Drawing by Carol L. Douglas. In a perfect world, I’d do nothing but draw every day.
Every year my repeating New Year’s resolution is to unsubscribe myself from all the mailing lists I’ve been dumped on over the past year. This year, I aim to:
Reduce my use of plastic. Most plastic-79%-ends up in landfills or as litter. Revoltingly, we ship much of it overseas, and then complain that third-world countries dump that waste into the ocean. There are many uses for which plastic is unparalleled; for example, plastic wrap has revolutionized food storage. But there are places where we use tons of it for no good purpose. Despite the bottle return on plastic drinking bottles in many states, 80% of one-use plastic water bottles end up in landfills. And nobody can convince me that water stored in plastic for months is as healthy as the stuff that comes out of my tap.
Practice scales. I used to sing-a lot. My voice went to wrack and ruin after my first cancer, and old age and lack of practice haven’t helped. But a little work will go a long way towards mending a broken voice. Now, to find the time.
Drawing by Carol L. Douglas
What are your New Year resolutions, if any? Whatever they are, I wish you a blessed and happy new year.
Happy New Year, 6X8, oil on archival canvasboard, $435 framed.
As I look at this painting through the mists of time, I wonder when was the last time I stayed up until midnight on a New Year’s Eve. No matter what the text on the painting page says, it’s 35 years if it’s a day. Now, I’m frankly too old to party except with my grandchildren, whose bedtimes are not much later than mine.
Said grandchildren (and their parents) are here for New Year’s Eve. This weekend, my other children will arrive so we can celebrate Christmas and the New Year together.
The beads in this painting came from Mardi Gras in New Orleans, brought back by my friend Karolina. The hat and noisemaker were left in my studio by a student, then a teenager, now pushing middle age. And the purple velvet and feather boa? They are mine alone. As ratty as I look while painting, I do like bling on occasion.
My favorite part of this painting is the gold lettering on the hat. If I didn’t point out that it read “Happy New Year” would you notice?
This is the last weekend that you can take December discounts. They are:
10% off any painting, with the code THANKYOUPAINTING10.
$25 off any workshop except Sedona, with the code, EARLYBIRD
Believe it or not, Sedona and Austin are right around the corner!
Table with Tablecloth, 1978, Wendell Castle, courtesy Memorial Art Gallery
Work Hard. We all start out bad, and go as far as talent and dedication will take us. Start when and where you are, and practice; you’ll improve.
Don’t Steal. Don’t take credit for the work of others. Make your own magic.
Be Enthusiastic. Creativity is fun, it is also work. Enjoy it, but do it like it matters because it does!
Don’t Compare yourself to others. It’s fine to analyze the work of those you admire to help you improve your own. It’s how we learn. But be careful. Comparison can make you miserable.
Be Generous with praise and encouragement. Know the difference between critique and criticism. Be clear, concise, and firm with critique, and offer it only when asked. And leave the criticism to critics.
Value Perseverance over talent. Talent has limits and will let you down. Perseverance lets you punch above your weight. It will keep you going when you want to quit.
Be Confident, never arrogant. Confidence allows you to admit when someone else is right. Arrogance prevents this and will stunt your growth.
Reach Back. It gets harder to get a break every day. Veterans should mentor. (And remember, mentorship is not a dating app.)
Be Brave, but be humble. Even it out. You are neither as bad, nor as good, as you think.
Keep Practicing. There is no destination for artists. It is all a journey. Apply yourself, and you’ll keep growing forever.
-Source unknown
Shawl, textile design and construction by Jane Bartlett, courtesy of the artist.
Learn to love the process. Creating is often a long and tedious process. Learn to love each step.
In the middle of the process there will be stages that can seem dreadful or look hideous. You’re not done. It’s a process.
Put it up on the wall, place it on a stand, sit it where you can live with it for a few days. Keep walking by. The next step will come to you. One of my pieces sat for three years.
Some people can go to a class and create finished pieces that look done. I go to classes to learn techniques, so nothing looks done, just experimental. You are who you are, and you haven’t failed if your classwork isn’t a masterpiece.
