plein air Archives | Page 4 of 25

July 2, 2018

Monday Morning Art School: painting when the sun don’t shine

Changing light, comfort and safety, and keeping your materials workable are big challenges for bad weather

Rocky, by Carol L. Douglas, Cape Elizabeth Paint for Preservation

I’ve had great luck with weather this year, but that isn’t always the case. Last year I did an event in a cold rain that lasted from the opening bell until the jurying was complete, at which time the sun came back out. Mother Nature may forego the rain and sulk instead. Fog is beautiful but the flat dull light of an overcast sky is a challenge to love. Organizers may sympathize, but they can’t magically change the parameters of a plein air event. The show must go on.

Outside of events, painters have the luxury of staying home when they aren’t inspired. I don’t recommend it. There are exciting atmospheric effects that take place in bad weather, and if you aren’t there, you won’t see them. Nor will you know how to cope if you suddenly find yourself in a downpour when it really matters.

Storm Clouds (pastel), by Carol L. Douglas

There are three issues involved in painting in lousy weather.

Changing lighting conditions.
Your material’s stability;
Your personal comfort and safety;

Changing and imperfect light is one of the principle arguments for doing preparatory sketches. This weekend, I painted a dramatically back-lit rock for Cape Elizabeth Land Trust’s Paint for Preservation. I only had about four hours a day when these lighting conditions were true, and they weren’t true on the second day at all, because it was overcast. At the same time, I needed to include the tide, which advances almost an hour a day.

I’d done a fairly careful sketch in advance and was able to refer to it when in doubt. I repeated that process on the canvas when I started painting. Some people think underpainting is a substitute for an initial value sketch on paper. The problem, however, is that you cover up the evidence when you paint. Without my sketch as my guide, I doubt I would have retained the rigor of my initial idea.

Painting in the residue of a hurricane with Brad Marshall. (Courtesy Rye Art Center)

Watercolors and pastel are very difficult to manage in a downpour, even when they’re out of the direct rain. Paper and chalk both become saturated with moisture, making control impossible. The only solution I know is to work from inside your car. Acrylics actually benefit from higher humidity, but sideways mist and rain will make them run off the canvas too.

Remember learning that oil and water don’t mix? Instead, they form a sludgy emulsion that’s impossible to paint with. Oil paint won’t stick on a damp surface. Since the pigment is in suspension in the linseed oil, it can bleed off with water droplets. Shake loose water off and pour off any that ends up on your palette. Don’t blot.

Oil paint doesn’t freeze, however, making it great for winter painting.

Storm Clouds over Lake Huron was painted in the direct rain in a terrific downpour. The paint emulsified, but sometimes you just have to capture the scene.

With any media, you should avoid letting your canvas get wet from the back. Gesso expands and contracts with moisture changes. Copious rain will destabilize canvas and warp boards.

This spring, Ellen Joyce Trayer brought a bag full of knitted cowls along to my Age of Sailworkshop. She handed them out to anyone on the boat who wanted one. I was an immediate convert. They warm your neck without adding bulk. A general rule of dress: you are coldest when standing or sitting still, so bring more clothes.

Massed thunderheads are beautiful and transient but put away your lightning rod (easel) and get off your mountain long before the storm hits. Lightning strikes on both the leading and trailing edges of thunderstorms. Even if the sky directly over your head is clear, you’re at risk of a strike when you can hear thunder. Far better to get inside your car and record the pyrotechnics with gouache.

I’ve got one more workshop available this summer. Join me for Sea and Sky at Schoodic, August 5-10. We’re strictly limited to twelve, but there are still seats open.

March 26, 2018

Monday Morning Art School: drawing clouds

Clouds are objects with volume, obeying the rules of perspective.

Whiteface makes its own weather, by Carol L. Douglas

Clouds are not flat. The same perspective rules that apply to objects on the ground also apply to objects in the air. We are sometimes misled about that because clouds that appear to be almost overhead are, in fact, a long distance away.

I’ve alluded before to two-point perspective. I’ve never gotten too specific because it’s a great theoretical concept but a lousy way to draw. Today I’ll explain it.

A two-point perspective grid. You don’t need to draw all those rays, just the horizon line and the two vanishing points.

Draw a horizontal line somewhere near the middle of your paper. This horizon line represents the height of your eyeballs. Put dots on the far left and far right ends of this line. These are your vanishing points.

