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Monday Morning Art School: get the most from a painting workshop

Rim Light, 16X20, 16X20, oil on archival canvasboard, $1623 includes shipping in continental United States.

The hardest thing for a teacher is the student who says, “yes, but…” to everything one tells them. I should know; I tend to be one of those myself. I know what it means to stubbornly protect what I already know, to rely on my own skills instead of opening my mind to new concepts. (Note to Cornelia Foss: I really was listening; I wish I’d listened better.)

I’m teaching in Sedona this week and Austin next week, so preparation is on my mind.

The Rocks Remain, 16X20, oil on archival canvasboard, $1623 includes shipping in continental United States.

Come prepared

Study the supply list, but don’t just run right out and buy everything on it. Every teacher has a reason for asking for specific materials. In my case, it’s that I teach a system of paired primaries. You can’t understand color theory without the right paints. Another teacher might have beautiful mark-making. If you don’t buy the brushes he suggests, how are you going to understand his technique?

A tube of cadmium green that I once bought for a workshop and never opened still rankles. I never want to do that to my students. When you study with me, I want you to read my supply lists. If something confuses you, or you think you already have a similar item, email and ask.

(If you find yourself buying something for one of my classes or workshops and not using it, would you let me know? It means I’m missing something.)

Bring the right clothes. It’s hovering in the 50s in Sedona this week, but Austin will be in the 70s. I send my students a packing list for clothes and personal belongings. But modify it for the weather you’re expecting. Don’t ignore the insect repellant and sunscreen.

The Surf is Cranking Up, 8×16, $903 includes shipping in continental United States.

Know what you’re getting into.

“How can you stand this? It’s all so green!” an urban painter once said to me after a week in the Adirondacks.

There are no Starbucks in Acadia National Park or on the clear, still waters of Penobscot Bay. If you’re dependent on your latte macchiato, you may be uncomfortable at first. But the beauty of America’s wild places more than makes up for it. (And somehow, there’s always coffee, even where there’s no cell phone reception.)

Take notes

There’s a sketchbook on my supply list; plan on writing as much as you draw. If you write down key points, you’ll remember them far better than if you just read my handouts.

Listen for new ideas and ask questions. If I can’t stop and answer them mid-stream, save them for after the demo. Participate in discussions and know that your voice is valued; I’ve learned more from my students than from anyone else.

Seafoam, 9X12, oil on archival canvasboard, $869 framed, shipping included in continental United States.

Be prepared to get down and dirty.

I’m not talking about the outdoors here, I’m talking about change and growth. I am highly competitive myself, so it’s difficult for me to feel like I’m struggling. However, it’s in challenge that we make progress. Use your teacher’s method while you’re at the workshop, even if you feel like you’ve stepped back ten years in your development. That’s a temporary problem.

You can disregard what you learn when you go home, or incorporate only small pieces into your technique, but you signed up for the workshop to grow and change. You can’t do that if you cling to your own technique.

Connect with your classmates

There’s power in those relationships. Exchange email addresses. Keep in contact. Follow them on Instagram or Twitter. You’ll learn as much from each other as you will from me.

Reserve your spot now for a workshop in 2025:

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Investing in art

Early Spring on Beech Hill, oil on canvasboard, Carol L. Douglas, 12X16, $1449 framed includes shipping in continental US.

In June of 1975, my husband paid $285 for a Fender Precision Bass. He spent the whole of his high school graduation money on it. For a 16-year-old about to start his first summer job and then go off to college, that was a very big deal.

“If I had invested that money…” he mused recently.

That’s a difficult question to answer. Had he put it in an S&P 500 index fund and reinvested all the dividends and not had to pay fees, he’d have about $60,000 right now. Of course, that is a theoretical ideal; in practice, it would have been impossible. There weren’t index funds available in June, 1975. Most working people had pensions, and the 401K hadn’t even been invented yet. In 1980, the first year the SEC asked the question, only 6% of American households had mutual funds. Our parents kept their savings in banks.

In a savings account, that $285 would have earned… pretty much nothing. Assuming it had survived the depredations of three subsequent college degrees and four children, today that $285 would be worth $1,599.62. Even in its heavily-used condition, the bass is worth much more than that.

That’s disregarding the money he’s made with it. Although he now plays in church, at times he supported us with that guitar. But that really misses the point.

Sea Fog over Castine, Carol L. Douglas, 9X12, $869 framed includes shipping in continental US.

