fbpx

Category: Romanticism

Posted on

Drawing as prayer, play and thought

“Drawing is prayer,” Delacroix famously said. He could have added that it’s play as well. And thinking.
The Giaour on Horseback, by Eugène Delacroix, c. 1824–26, by Eugène Delacroix, pen and iron gall ink with wash over graphite, courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art
Shelving books this week, I came across a small volume of drawings by Eugène Delacroix. I flipped it open and the better part of an hour was lost.
Delacroix was a Romantic painter. He is considered the last of the Old Masters and the link between Romanticism and the Impressionists. He rejected the more-structured romanticism of Géricaultand the classical coolness of Ingresin favor of frenzied brushwork and explosions of color. But there is nothing modern in his painting; it is far too topical for us to dive right in. Delacroix was a man of his times—perhaps the illegitimate son of the great diplomat Tallyrand—and it’s hard for us to skim past the allusions to Shakespeare and Greek myth and find the passion within. But it’s there, a kind of fervor we usually associate with Spanish visionaries.
Louis of OrlĂ©ans Unveiling his Mistress, by Eugène Delacroix, c. 1825–26, courtesy Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection
Still, he’s a cool observer of the human condition. Consider his portrait of the 14th century Duke of Orléans, above. The historic figure was a young, debauched, power-hungry prince. Delacroix portrays him considering a young woman as if she were a side of beef. It’s both a well-realized portrait of female powerlessness and a devastating attack on the French nobility. Delacroix was both politically incisive and technically proficient, a combination that is largely lost today.
Evolution of an idea: the following illustrations take us through Delacroix’ thinking process. Study for The Sultan of Morocco and His Entourage, by Eugène Delacroix, c. 1832–33, brush and brown ink, courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art
But it was his drawings I was interested in. Immediately before his death in 1863, he wrote a will ordering the contents of his studio to be sold. At the sale the following year, an amazing 9140 works were attributed to him: 853 paintings, 1525 pastels and watercolors, 6629 drawings, 109 lithographs, and over 60 sketch books. “Color always occupies me, but drawing preoccupies me,” he frequently said.
Study for The Sultan of Morocco and His Entourage, by Eugène Delacroix, 1845, graphite, squared in white chalk, courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art
Delacroix’s drawings and sketchbooks outline a classical artistic training and developing career. They include academic nude figure drawings, écorchés and compositional studies for his paintings and murals. They included drawings from life and nature, and the many, many drawings he created from his imagination.
The Sultan of Morocco and his Entourage, by Eugène Delacroix, 1845, courtesy
Musée des Augustins de Toulouse. By this time, the French and Moroccans had been at war.
They weren’t, by any means, all graphite pencil drawings. Many are in ink or wash and demonstrate a calligraphic assurance. Others are in watercolor. “Drawing is prayer,” Delacroix famously said. He could have added that it’s play as well. And thinking.
He couldn’t leave the idea alone. Study for The Sultan of Morocco and His Entourage, by Eugène Delacroix, c. 1855–56, graphite, courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art.
If you’re serious about painting, you ought to take him as an example and draw every day. Yes, it’s important to learn to lay down paint, but drawing is the foundation from which painting rises.
Posted on

Painting bombogenesis

We went from idealizing the arctic to seeing it as a metaphor for mortality. What changed?

Bombogenesis, by Carol L. Douglas
Cameras lie about blizzards. It’s hard to shoot a picture of falling snow through glass, because the glass is usually covered with snow. Even when one goes outdoors, the freeze-frame nature of photography tends to lighten the apparent fury of the storm. What the person sees is a dimly lit maelstrom. What the camera records is lighter, higher in contrast, and less ferocious.
Yesterday I tried several times in vain to photograph the storm. Finally, I decided to paint a quick study out my studio window. It’s a lie, as much as my camera was telling lies. There isn’t as much contrast in the trees. They’re really a hazy shape in uniform grey, the only difference being that the spruces read cool and the maple trunks slightly warmer. But I think I caught the blurriness.
Same view, sunnier day, by Carol L. Douglas
It’s still dark as I write this, but what I imagine I’ll find after bombogenesis has ended is a series of snow ridges between my house and garage. That is in some ways a better image of the raw power of wind-driven snow. Poke them with a shovel and you’ll find they are not soft and fluffy at all. That’s why I used them for Winter Lambing. I’ve shown you the painting many times; below is the reference photograph, taken at the intersection of Routes 31 and 98 in Orleans County, New York.
Reference photo for Winter Lambing.
The French Impressionists painted hundreds of images of snow, or effets de neige. They may have been influenced by a series of cold winters in France. Among the best are Claude Monet’s The Magpie and Van Gogh’s The Parsonage Garden at Nuenen in the Snow. The Canadian Group of Sevenbelieved the Great White North was the seat of Canada’s power, so they frequently painted snow. Lawren Harris’ early Winter Woods, is an example of their idealism.
The art world of the 19th and 20th centuries was fascinated by light in all its forms. There’s no better reflector than snow. But even before that, going right back to Pieter Bruegel the Elder, snow was a powerful symbol in western art. Caspar David Friedrich, for example, used it to represent mortality.
Doe drinking in the woods, by Carol L. Douglas
As arctic exploration increased with settlement in the Americas, the arctic became the focus of our obsession with snow. The search for the Northwest Passage drove American exploration for several hundred years. It is a treacherous and inaccessible region, and thus a spark to the imagination. Painters like Frederic Edwin Church and William Bradford went shipboard to create a visual image of the arctic. Writers like Mary Shelley, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Edgar Allen Poe memorialized it in fiction.
“There are no tales of risk and enterprise in which we English, men, women, and children, old and young, rich and poor, become interested so completely, as in the tales that come from the North Pole,” opined journalist Henry Morley in 1853.
Light snow above the Arctic Circle, by Carol L. Douglas.
But this was a fiction of a vast, empty, benign, landscape. The loss of the Franklin Expeditionsobered artists and writers alike. Sir John Franklin and his 129 men left England aboard two ships in May of 1845, intending to traverse the Northwest Passage. When they weren’t heard from by 1848, search parties (a total of twenty altogether) were sent out after them. Over the following three decades of searching, a morbid, sordid tale emerged. Both ships had been trapped and ground up by sea ice. The crew was poisoned from the lead solder in their ration tins. Sick, lost and cold, they ultimately resorted to cannibalism. All 129 men were lost. After that, representations of the arctic began to acknowledge the danger of bitter cold and ice.
Posted on