A cube drawn with perspective rays. It’s that simple.

All objects in your drawing must be fitted to rays coming from those points. A cube is the simplest form of this. Start with a vertical line; that’s the front corner of your block. It can be anywhere on your picture. Bound it by extending ray lines back to the vanishing points. Make your first block transparent, just so you can see how the rays cross in the back. This is the fundamental building block of perspective drawing, and everything else derives from it. You can add architectural flourishes using the rules I gave for drawing windows and doors that fit.

All objects can be rendered from that basic cube.

I’ve included a simple landscape perspective here, omitting some of the backside lines for the sake of clarity. (I apologize for the computer drawing; I’m recovering from surgery and it’s hard to draw with my foot up.)

As a practical tool, two-point perspective breaks down quickly. In reality, those vanishing points are infinitely distant from you. But it’s hard to align a ruler to an infinitely-distant point, so we draw finite points at the edges of our paper. They throw the whole drawing into a fake exaggeration of perspective. That’s why I started with a grid where the vanishing points were off the paper. It doesn’t fix the problem, but it makes it less obvious.

Staircase in two-point perspective, 1995, Luciano Testoni.

The example above is from Wikipedia’s article on perspective. It’s a masterful drawing, but it isn’t true two-point perspective, because he tosses in several additional points. There is also three-point perspective, which gives us an ant’s view of things, and four-point perspective, which gives a fish-eye distortion reminiscent of mid-century comic book art. And there are even more complex perspective schemes. At that point, you’ve left fine art and entered technical drawing.

Still, two-point perspective is useful for understanding clouds. Clouds follow the rules of perspective, being smaller, flatter and less distinct the farther they are from the viewer. The difference is that the vanishing point is at the bottom of the object, rather than the top as it is with terrestrial objects.

Basic shapes of clouds using the same perspective grid.

Cumulus clouds have flat bases and fluffy tops, and they tend to run in patterns across the sky. I’ve rendered them as slabs, using the same basic perspective rules as I would for a house. If I wasn’t elevating my foot, I’d have finished this by twisting and changing their shapes in my imaginary bounding boxes.

Mackerel sky forming over the Hudson, by Carol L. Douglas

A flight of cumulus clouds or a mackerel sky will be at a consistent altitude. That means their bottoms are on the same plane. However, there can be more than one cloud formation mucking around up there. That’s particularly true where there’s a big, scenic object like the ocean or a mountain in your vista. These have a way of interfering with the orderly patterns of clouds.

I don’t expect you to go outside and draw clouds using a perspective grid. This is for experimenting at home before you go outside. Then you’ll be more likely to see clouds marching across the sky in volume, rather than as puffy white shapes pasted on the surface of your painting.

It’s about time for you to consider your summer workshop plans. Join me on the American Eagle, at Acadia National Park, at Rye Art Center, or at Genesee Valley this summer.

March 14, 2018

Goodbye, New Orleans

I had to leave you because of the beignets. We were developing one of those Southern Gothic relationships where they were trying to kill me.

Live oak branches, by Carol L. Douglas

I have to wear a fitted dress on Saturday, so I’ve been scrupulously careful of my diet on this trip. Even in New Orleans, it wasn’t terribly hard, until the very last day.

Left to my own devices, I could have ignored the siren call of beignets, but other people kept handing them to me fresh from the deep-fryer. They were impossible to resist. When I realized I’d eaten three of them in one day, I struck camp and headed out of town

“You should go to the county fair more often,” my son-in-law told me. Beignets may ‘just’ be fried dough, but they taste somehow better here.

A fast sketch to understand the live oak’s branching pattern, which is chaotic.

I spent the morning painting the branches of live oaks at Audubon Zoo, which is in another beautiful old city park. Here the trees don’t have Spanish moss. Unlike City Park, Audubon Parkhas no meandering creek. According to a local, Spanish moss prefers to be near water.

Most trees spread their branches in some kind of regular pattern, including the white and red oaks of the north. Not so with their southern cousin. The live oak’s branching pattern defies visual organization. It’s as sinuous and baroque as everything else down here. Eventually, the branches end up dipping right back down to the earth.

My friend’s former home on Arabella Street.