Making art is transformative

“You wouldn’t be the person you are today,” I told him. He’s played that instrument for 48 years-sometimes in intense bursts of creativity, at other times in stolen moments in an otherwise busy life. But it’s central to the way his mind works.

Back in 1975, I didn’t have $285. If I had I’d have banked it. I don’t think frugality is a bad trait, but in this instance, I’d have been dead wrong. There are purchases that are self-indulgent, and other purchases-investments, really-that pay off many times over.

The Pine Tree State, 6X8, oil on canvasboard, $435 framed and including shipping in continental US.

How does this apply to the visual arts?

First, there’s the question of materials. My student Diane wants to try pastels. She could buy a cheap kit at a department store for under $30, but it’s a waste of money. She’d walk away frustrated and not understanding the first thing about the seductive immediacy of pastels. If she wants to try them, she needs the proper materials.

I gave her a list: Unison pastels in a starter kit and a landscape kit, paper, and hard pastels. Even at that minimum level, that’s more than a hundred bucks. That hurt to tell her. But it’s an investment in learning and Diane is happy.

Blueberry barrens, Clary Hill, oil on canvas, 24X36, $3985 framed, includes shipping in continental US.

Then there’s the question of hanging art on your walls. I sometimes look at the prices of the so-called ‘art’ at my local Home Goods and wince. It’s like those cheap pastel kits-a simulacrum of the real thing. In a few years, it will be added to the local landfill.

Art, if it’s chosen well, is not just something to look at. It’s an investment that appreciates over time. That’s particularly true of the work of women artists on the secondary market, which is currently appreciating faster than their male peers’. And unlike my Vanguard account (at the moment) the art on our walls brings me consistent, great joy.

Reserve your spot now for a workshop in 2025:

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Ecotourism and art

Painting aboard schooner American Eagle.

The track up Beech Hill is my daily morning routine. Occasionally I run across C-, who’s a co-owner of an elegant windjammer plying Penobscot Bay.

As you know, I teach two watercolor workshops each year aboard the schooner American Eagle. These workshops combine two things I love: sailing and painting. I get to do them without the responsibility of owning a boat, and my students get to do them without the responsibility of carrying their gear. (I supply it.)

I’m always thinking about ways to get more people excited about the combination of painting and sailing, because I can’t imagine anything better. Windjammers tend to attract older people, and that’s great, except that I don’t really understand why younger people don’t love them too.

“I had an idea that windjamming is the natural extension of eco-tourism,” I told C- the other day. “But I can’t figure out a way that you could stack 18 kayaks on your deck. They wouldn’t fit.”

“We don’t have to,” she pointed out. “The boats themselves are the original form of ecotourism.”

That’s my girl! American Eagle modeled for this painting, called Breaking Storm, 30X48, oil on linen, $5,579.00 including shipping in continental US.

What is ecotourism?

Ecotourism is defined as “responsible travel to natural areas that conserves the environment, sustains the well-being of the local people, and involves interpretation and education.”*

Schooners rely on wind power to glide silently through the sea; hence their moniker of ‘windjammers.’ We pass ledge and small islands where sea birds and eagles nest. I’ve seen sea otters, dolphins, and, memorably, a whale breaching off Rockland harbor last fall.

Because American Eagle carries several smaller vessels, including a seine boat, we can row to uninhabited islands, which we visit on a carry-in, carry-out basis. And those interested in studying quaint, endangered local cultures need look no farther than the lobstermen of coastal Maine.

Lobster pound, 14X18, oil on canvas, $1,594.00 framed, includes shipping in the continental US. G**gle recently disapproved this image because it violates their policy. “Local legal requirements and safety standards (live animals).”

So why hasn’t the windjammer industry tapped into the $200 billion annual ecotourism market? I suspect it is because we believe that to see something exotic, you must go overseas. Having traveled extensively, I know this is nonsense. New Englanders and Nevadans may-nominally-share the same language, but we live in very different physical, economic and cultural communities. Ours is a vast country, twice as large as the EU. It has amazing diversity, including more than 95,000 miles of coastline.

Maine’s little piece of that includes 17 million acres of forestland and 3,500 miles of rocky coast. There are more than 3000 sea islands (and who knows how many on inland lakes). Only about 200 have more than four structures, meaning that the whole coastline is covered with forestland, bluffs, cliffs, and coves-and all the wildlife that goes with that.

