucks a story back then, for which I sat through interminable board meetings. Said paper doesn’t even hire stringers any more. Evidently the water-and-sewer-line stories now gather themselves, and democracy in its most immediate form operates sub rosa.
“How do you publish photos on the internet so you don’t lose your copyright?” I was asked recently. (The writer was concerned about Facebook.) The short answer is that we give Facebook a non-exclusive, transferable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any content we post. However, we don’t negate our ownership; that’s protected by law.
The same scene in a photo, more or less. Do whatever you want with it; I don’t care. Photos are a dime a dozen on the internet.
Having said that, our copyright is probably worthless, because photography itself is devalued. Today’s point-and-shoot cameras take better pictures than most trained photographers could back in the age of film. Unless you’re shooting events for a fee, are particularly gifted, or got extremely lucky and caught the Duchess of Cambridge nursing Prince George in the buff, you may as well set your privacy controls to zip and let ‘er rip. It’s difficult to protect photos on the internet, and many news sources have given up trying.
Which brings me to a curious anomaly about the internet: it’s better for painters than for photographers. No screenshot of one of my paintings will ever compare to the original. However, the character of a good painting is implied well enough in a photo that potential buyers can see what they’re getting. That means that the same qualities that make the internet so good for ripping off people’s photos make it a great platform for promoting paintings.
Oddly, one sees a similar thing in the writing disciplines as well. I can hack almost any news source, but if I want to read a novel, I go through the normal licensing channels to download it to my Kindle or—gasp—read a book printed on paper. Novelists can and do use the internet to promote their works, and we consumers willingly pay them for their intellectual property. Imagine 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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Rejuvenation

Workspace or spiritual battleground?
This weekend I spoke with a former student who is now in his fourth semester at Rhode Island School of Design. Inevitably, we discussed criticism. He made a point I’ve heard from other students: all art school criticism is fundamentally self-referential. What matters isn’t the technique, intellectual rigor or theory brought into the process, but how the work relates back to the artist.
This circular thinking came back to me forcefully this morning. For the past few weeks, our pastor (Tony Martorana at Joy Community Church) has been talking about spiritual rejuvenation. I was struck by how much modern art needs that. Truly, a valueless, concept-free, rudderless visual art world is nothing more than those dry bones Ezekiel so powerfully and movingly described.
But that’s still abstract; I wrote last week that I don’t see myself having the moral intelligence to paint the cardinal virtues. Pastor Tony used an agrarian metaphor to describe spiritual rejuvenation, to which I can easily relate. And I don’t mean to denigrate the spiritual significance of his instruction, but I can see in it a path to better work as an artist.

Rocks are annoying except in viniculture, where they end up being an important part of good wine. (But there’s such a thing as torturing a metaphor.)

The following are his bullet points:
1.       Remove the rocks. In the northeast, our fields are planted on former forests, where acidic soil caused rocks to rise to the surface. So our fields are surrounded by dry stone walls made of rocks painstakingly removed by our ancestors.

Rocks make soil hard to till and block moisture and root growth. They are not living things; they never were living things. We all have metaphorical rocks in the landscape of our painting technique. These are the internal voices that say things like, “I can’t,” “I’m a second-rate talent,” “I don’t have an MBA,” as well as the bad work habits and distractions that come from a life of working alone.

2.       Remove the stumps. These are things which once lived and which might have produced good fruit, but do so no longer. In my life, these are primarily the lessons of the dead, which were perhaps well-meant and instructive when I was fifteen but which tend to hobble me today. (That isn’t meant to denigrate the importance of those people, for in the not-too-distant future I may be a stump to that kid now at RISD.)

Then there’s pruning.
3.       Remove the weeds. In early spring, everything is covered with a green loveliness, and it’s frankly hard to tell the useful plants from the bad. Then overnight your garden is overrun with bindweed and dandelions are blowing across the lawn. I often have a hard time distinguishing between good and bad ideas, because often the bad ones are frankly more seductive. In the garden, I use my intellect and experience to determine which plants are weeds, and I pull them before they set roots. I ought to be able to do the same with my bad ideas.
4.       Plant a sufficient harvest. There are many factors which limit the harvest, but it can never be greater than that ordained by what we’ve planted. If you never work, you can’t expect to create very much of a body of work, can you? If you work sporadically, or half-heartedly, what do you expect to pull out at the harvest time? If you plant weeds, can you expect to harvest fruit?
5.       Then wait. You’re not going to harvest a crop overnight. In fact, in the world of art it is very possible that we may not live to see our harvest at all. But that doesn’t mean the harvest won’t be there.

(All the bullet points are Pastor Tony Martorana’s and were given by him as points of spiritual growth. This specific exposition and application to painting is my responsibility and I don’t mean to misquote him or twist his initial message.)