I drove down Arabella Street to take a photo for a friend. She once lived in a lovely small house here and was curious to see what it looked like today. I’d say it was spruce and pristine and gentrified, although they’ve taken down her porch swing. A Whole Foods now occupies the site of the derelict bus station from her day.

The streets in New Orleans are atrocious. On Magazine Street, I narrowly missed a giant pothole that was deeper than my wheel is tall. A local had helpfully made a big sign on a cardboard box: “F’ing Huge Pothole!”

Spanish moss in City Park.

That afternoon, I went for a long walk through City Park to stretch my legs. There’s so much more to paint in this city, including the shotgun houses and Creole cottages. Next time I paint here, I’m staying for a week. Now, however, I have to be in Buffalo on Saturday. It’s time to put my sneakers back on and head north. I hear there are four-foot drifts in my driveway.

One of my tasks for this trip is to try out sketchbooks for my Age of Sail workshop. (Materials are included.) I like the paper in this Strathmore one, but the binding is making me a little crazy.

On my way out of town, I stopped at a Winn-Dixie in Slidell, Louisiana. There I bought carrot sticks and hummus. Oh, and some beignet mix for when I get home, just in case.

February 22, 2018

The mysterious perfection of watercolor

It can be either deliciously finicky, or wildly out of control. Or, in a perfect world, both.

St. Elias Mountains, Yukon Territory, by Carol L. Douglas. Think you can’t paint from a boat? This was done from the passenger seat of a car.

Yesterday I got an e-blog that read, “Want looser watercolors? Pour your paint.” Well, I like pitching, throwing and otherwise making a mess with watercolors, so I opened it in great anticipation. What it was really talking about was drawing a meticulous cartoon, blocking off the light areas with masking fluid, and then setting the darks with a wallowing, graduated wash that gets a little bit psychedelic by virtue of watercolor’s great sedimentation qualities.

That’s a beautiful technique, but nothing that starts with masking fluid can be described as loose. We can’t use these shadowy washes in field painting, unless we’re willing to hang around all day reblocking paper and waiting for it to dry.

A field sketch of Houghton Farm (New York) by Winslow Homer.

Watercolor is a curious medium. It’s quite capable of the ultimate control, as in Albrecht Dürer’s Large Piece of Turf, 1503. It’s equally capable of insouciance, as in Maurice Prendergast’suntitled seascape, below. You can go anywhere you want with it.

Untitled seascape by Maurice Prendergast.

Frank Costantino is a painter who manages to pull off meticulous renderings in watercolor in plein air events. Frank’s drawings are spot-on and his framing is clever. On the other end of the spectrum is Elissa Gore, whose field sketches always burble in the style of Ludwig Bemelmans.

You know my pal Poppy Balser, who shares my adoration of boats, the sea, and color. Although she’s primarily an oil painter, Mary Byrom does lots of sketching in watercolor.

Large Piece of Turf, 1503, Albrecht Dürer.

There hangs the moral of my tale. Every one of these painters works in more than one medium—in Frank’s case, watercolor and colored pencil, in the rest of them, watercolor and oils. That’s true of me, too.

I first learned to paint in watercolor. That was standard procedure in the mid-century, when no right-minded teacher was going to hand a kid a box of toxic chemicals and tell her to go to town. It’s a private possession for when I travel or when I’m thinking. I never sell my watercolors, and I don’t intend for them to be shown. Watercolor, for me, is deeply personal.

Preparatory sketch of Marshall Point, by Carol L. Douglas.

But it’s also the perfect travel medium, which is why I took it to Australia and to London and plan to bring it along to Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi in March. When it’s just you, your suitcase and a Prius, you want to travel light.

All of this has been much on my mind recently as I’ve debated the best sketchbooks to buy for my Age of Sail workshop on the American Eagle, in June. I’ve tried many myself. As with everything else, each one has its plusses and minuses. One friend suggested that I cut down sheets of paper and make my own, but I want every student to have a takeaway book with a nice binding.

I plan to have students working in both gouache and watercolor. I need to find the right paper for both. So every time a friend posts a new work in a sketchbook I query him or her relentlessly on the materials. And I’m narrowing it down, slowly but surely.

February 13, 2017

Why paint from life? For one thing, you can’t wander through a photograph

This is the site from which I did Friday’s painting of the Chugach Range. Which is more “realistic”? My painting, of course. The mountains in Anchorage are an everpresent force, not a nice little outline in the background.