As a painter, I find that irresistible, and I’m not alone. That’s why the Maine coast is infested with artists and galleries.

The Wave, 9X12, oil on archival canvasboard, $869 includes shipping in continental US. You can tell it was painted from a boat, rather than from shore, because the wave isn’t horizontal.

Where happiness lies

“A wandering mind is an unhappy mind,” wrote Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert. We’re happiest when we’re living in the moment, totally focused on what we’re doing. A wandering person, on the other hand, tends to be a sublimely happy soul. New experiences sharpen our focus in a way that material goods can’t. Soon after they’re purchased, our new car, phone or dress fade into the background; in fact, they’re only notable if there is a story to their acquisition.

Psychologists tells us that experiences bring people more enduring happiness than do possessions. Which, I suppose, is why I love the paintings I’ve done from the deck of American Eagle so much. They are treasured memories of happy days.

Reserve your spot now for a workshop in 2025:

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Monday Morning Art School: painting plein air fast

My top five tips to finish a plein air painting in three hours.

The Rocks Remain, 16X20, oil on archival canvasboard, $1623 unframed includes shipping.

Keep your equipment organized

Eric Jacobsen improved my life when he suggested I buy a good, dedicated backpack instead of using cheap gear bags. I bought this Kelty Redwing; you must find the pack that’s sized for you.

When not in use, that pack hangs on the back of my studio easel. With a few exceptions, my plein air kit stays in it. My tubed paints are in a tough pencil pouch (more durable than a ziplock bag), and my small tools are in a zippered makeup bag. The tripod for my easel stays put. The pochade box itself is usually in my freezer in a 35-liter waterproof stuff-sack. My brush cleaning tank is attached to the pack with a carabiner and there’s always a spare canvas ready for painting.

When I get back after a day of painting, I spend a few minutes pulling it back together. Everything goes in its designated place so I can find it when I need it.

I use the same brushes for studio and field work, so they live in a brush case next to my easel when I’m not carrying them outdoors. I clean them when I come in.

When I decide to go out, I can be out the door in a matter of minutes.

Jimmy the donkey admiring my palette.

Lay out your palette in advance

Cleaning all the paint off your palette between sessions wastes time and money. Only clean the mixing area of your palette, and leave your unused paint for the next session. Or, do as I do and never clean your palette at all. I just knock off any dried paint as it annoys me.

Every palette needs attention at some point (even mine). It’s easiest to reset the colors when you finish for the afternoon, but if that doesn’t work for you, do a reset before you walk out the door the next morning.

Your palette doesn’t need to be cleaned off before you fly. When I arrive in Sedona on Monday, I can just flip open my pochade box and I’m ready to go.

A painting student from my Adirondack workshop, with her drawing at hand. (The subject was perspective.)

A sketch in time saves nine

It’s faster and easier to work out your composition with a pencil than to do it with a brush. It’s a lot easier to erase pencil errors than to scrape out bad brushwork-or worse, start again in watercolor. The ten or twenty minutes you spend with a pencil on this first step will save you hours of bad painting later.

Your sketch should lay out your basic composition. The human eye sees value first, so if that doesn’t work in your composition, the painting will fail. “I substitute off-value color and chroma for accurate value. Then, except for a couple spots of high-chroma yellow, I wonder why my paintings are flat,” a student once told me. He took that observation and ran with it, painting only in greyscale for months.

You don’t have to go that crazy, but with every painting, work out the darks to lights in your sketchbook first. Alla prima painting requires great skill in color mixing, because the goal is to nail it on the first strike. You can be off on the hue, but when you don’t have the value right, you start to paint and overpaint passages. That’s flailing, and it kills a painting.

I do not know what Eric Jacobsen or Björn Runquist were up to, but my sketchbook is right underneath my easel, as I was faithfully copying my original idea.

Stick to your value sketch

The worst error of plein air painting is chasing the light. It’s seductive. The shadows lengthen and grow heavier, and you want to capture every second of that transition. You can’t.

If you start with a good value sketch and stick with it, you’ll have a strong painting. That sketch on paper (instead of just on your canvas) gives you reference for when the light inevitably changes.

Make sure you aren’t intimidated by your neighbors, who just dive in without sketching and appear to be going much faster than you. The goal isn’t to finish first, but to paint your best.

Cypresses and shadows, 11X14, oil on archival canvasboard, $869 unframed.