What is romanticism?

The next time I need to paint a nocturne, I’m going to a Ford dealership and painting F-150s.

Spruces and pines on the Barnum Brook Trail, by Carol L. Douglas.

Nocturnes are very popular right now, but I suspect I’m not romantic enough for them. I can’t exactly put my finger on what romance in painting means, but I think it involves thinking sensually vs. analytically. Anders Zorn is a romantic painter. Winslow Homeris not (even though he painted some brilliant nocturnes).

I’m not talking about the artistic movement of the 19thcentury here, but rather the response of the soul to paint. This isn’t a technical distinction or a matter of subject. It’s a question of how we see the world. My old pal Kari Ganoung Ruiz is a wonderful painter of nocturnes. She’s also a very romantic soul. I just keep thinking about how early I must get up in the morning.
Perhaps what I’ve been talking about, above, is sentimentality. Romanticism may be just a question of what we really love. The lonely light in the darkness is a painting of longing. It reminds me of Jay Gatsby staring at the green light at the end of Tom and Daisy’s dock. I’ve read it twice, and I still hate that book.
Young trees, by Carol L. Douglas
Earlier, I’d painted with Lisa Burger-Lentz and John Slivjakat Paul Smith’s VIC. They, like many other painters here at Adirondack Plein Air, are from the greater Philadelphia area. I started a large canvas of rocks, pines and spruces along the Barnum Brook trail. This is a very popular scene, but it’s not my favorite trail in the VIC. I’m usually drawn to the Boreal Life Trail, which runs through a bog. 
Vallkulla, 1908, by Anders Zorn (courtesy Wikiart)
I’ve been drawn to baby pines and spruces ever since seeing Anders Zorn: Sweden’s Master Painter in 2014. Zorn treats infant trees with the respect we usually give their towering elders. Tiny trees are everywhere in the forest. They are more than just punctuation marks. Without them, there would be no green at our eye level, because the canopy is far above our heads. Plus, baby trees are cute.
I edited reality to feature two eastern white pines in the foreground where two baby spruces were growing. It didn’t go well, so I stopped and did a small study of young trees. This helped enough that I could go back to my original painting. As in so many things, nature knows best. Spruces worked better there than the white pines, so I put them back where they belonged.
Unfinished, by Carol L. Douglas
As dusk fell, I drove to the local ice cream stand to do the small nocturne, above. This is a terrible photo of a half-finished painting, which possibly needs cropping with a radial arm saw. I hope to set up somewhere today where I have access to my car, so that I can finish it. Really, however, I’m more interested in the pines.
Posted on

In the absence of volcanoes, learn to paint

In the absence of a world-class volcanic event, we can expect a typical, stunning coast-of-Maine summer. What better way to spend it than painting outdoors?