“Why should a painter work from life rather than photos?” a reader asked me. “I can see that work painted from photos can lack a certain depth, but I don’t understand why.”

First, let me be clear: almost all painters work from photos at times, if only to clarify something they didn’t understand out in the field. On a morning like today, when Mother Nature is creating a ruckus, there’s no way I’m going to be anywhere but in my studio, with slippers on. And that means working from photos.

But that should be the lesser part of the experience, not the greater.

I mentioned last week that neither the human eye, nor the camera, nor my monitor are objectively correct about the color of distant mountains. If I had used photos to paint my trip across Canada, the mountains would have been large cutouts in blue-violet shapes because that’s what my camera recorded. In real life, they had dimension, shadows, and rocky ridges—all things that disappeared in the photographic record. A better camera would have given me a better image, but no camera can equal my own eyes, as old as they are.

Chugach range from Anchorage, oil on canvasboard, by Carol L. Douglas. The colors in my painting are warmer, and the mountain is more important and detailed.

“Digital adds lots of cyan to an image, usually about 30% in the lighter and mid-tones. And RGB color space doesn’t ‘see’ as many colors as a human’s eye/brain perceives,” responded Victoria Brzustowicz, who, in addition to being a painter is a graphic designer.

The human eye is a dynamic sensor. The resolution in the center of our eyes is far higher than at the edges, so we create images by shifting our focus very, very fast—so fast, in fact, that we’re not aware of it. We do a similar thing with darks and lights—although our eyes have less dynamic range than cameras, we just record the full range of impressions in our memories, stitching them seamlessly into an image we think we see.

Put away the camera and draw, draw, draw. You can draw anywhere, and in this climate, you can bring your own still life with you.

We don’t see in rectangles, either, but in a cone shape that somehow takes in lots of information at the periphery. That’s the big reason I don’t like my students using viewfinders in class. Viewfinders reduce what is possible to what can be contained inside a rectangle. Often, what’s actually there in life includes something amorphous and looming that gives character to the whole scene. Yes, it’s harder to capture that, but that’s the difference between an artist and a scribe.

Cameras also distort our sense of space. There is no one lens that exactly duplicates our range of vision. We humans see in neither telephoto nor wide-angle. The photographed view is, sadly, a choice somewhere between the two. That doesn’t match human perception.

My hiking poles, along with my tam (left) and mittens (above) went to church with me on Sunday. I’m listening to every word, but I’m also keeping my hands busy.

Years ago I took an anatomy-of-drawing class from the late Nicki Orbach. I had the shape of the shoulders wrong. “Get up and look at him from the other side,” she suggested. It was only then that I could see how I’d ignored the pull of the trapezius muscles, which control the neck but are mainly visible from the back. You can’t get up and wander through a photo to collect more information, and it’s something I do surprisingly often.

January 11, 2017

When does it stop being plein air painting?

“The Three Graces,” Carol L. Douglas

I have never been much for the debate over what constitutes plein air painting. What percentage needs to be done on location? Does painting from your car count? These questions mostly just annoy me. At every plein air event I’ve done, painters continue to work at night after they leave their location. Years of painting give you excellent visual memory. Letting your eyes rest after a day of working in bright light is an important step.

Since the only requirement is that the work be finished within a certain period, it’s up to us to interpret what “painted en plein air” actually means. And the vast majority of artists, I find, are very strict about the rules they establish.

“The Three Graces” as it looked when I took down my easel.

In most cases, I can tell at a distance whether a work was done on location or not. The energy of plein air painting is not easily faked, although the lighting and brushwork may be indistinguishable from studio painting. In plein air painting, the whole scene is constantly subject to change. That lends a frisson of nerves to the process.

“My clients don’t care whether it was painted on location or not,” Brad Marshall once said during one of these interminable discussions. “They’re just interested in whether it’s a good painting.”

“Mercantile’s anchor,” Carol L. Douglas

That’s true, but it becomes an issue for painters when they’re selecting paintings to apply for upcoming plein air events. At what point do after-the-fact edits disqualify a work from consideration?

I did the two paintings in this post during the same week. There was gorgeous weather and I painted almost non-stop on the floating docks at Camden. Of course there were interruptions, since wherever I go, that’s where the party’s at.