Sometime in the history of art, oil painting got shoved to the top of the heap as the most valuable art type, followed, maybe, by certain types of sculpture. Look back in history and you’ll see that it wasn’t always the case. Artists created all kinds of work. Even Michelangelo (di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni) produced what is now called decorative art.
Take classes in techniques and disciplines that are out of your territory. You’d be surprised at how much it broadens your possibilities.
Learn from many teachers. Even if you take away just one thing from a class, it will be worth the price of admission.
Buy the best tools and materials that you can afford. Sure, you’ll start with basic materials, but as you progress, you’ll find that good quality will help you create your best work.
Women are the unsung heroes of the art world. It will make your teeth grind. Ignore the ignorance and work to demolish the myth. You know the drill.
Try not to pay attention to creating what you think will sell. Create without the constraints of whether it will look good over someone’s couch or whatever similar statement applies to your medium. Such thinking will be the death of your creativity.
Write some of your own rules and share them. Also, take the best and leave the rest. Not all rules work for everyone.
–Jane Bartlett, who also wrote this post for me. Thanks, Jane!
Jacket, textile design and construction by Jane Bartlett, courtesy of the artist.
Beth Carr drew a concolor fir, which has a softer branching pattern than many other evergreens.
My friends (and students; the line is blurry) Diane Fulkerson and Beth Carr drove up this week to spend Christmas with me. While they were en route, I texted them to ask if they would do this morning’s exercises as examples. “I knew there would be work involved,” Diane said. The last time she visited, I had her do an exercise for Monday Morning Art School on using Pilot FriXion pens with watercolor.
I drew a Fraser Fir. If I’d been thinking, I’d have drawn a balsam, which was my favorite tree in the days when we had real trees. (I’m allergic.)
If you look at Christmas tree drawings online, the majority have boughs facing down. That is not how most young evergreens grow. Their boughs point up until they reach maturity. Even then, the upper branches tend to arc upwards. Pine boughs droop when they’re snow-laden, so maybe that’s why people persist in drawing them that way.
Moreover, every species has a unique branching pattern, needle length and color.
Diane Fulkerson did a blue spruce. She’d started out wanting to paint a black spruce, but her photo from Schoodic was too backlighted to be useful.
This is an exercise in seeing. If you celebrate Christmas, look at your tree and draw or paint it. If you don’t have a tree, look online for some of the common species used for Christmas trees, including but not limited to balsam firs, Scotch pines, blue spruce and Douglas firs. (My own Christmas tree is so fabulously fake that I used an online picture.)
Diane, Beth and I decided to use colored pencil so that we could work in the dining room next to the wood stove. None of us are expert in this medium, but we still had a great time. Pam wisely used watercolor.
Pam Otis painted a Christmas tree that was brought to the beach by a family. “They had a nice picnic and a campfire and left the tree behind for others to enjoy.”
I don’t really expect you to do much work today, but this will give you something to do if your uncles get into an argument about politics, your cousin gets stuck too deeply in the eggnog or your partner falls asleep after eating too much pie.
Above all, have a wonderful and blessed Christmas Day and Christmastide, and may God bless all of you.
Winter lambing, oil on linen, 30X40, $5072 framed, includes shipping and handling in continental US.
My home town of Buffalo, NY is the most famous lake-effect snow city in North America, but it’s hardly unique. Erie (PA), Rochester, Syracuse, and the small city of Oswego regularly get buried in snow. The Great Lakes are very deep, so they don’t freeze solid in winter. Arctic air sweeps across them, picking up moisture that then drops in deep blankets onshore. I miss those blizzards very much.
There are other, smaller snow plumes that are not as well known. One of these is in Orleans County, New York. I spent two decades driving weekly from my mom’s house in Niagara County to my house in Rochester. That took me straight through the Orleans snow belt.
Wind sculpted snow in Orleans County, NY.
As my children can recite by heart, you don’t drive in snow country without a candle and matches, bottled water, a chocolate bar, car blanket and collapsible shovel. People have frozen to death in their cars in Buffalo.
The drifts that formed the basis of ‘Winter Lambing’.