There’s been only one time in American history when summer failed to show up. That was 1816, and it was caused by the eruption of Mt. Tambora in the Dutch East Indies.  It was an event that had spectacular cultural repercussions.
In the northern hemisphere, grain crops failed. There was widespread famine for man and beast alike. Horses starved. That led to the invention of the velocipide, predecessor of the modern bicycle.
Here in the United States, famine spurred the westward expansion. Starving farmers in New England left for western New York and the Midwest, hoping for better weather and richer soil. The cataclysm sparked a religious fervor that created the Burned-Over Districtof New York. This in turn became a flashpoint for women’s suffrage and abolition.
Mount Vesuvius In Eruption, 1817, J.M.W. Turner
Among those who went west was the family of Joseph Smith, who relocated to sleepy Palmyra, NY with rather spectacular results. Both Smith and his mother were prone to religious visions. Was that God or ergotism from eating spoiled grain?
Particulates in the air led to extravagant sunsets. These in turn influenced the Romanticism of painters like J.M.W. Turner and Caspar David Friedrich.
Incessant rainfall kept Mary Shelley, her lover Percy Bysshe Shelley and their host Lord Byron inside during their Swiss holiday. Bored, they had a contest to see who could write the scariest story. The result was Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus, and the birth of science fiction.
In the absence of a world-class volcanic event, we’ll have to settle for a typical, stunning coast-of-Maine summer: fresh breezes, blue skies and the soft susurration of the surf on our great, grey granite coast.
My next session of weekly classes starts on May 30. We meet on Tuesdays from 10 AM until 1 PM, until July 11 (skipping neatly over Independence Day). There are two slots open for this session, so if you are interested in taking one, please let me know. The fee is $200 for the six-week session.
Neubrandenburg, 1816-17, Caspar David Friedrich
The goal is intensive, one-on-one instruction that you can take back to your studio to apply during the rest of the week. We’ll cover issues like design, composition, and paint handling. We will learn how to mix and paint with clean color, and how to get paint on the canvas with a minimum of fuss.
And, yes, we’ll talk about drawing. If you ever want to paint anything more complicated than marshes, you must know how to draw. As I’ve demonstrated before, any person of normal intelligence can draw; it’s a technique, not a talent. And it’s easy to learn, no matter what you’ve been led to believe.
Unless the weather is inclement, we’ll paint at outdoor locations in the Rockport-Camden-Rockland area. Painting outdoors, from life, is the most challenging and instructive exercise in all of art. It teaches you about light, color and composition.
That, of course, limits the media you work in to oils, watercolor, acrylics, or pastel, since they’re what is suitable to outdoor painting.
After that, I hit the road in earnest. My summer schedule includes events in Nova Scotia, Maine and New York. (As I tell my family, if you want to know my schedule, you can find it here.) 
For more information about my classes, see here, or email me here.
Posted on

Redefining Kinkade

War on Kinkade 02, by Jeff Bennett.

The late Thomas Kinkade took romanticism to absurd levels. His glowing highlights look like barn fires and his pastel peachy highlights are as hyper-saturated as a 1970s album cover. One generally shrinks from discussing him, because he was what he was—a painter of kitsch. There’s certainly no point in beating him up about it now that he’s dead.

War on Kinkade 02, by Jeff Bennett

To me, the maddening thing about Kinkade is how every building he ever painted appeared to be on fire. A cottage might be in an idyllic forest dell at midday, and yet every window is ablaze with light.
War on Kinkade 01, by Jeff Bennett
Enter one Jeff Bennett, who has just redefined Kinkade’s world into a cosmic battlefield. Suddenly, the lighting, the colors… it all makes sense. (You can see the rest of Bennett’s pastiches here.)
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!
Posted on

Romanticizing the familiar

Niagara, 1857, by Frederic Edwin Church
Yesterday, I talked about the differences between what is actually present in a landscape and what an artist paints. This morning I thought I’d look at a subject I know intimately: Niagara Falls.
Distant View of Niagara Falls, 1830, Thomas Cole
Thomas Cole, the patriarch of the Hudson River School, was interested in celebrating the untamed American wilderness. In Distant View of Niagara Falls, he presses the forest up against the cataracts. Two noble savages observe the view; other figures are distantly present on the Canadian shore.
Although this picture was taken in 1858, it probably better represents what Niagara Falls looked like in 1830 than Cole’s painting does. It’s exactly contemporary with Church’s Niagara.
By 1830, Niagara Falls had been host to white settlement and exploration for almost two centuries. The cataracts themselves were surrounded by factories, thriving towns, and the hotels, shops and other businesses serving the tourist trade. A band of Tuscarora lived in a village on Goat Island (that bit between the cataracts), selling their handicrafts to tourists.
Niagara Falls, from the American Side, 1867, by Frederic Edwin Church. This view is so accurate to reality that it is no surprise to learn that he had a sepia photograph to use as reference.
In editing the real into the sublime, Cole made the forests and the sky his primary subject. He sets the viewer so far back from the Falls that the grandeur of the scene lies in its setting, not in the cataracts themselves.
Frederic Church’s most well-known canvas of Niagara takes an entirely different approach: he strips out the inconsequential, focusing on the rim of water. This corresponds so exactly to our psychological reaction that we locals think it’s triggering memory. In fact, a hundred thousand viewers flocked to see it in the first two weeks of its debut; most of them had probably never visited Niagara, but they all felt the roar of the Falls. From a strictly visual standpoint, however, it doesn’t reflect reality any more than Cole’s painting did, because Goat Island is much closer than he represented it to be. 
The view (approximately) which Church painted in 1857.
Both Cole and Church sought to eliminate man’s touch on the landscape; both succeeded. Niagara Falls has been painted so many times, by so many first-rate artists, and they almost all share that goal. Here is Bierstadt’s painting, and here is William Morris Hunt’s. 

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!