Had I gone back to my studio and made the same changes I made yesterday, I’d have had no hesitation in calling them en plein air paintings. However, my husband flew home from Norway, and I didn’t get back to them until yesterday.

“Mercantile’s anchor” as it looked when I took down my easel. Because I’d painted this boat in dry-dock, I know its black hull is underpainted in green.

I made no structural changes to either painting, because I’m trying to make a point. (Otherwise, I’d have moved that boom out of directly behind the anchor.) In neither case was a photo necessary to finish. But in both cases, the surface has been overpainted almost completely, and I had the luxury of time in which to finish them.

So, for the purpose of jurying, is this plein air painting? I don’t have a ready answer, and I’m interested in your opinion.

September 6, 2016

Painting clouds

“Whiteface makes its own weather,” by Carol L. Douglas. High contrast clouds and a flat brush imply rain.

Clouds are a terrific, rampaging part of the landscape, and often the best part of a composition. I love painting them. They seem so easy that I never figured there was much secret gnosis to painting them, any more than there is some magic trick to painting water. However, last week a reader wrote asking for tips about painting clouds, and she got me thinking about how I manage them.

Clouds have perspective, but it is upside-down from earth-bound objects. That’s because the vanishing point is the horizon, putting the farthest clouds at the bottom of the sky. While we mostly look at the tops of earthbound objects, we mostly look at the bottoms of clouds. That makes the shadow color predominant.

Altocumulus clouds over the Hudson River, by Carol L. Douglas

As with earthbound objects, there is also atmospheric perspective: clouds are generally lighter and duller at the horizon. This, however, is subject to circumstances. At dawn and dusk the horizon may be the most colorful part of the sky. A good storm turns everything on its head.

Figuring out the color of clouds is easy: there’s a color for the highlights, and a color for the shadows, and these are more or less opposite each other in color temperature. On a peaceful day, the values of shadow and highlight are almost the same. When there’s a real range in value in the clouds, you have an ominous sky.

Surf study by Carol L. Douglas

Note and use the patterns of clouds, rather than randomly placing one or two clouds in the canvas. The pattern should be part of your design. White, puffy cumulus clouds often appear in repetitive patterns across the sky. Cumulonimbus clouds are towering portents of rain or worse. These are the clouds that often have dark shadows and odd coloring, for they are livid.

A mackerel sky, high in the atmosphere, is a sky knitting itself together in advance of a change in the weather. “Mares’ tails and mackerel scales make lofty ships to carry low sails,” is an acknowledgement of this phenomenon. High-atmosphere clouds have no volume. They are merely regular patterns of white against a blue sky.

Higher cirrus clouds at Olana, by Carol L. Douglas

Higher cirrus clouds (above) and cumulus clouds (horizon) at Olana, by Carol L. Douglas

I used to live in the Great Lakes region. If I looked north, I would almost always see a band of cumulus clouds low on the horizon, racing down the center of Lake Ontario. Such local weather patterns exist all over the country. They are part of the ‘sense of place’ where you live. You can’t paint them until you observe them.

How do I translate those observations onto my canvas? In practice, I mix a puddle of the shadow color of the cloud and a puddle of the light color. I race around, first with the shadow color and then with the highlight color, to create a pattern. When that is established, I used particular clouds as reference to finish the details. Since clouds constantly morph, there is no danger of repetitiveness. This is the only time I ever use straight white from the tube, for it sometimes acts as my mid-tone in clouds.

“Clouds over Hudson, NY,” by Carol L. Douglas

What brush? As with everything else, it depends on what you are trying to say with your mark-making. A flat will convey energy. A filbert or round will allow you to be more lyrical. It’s up to you.

Dr. Albert C. Barnes, founder of the Barnes Collection, was very particular in how his paintings were hung. He believed that he could improve individual paintings’ compositions by juxtaposing paintings and furnishings in the greater space of a room. That’s pretty cheeky considering the Impressionist masterpieces he collected, but in his defense, nobody knew they were masterpieces yet.

You can use clouds in your painting to redirect the viewer in the same way. Although—like water—clouds’ patterns are usually wavelike and horizontal, there is no reason to be hidebound about that. Within the reality of their structure, you can find ways to lift and lead the viewers’ eyes.