It was on a bitter winter afternoon that I found myself flagged down by an Orleans County Sheriff’s Deputy. She directed me around an accident and warned me that the road ahead was barely passable. The wind was whistling along the long, flat fields of the Niagara-Orleans lake plains. There, wind can pick up already-fallen snow, reducing visibility, and driving it into drifts as hard as cement. When these form across a road, your steering wheel can be wrested right from your hands. Road salt doesn’t work in extreme cold, which is perilous in icy conditions.
Bad parking job.
I’m an old hand at winter driving, but I slowed right down. At one point, I stopped entirely, which is when I saw the drifts above. At the time, I was thinking through a solo show at Davison Gallery at Roberts Wesleyan College called God + Man: Paintings by Carol L. Douglas, about which I wrote last week.
James Herriot wrote about the bone-chilling work of the Yorkshire veterinarian, particularly the grueling task of lambing during blizzards on the high Dales. Not only were shepherd and veterinarian at risk, but newborn lambs were in danger of freezing or predation.
I wanted to paint that feeling of intense cold at high elevations. At first glance, viewers see these shapes as mountains; it’s only when I tell them the backstory that they realize they were a series of drifts just a few feet tall. Context is everything when it comes to reading a painting, and the artist has lots of latitude in repurposing reference pictures.
It might look soft, but that stuff is hard as cement.
God + Man was about the relationship of God and man in the natural world. This painting was based on Isaiah 1:18, which says: “Come now, and let us reason together,” Says the Lord, “Though your sins are like scarlet, They shall be as white as snow; Though they are red like crimson, They shall be as wool.”
Tin Foil Hat, 6X8, oil on archival canvasboard, $435 includes shipping in continental US.
“Art is eternal,” read yet another meme on Facebook. Not surprisingly, artists like to repeat this. But art is no more eternal than any other handiwork of man.
Pinkie, pastel, ~6X8, $435 includes shipping and handling in continental US.
Whole cities have been sacked, like Athens, Constantinople, or Kaifeng. Their art was destroyed with them. Insurgency and war destroy art, as in the French Revolution. Conquerors loot and lose it; Napoleon and the Nazis are just two examples.
This fall we had a massive fire in Port Clyde, ME. It destroyed several historic buildings and paintings by Jamie Wyeth and Kevin Beers. They were gone with sudden finality, and we were shocked and grieved.
There are spasms of iconoclastic fury that convulse humankind. The Beeldenstorm of the 16th century is the most well-known. The Reformation wanted to purge Northern Europe of Catholic ideology. What better way to attack it than through art? In England, 90% of religious art was destroyed. The percentages were probably similar in Germany and the Low Countries.
The Late Bus, oil on archival canvasboard, 6X8, $435.00 framed, includes shipping and handling in continental US.
Occasionally, great works are saved from iconoclasm by very brave people. The Van Eycks‘ Ghent Altarpiece, is an outstanding example of Early Netherlandish painting. It was already famous in August of 1556 when the Beeldenstorm hit Ghent. The first attack on the Cathedral was repelled by guards. On the second try, the rioters used a tree trunk to batter through the doors. But by then the panels and the guards had been hidden on a narrow spiral staircase within the tower. They were eventually moved to a new hiding spot in the town hall, but the original frame, itself a work of art, was destroyed.
To put that in context, imagine trying to stop the Taliban as they blew up the Buddhas of Bamiyam.
Art isn’t even above fickle fashion. It’s easy to date paintings because every era has its tropes. Right now, we’re in a long period where color is ascendent over detail. To the next generation, that will look as old-fashioned as leg o’ mutton sleeves look to us.
Hiking, 6X8, oil on archival canvasboard, $435 includes shipping in continental US.
I told my daughter that when I die, AI should be able to reproduce me well enough to go on teaching my classes without me. “I won’t do that,” she said. “Your paintings will go up in value when you’re dead.” That is probably, true, but I’m not painting to impress people after I’m gone. Nor should you.
Our job as artists is to speak to the living. The Beeldenstorm happened because Protestants knew how powerful art is. The Nazis destroyed ‘degenerate’ art for the same reason. That’s what motivated the Taliban.