The greatest painter of clouds alive today is the Glasgow-trained landscape artist,James Morrison. I strongly encourage you to study his paintings, to see how his clouds have volume, character and energy. They are never an afterthought in the landscape; they are a potent force within it.

August 26, 2016

Painting along the Marginal Way

Workers built a retaining wall to stabilize a seriously damaged section of the Marginal Way after the Patriots Day Storm of 2007. Private donors contributed $100,000. Photo courtesy Marginal Way Preservation Fund.

Photo courtesy Marginal Way Preservation Fund.

When my kids were small, we would alternate vacations between the western National Parks one year and Ogunquit, ME, the following. I have many lovely memories of frolicking on the beach with them, ice cream, those peculiar red hot dogs, sandy bedtimes at my friend Jan’s cottage, and treks along the Marginal Way.

The Marginal Way was the brain-child of conservationist Josiah Chase (1840-1928). On his retirement, he moved to York, ME and bought a 20-acre strip of land extending from Perkins Cove to Israel Head. In 1925, he ceded the land for the Marginal Way to the town. Since then, other landowners have donated parcels that extended the Way.

Photo courtesy Marginal Way Preservation Fund.

In Scotland, I had the luxury of rambling where I wanted without worrying about trespassing. That was also the case in much of Australia. But in the United States we are often blocked from access to these places because our notion of property rights is different.

The men and women like Josiah Chase who gave land into the public trust during the last century were great visionaries. They recognized that the coast would eventually be built up. The common man would need access to it. But the process of preservation is on-going. The same properties need maintenance, particularly where they get heavy use by the public.

Workers built a retaining wall to stabilize a seriously damaged section of the Marginal Way after the Patriots Day Storm of 2007. Private donors contributed $100,000. Photo courtesy Marginal Way Preservation Fund.

I think of the Marginal Way as perfectly groomed, but it has taken some beatings over the years. Fierce storms in 1991 and 2007 destroyed large sections. In 2010, a group of concerned citizens formed an endowment fund to protect and preserve the coastal path. This is the Marginal Way Preservation Fund.

The Marginal Way has two focal points: the ocean breaking against its great granite bowl, and the lovely homes and gardens behind it. I have the same curiosity you do about these gardens, and I’m finally able to satisfy it.

Photo courtesy Marginal Way Preservation Fund.

This weekend I will be joining Mary Byrom, Frank Costantino and other invited artists at By the Sea, By the Sea, a plein air paint-out and private garden tour. We start painting on Saturday at noon. The reception and sale will be Sunday, August 28, under a tent at the Beachmere Inn. Click here for more information.

August 9, 2016

Indestructible

“Rockbound coast of Maine,” 8X6 demonstration painting, oil on canvasboard, Carol L. Douglas

One of my workshop students was seriously injured in a car accident last year. Because of this, I’m trying to limit our rock climbing. Plein air painting is hard enough without physical or spatial problems.

With this in mind I encouraged her to paint from just below the parking lot at Schoodic Point. She set up her pastels, did a quick value sketch and immediately moved to color. She’s an excellent composer and her start was fantastic.

Cecilia Chang’s painting of Schoodic Point.

The air was perfectly still when we started painting. Unfortunately, neither she nor I thought to weigh down her Heilman pastel box. The wind rose imperceptibly. Whitecaps began to form and bigger breakers crashed along the rocks.

Lynne’s entire kit flew over onto the rocks with a terrible crash.

If you’ve worked in pastels, you know that the tinkle of broken chalks is the saddest sound known to mankind. An open-stock pastel stick can range from $3.50 to $7.00, and a good pastel artist can carry more than a hundred of them, accumulated over decades and treasured. The proper response to a fallen easel is either copious swearing or copious tears, depending on your personality.

The scene of the crime.

Instead, we squared our shoulders and set to work cleaning up the mess. Miraculously, the box itself wasn’t damaged by the crash. Neither were the Terry Ludwig soft pastels she was carrying. While some of the other brands came from dust and to dust returned, these chalks were unfazed. A soft pastel that can survive the granite of Maine is not to be sneezed at.

On the first day of a workshop my students are usually so gung-ho that I have to drag them away for breaks. This year was no exception. By 1 PM, I was begging them to pack up their easels and eat their lunches. Our situation was untenable. The wind, at around 20 MPH, made the easels vibrate and the work snap around like tacking sails.

Lynne Vokatis’ unfinished pastel of Schoodic Point.

We moved to Arey Cove, which gave us a little protection. There I did a demo while my students ate their lunch.

At 5:30 I told everyone to pack up, as we had half an hour before dinner was served. Lynne was covered in pastel dust. “I think I’d better shower,” she said, and rushed through her packing. Unfortunately, the back door of her SUV wasn’t secured. As she sped around the corner, her art supplies flew out of the back, including her Heilman pastel box on its tripod.

Again, we squared our shoulders. Again we picked up the mess. Again, that box was completely unscathed.

So consider this an endorsement of the Heilman pastel box. Apparently it is indestructible. The same might be said of Lynne. Lesser women (like me) would have cried and quit for the day. But she didn’t let disaster derail her. She told me that her neurologist says to think of such moments as clouds that will shortly move along. Sounds like brilliant advice to me.

Corinne Avery’s unfinished painting of Schoodic Point.

I am participating in two events this coming weekend:

Annual Aldermere Farm Art Show and Sale

Saturday: 9 AM to 4 PM
Sunday: 9 AM to 4 PM

Paintings of coastal Maine, Aldermere Farms, and the Rockport area are featured in this event, which is free and open to the public. The farmhouse is located at 20 Russell Avenue, Rockport.

Wet Paint on the Weskeag!

Sunday, starting at 4 PM

Organized by The Kelpie Gallery in South Thomaston, this event supports the Maine arts community and the Georges River Land Trust.

Thirty juried artists will paint along the Weskeag River and Marsh and St. Georges River. The party starts on Sunday with an elegant cocktail reception at 4pm. At 5 PM dueling auctioneers Bruce Gamage and Kaja Veilleux will sell the work

Tickets are $40 in advance for GRLT members/$50 for non-members and day of auction. For more information, call 207-594-5166.

July 7, 2016

Frog weather

I have decided to repost my BDN blog here so that my non-Maine friends who object to the survey can see it.

Class at Schoodic Point.

My pal is a righteous church-going grandmother from Allegheny County, PA. Yesterday, she was offered $50 to perform an immoral act. We were both a little confused about the economics. If that’s the going rate, prostitution really doesn’t pay well.

In reality, she’s a residential advisor at a center for adults with developmental disabilities. This is empowering and important work. I teach painting, which isn’t as immediately beneficial to society, but is probably equally important in the bigger picture.

A happy student

I’ve been painting since many of you were in short pants, and teaching since you were angst-ridden teenagers. You could read my long and boring CV here, or you can cut to the main point: lots of people have become better artists by studying with me.

I understand from my pals that it’s hotter than blue blazes in my birth state of New York. I was dismayed to see photos from last weekend’s Battle of Fort Niagara reenactment in Youngstown, NY. The parade grounds appear as parched, brown and dusty as the ancient walls of the fort itself. It’s been hot, humid and hazy downstate, too, where there’s been an air quality advisory for metropolitan New York. In fact, that’s the way it’s been going for much of America so far this summer.

Concentrating.

Here in Rockport, Maine, it is hitting the 70s, but there is a cool breeze. In Acadia, it might even be a few degrees cooler. That’s one reason you should consider joining me in Acadia’s Schoodic Institute for this year’s Sea & Sky workshop from August 7 to 12.

The Schoodic Institute isn’t open to the public. To stay there, you need to be part of an educational program. That makes it quiet and secluded. I’ve watched its transition from a former navy base to its current incarnation as an educational institution. Someday we will all brag about having been there.

Me, demoing.

Some of the best painting on the East Coast is there. High granite cliffs drop down to the misty green depths of Frenchmen’s Bay. Atlantic surf roars onto Schoodic point in the clear light of Maine, which is like no other light in the northeast.

If you’re a history buff, you know that this is Acadia’s centennial year. That makes our workshop part of an amazing run of history.

Our lobster bake.

The cost for this whole shindig including instruction, meals, accommodation, and a lobster feast is just $1600. Compare that to other workshops and you’ll realize it’s a great deal.

Yes, I have a few openings left. I believe that the people who go are those who are meant to go. Perhaps that’s you. If so, email me soon so you can snag one of these last spots.