Of course, art can reach across the centuries to speak to us. Consider paleolithic cave art and its makers. We know almost nothing of their culture: we have no dishes, spears, firepits, foods, dwellings or traces of language. All we have is art: figurines, bone carvings, a few decorated tools and lots of cave paintings from all over the world. These speak to us powerfully but wordlessly. I don’t care if my own painting lasts 500 years, let alone 35,000 years, but I’m sure glad their art has.
Until the first of the year, you can use the discount code THANKYOUPAINTING10 to get 10% off these or any other painting on my website. Shipping and handling are always included within the continental US, but I’m afraid I’ll no longer be able to get them to you by Christmas.
Susan Lewis Baines is an artist, gallerist, and the wrangler of a gorgeous and goofy half-grown puppy-in short, an all-around good egg. I had an idea for a Christmas exercise, but when I saw what Sue made, I asked if I could share it instead. It’s far more exciting.
Sue’s project is called a puzzle purse, and it is a craft with a long and storied pedigree. Tato (flat paper envelopes or boxes) date from Japan’s Heian era (782-1185 AD). They were used as portable storage for small items like buttons, pins and needles, or stamps.
Valentine Puzzle Purse, Anonymous artist, British or American, 1826, courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art
How they got to Europe, I don’t know, but by the early 18th century, puzzle purses were being used to exchange romantic messages in both England and America. Meanwhile, immigrants brought a distinctive calligraphy from Germany called fraktur. They applied this to puzzle purses to create highly complex love letters (liebesbrief) and envelopes.
Because I’ve never made a puzzle purse, I’m sending you to the Origami Resource Center for detailed instructions.
Love Token in Fraktur calligraphy, c. 1800, possibly made in Harrisburg, PA, courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art
A variation
A very elaborate cootie catcher, 2006, made and photographed by Paul Blais.
If you were a kid within the last century, you’re familiar with a paper fortune teller, or ‘cootie catcher,’ as it’s called in some parts of the US. This simple piece of folded paper also has deep roots; while it was first described in an 1876 German book for children, it resembles much older fortune-telling frameworks. Although it looks like Japanese origami, it’s European in origin.
In my childhood, adults had no part in making cootie catchers. Today you can find instructions for them all over the internet. Predictably, these adult-suggested fortunes are dull, like “signs point to yes,” or “doubtful.” I remember them as being far goofier, like “You’ve got cooties!”
Why not marry Sue’s idea for a holiday puzzle purse with the cootie catcher? Just replace the colors, numbers and fortunes with similar little illustrations to Sue’s. For anyone who ever used one, it would be a charming surprise, a twist on a happy childhood memory.
In case you’ve forgotten, this is how to make a cootie catcher. Courtesy Michael Philip.
What you need
Sue did her puzzle purse in colored pencil, but you could also use watercolor. Use any foldable, reasonably lightweight hot-press paper (cold press will be more difficult to fold). If you have a bamboo or bone folding tool, it would be a nice refinement, but it’s not necessary.
Enclose an ornament hook and your puzzle purse or cootie catcher will become a treasured ornament.
Aren’t you glad I didn’t go with Plan A, which was to have you draw the packages under your Christmas tree? Now, get to work. I can’t wait to see what you come up with!
All Flesh is as Grass, oil on linen, 30X40, $5072 framed, includes shipping and handling in continental US.
Of all the paintings I have hanging in my home, the one that gets the most comments is All Flesh is as Grass, above. It was part of a solo show called God + Man: Paintings by Carol L. Douglas at the Davison Gallery at Roberts Wesleyan College, and reprised at Aviva Gallery in Rochester, NY.
Harry Rogachefsky was an elderly man who lived across the street from us. He had a lovely apple tree curling over his driveway. He told us we were welcome to all the apples we wanted. They were not sprayed and thus organic, and they made great pies.
Mr. Rogachefsky’s house in happier times (2007) with his apple tree in flower.
The house was built in 1948, and the tree was planted around the same time. I thought of painting it many times, as I’m fascinated by the twisting branches of old apple trees. Alas, I never did it.
Mr. Rogachefsky eventually died at the venerable age of 95. His house sat vacant until Christmas, 2014, when a flurry of contractors descended. It had been purchased by house flippers. They yanked the mature foundation plantings and cut down that beautiful old tree.
I found its remains while walking with my dear friend Mary. Its trunk was shattered and its branches sawn into logs. Its fruit was crushed and frozen.
What Mary and I saw as we rounded the corner.
There must be a standard landscaping plan for house flippers. When they were done with Mr. Rogachefsky’s house, five little popsicle shrubs marched along the sidewalk. Luckily, I didn’t live there much longer. Although I’m now hundreds of miles away, when pie season starts, I think fondly of Mr. Rogachefsky and his apple tree.
All flesh is like grass and all its glory like the flower of grass. The grass withers, and the flower falls, but the word of the Lord remains forever. (1 Peter 1:24-25)
We know that intellectually, but it’s still a shock when the chainsaw comes out.
No more pies, ever, from this tree.
A little while before the new owners moved in, I saw a boy knocking down icicles from the porch.
My next-door neighbor Aviva (may her memory be a blessing) had been seriously injured by a falling icicle a few years earlier. Icicles can weigh up to a thousand pounds and have a perilous pointy end. They’re especially lethal when they drop from any great height.
“Hey, kid, stop that!” I yelled from my stoop. “It’s dangerous!”
“Don’t worry!” he called back, and pulled off his hood to show me he was wearing a helmet underneath. It was Mary’s son Xoan, who was always prepared for any eventuality.
One knows it’s inevitable, but it’s still painful to see.
In the painting, I changed the setting to be an orchard of young trees; a chainsaw is in their unthinkably-distant future. The light is filtered and indirect; that’s the usual state of affairs along Lake Ontario in winter. There are warm lights and cool shadows, but they’re not as brilliant as in Maine. All Flesh is as Grass is a big painting, 36X48, but its delicate color structure means it’s not overwhelming. It’s in my own diminutive living room (about 14X12 feet) and looks lovely.
I recently pointed out to Naomi Aho that most painters’ paintings drop in price/square inch as they get larger. That makes a large painting like this a great deal, since it has the presence to compel as much or more than several smaller ones. Until the first of the year, you can use the discount code THANKYOUPAINTING10 to get 10% off it or any other painting on my website. And shipping and handling are always included within the continental US.
Spring Greens, 8X10, oil on archival canvasboard, $652 framed includes shipping and handling in continental US.
Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays me from the swift completion of my hike up Beech Hill (to paraphrase Herodotus and the US Postal Service). Here in Maine, we dropped into the teens last week. However, the worst hiking was through bucketing rain on Monday. I arrived home soaked to the bone and shivering uncontrollably. My student and friend Amy Sirianni stopped by; I met her at my door in a flannel nightgown and robe because I couldn’t get warm.
What’s a poor New Englander to do when both days and nights turn bitter? My mother used to book a flight to Florida for March or April; it gave her something to look forward to. She didn’t want to come home until winter’s back was broken.
Coincidentally, I’ve ended up doing something similar. At the end of March, I’ll again be teaching in Sedona, AZ and Austin, Texas. Instead of shivering in sleet storms, I’ll be in shirtsleeves under clear blue skies. Alleluia.
Most of my workshops are on the east coast, which is my home turf. These are the only two workshops I’m teaching in the west (although I dream of reviving Pecos). Western painting is different from New England in atmosphere, color, and vista. I’m grateful for the opportunity to work in both.
Sedona is a small city of 10,000 people located within the Coconino National Forest. The town is encircled by red sandstone massifs in various stages of erosion. They glow brilliant orange and red in the rising or setting sun.
Peace, 8X16, $903 framed includes shipping and handling in continental US.
Much of what we paint there are long vistas and those incredible red rocks set against junipers, piñons, and prickly pear cactus. We often paint from isolated trailheads, from which we can sometimes watch vast cumulus clouds form over the buttes and mesas and just as quickly blow away.
Avenue B. Market and Deli at night. We had a riot painting nocturnes here.
Austin, on the other hand, is the tenth most populous city in the United States (and grown out of all recognition from the first time I saw it). Our painting sites are urban, including the delightful Avenue B. Grocery and Market, where we painted nocturnes and ate fabulous sandwiches last year. Then there’s McKinney Falls State Park with its huge cypresses and turquoise spill basin. That’s where we painted bluebonnets in their thousands. On that magical day, hundreds of birds flew overhead in long, winding skeins.
“Canada geese?” I asked, confused.
“Pelicans,” someone answered.
I find gift-giving challenging, especially for those people on my list who don’t want or need more stuff. I could look at all the catalogs in the world and still not find the right thing for that person who has everything.
Pensive 8X10, oil on archival canvasboard, $522 includes shipping and handling in continental US.
For him or her, experiences are a better bet. If you’re looking for a truly unique gift this holiday season that feels extra thoughtful, try a workshop. (And if you want a workshop for Christmas, print this out and leave it someplace subtle, like under your spouse’s coffee-cup. He or she can use the code EARLYBIRD to get $25 off any workshop except Sedona, which is already a discounted price).
Also, if you’re thinking of buying a painting as a Christmas gift (another great idea for the person who no longer needs stuff), let me know soon. I’m my own shipping and handling department and I want to be sure your painting is delivered by Christmas. Until the first of the year, you can use the discount code THANKYOUPAINTING10 to get 10% off any painting on my website.
The illustrations in this post were from Monday Morning Art School: Drawing a Globe, and done by Sandy Quang and me on a stormy night before Christmas. The original post is here.
Ten years ago I wrote about teaching Amy Vail to draw. She’d made the cardinal error of telling me she “lacked the gene to draw.” Since I know there’s no such gene, I challenged her to let me teach her, and she made great strides in just one week. Drawing is not a magic trick; it’s not a talent. It’s a technical skill no different from reading, writing or arithmetic.
Drawing is first and foremost a technical skill.
I know people who paint by tracing photos or photo-montages, but that prevents the non-linear part of the mind from getting involved. Art has always been about deeper things: reflection, aesthetics, ideas, feelings, spirituality and other forms of higher-order thinking. It makes no sense to shut out the part of your mind that processes these.
I’m writing syllabuses for my January-February classes (and I’m sorry, but they’re both sold out). This is the first time I’ve taught drawing outside the context of painting. What is important and how do I teach it?
Most complex shapes are riffs on simpler shapes.
Observation Skills
The ability to closely observe and analyze a subject develops hand-in-hand with the physical act of drawing. One can photograph a scene without paying too much attention. Drawing and painting from life is how skilled realist painters sort out what matters. The best way to really see something is to draw or paint it.
Details are almost the least-important part, although it’s amazing how much one glosses over them until one actually sits down to draw. What really matters is proportion and the relationship between elements. That comes down to distance and angles. That is why painters can get away with leaving out detail if they get the proportions and relationships right. Anyone interested in abstracting the landscape had better have top-notch drawing skills.
Even a line drawing conveys volume, but shading is that much more expressive.
Basic Shapes and Forms
Almost every complex shape is a combination of basic shapes like cones, boxes, spheres and columns. For example, the spinet piano next to me is fundamentally a tall box with another boxlike structure (the keyboard) attached to the front and supported by two columnar legs. Get the size relationships of those big shapes right, and the fluting and scrolls are almost extraneous.
In their 2D form that means circles, squares, triangles, and ellipses. That doesn’t mean, however, that you get to ignore dimensionality, which leads us to…
Perspective
Everyone should learn how 1-, 2-, and 3-point perspectives work, and then never use them again. They’re a theoretical construct that shows you how to avoid errors, but they’re not ‘true’. The vanishing points in the real world are infinitely distant, and that’s hard to achieve on paper. However, understanding perspective will save you from lots of mistakes.
The more you draw, the more fluid your painting will be.
Volume and shading
Yes, one can imply volume with line drawing alone, but shifts in value tell a broader story. They will also form the basis of painting composition.
Expressive mark-making
This is where drawing suddenly gets fun. Expressive mark-making takes time to develop, but experimenting with different line weights and styles is the first step in that exploration.
Work up from simple objects and nothing will be too difficult for you. (Drawing by me.)
So how do you start?
Drawing is the cheapest and most liberating of all media. All you need is a sketchbook (this is the one I use, and I go through them like candy), a mechanical pencil, and some kind of straight-edge.
Then start drawing every day. It’s that simple. This is the text I recommend to those who like learning from books, but you can also find a lot of free instruction on this blog.