Don’t fuss with the ending

A good alla prima painting has two or possibly three layers of paint:

  • Grisaille or underpainting.
  • Midlayer, where the tonal relationships are worked out.
  • Finish layer of judiciously-selected detail.

Many exciting paintings are chewed down at the end, when painters perseverate over brushwork and/or details. If you find yourself noodling, stop.

This is not to say that you can’t ever paint in detail. But the ending should be about strengthening composition, not adding last-minute tchotchkes.

I’m off this weekend to teach back-to-back workshops in Sedona and Austin. There’s still a seat or two left in each (I think), and airfare has dropped considerably since last year.

My first online painting class is up and running, here. It’s called The Perfect Palette and is about the very first step in painting-the paints you should buy.

Reserve your spot now for a workshop in 2025:

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Welcome to the Perfect Palette

Stone Wall, Salt Marshes, 14×18, $1594 framed.

The Perfect Palette online course is $35.00 and you can access it here.

Today marks the launch of my first online painting class: The Perfect Palette. It’s the first in a series of seven, and I think it marks a new way of learning about painting.

I teach painting through a set of discrete steps that anyone can master. That gets the ‘how’ out of the way and makes room for the ‘why.’ In theory, once a student has my painting protocol sheet in his or her hand, I’m not necessary.

I wish it were that simple. Each step is the distillation of a great deal of theory and practice. It takes time to absorb new concepts. My idea with these online training classes is to expand that protocol sheet, to create a system in which people can return to complex ideas over and over until they really have them down. I’m going to make seven of them over the coming year, taking you through each step of oil painting.

Seafoam, 9X12, oil on archival canvasboard, $869 framed.

More better learning

A few years ago, I made some simple calculations. If I taught at my current rate (which is a heavy load for a working artist), I would have a maximum of three hundred open student-seats a year. That sounds great, until you consider that it takes a few years to make a painter. That means most of those slots are taken by repeat students-so much so that I’m not advertising my weekly classes right now. I’m only able to influence a few dozen painters each year, and there’s material I never get to.

Consider drawing. It’s fundamental, but I can’t add a drawing class to my schedule. I can just recommend a good book and hope people open it.

I have a much wider influence through this blog, which has thousands of regular readers. Mine it carefully (there’s a search box to the right), and you’ll learn everything you need to know. However, because of the way blogs are organized, that’s difficult. The content may be evergreen, but the indexing stinks.

I set out to write a ‘how to paint’ book in 2021. It didn’t go well. I’m too restless to sit still that long. Besides, a little voice kept asking, is that how people learn today?

Persistent clouds along the Upper Wash, 11X14, oil on archival canvasboard, $869 unframed.

Why did I start with the palette?

If you’re new to oil painting, the prospect of buying all the necessary paints can be overwhelming. If you’ve been painting for a while, you might find yourself with a expensive drawer full of paints that you never use-or worse, that make dull mixtures. That’s where this class comes in – you’ll learn how to set up the perfect palette with just the paints you need to create the widest range of beautiful colors.

In this class, we explore basic color theory and introduce you to the world of mixing oil paints. You’ll learn how to choose the right pigments for your palette and how to mix them effectively. We’ll also delve into the history of pigment and show you how to make informed decisions when buying paints, decisions that will save you time and money.

Early Spring on Beech Hill, oil on canvasboard, Carol L. Douglas, 12X16, $1449 framed

I couldn’t do it myself

Some of you know my daughter Laura Boucher. She’s ‘wicked smahht,’ as they say here in Maine. As sometimes happens in the software start-up world, she was footloose and fancy-free at the same time as I was realizing my limits.

I have never taken an online workplace training class, but they’re common enough in business. She took that model and applied it to painting. This class is the result, and today we launch the first of our new series.

I hope you enjoy it. Meanwhile, we’re well into the weeds with the second video. I’m learning some new skills, like how to run a video camera and how to light a shot.

These videos will follow a logical progression from getting started to finishing up a painting. Once you own the course, you can go back to sections one at a time to refresh your knowledge.

Reserve your spot now for a workshop in 2025:

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What is talent?

In Control (Grace and her Unicorn), oil on canvas 24X30, $3,478 includes shipping in continental US.

In response to Monday’s blog post about drawing, Byron Carr mused, “talent is when desire and determination collide.” I liked that comment and reposted it on my Facebook wall. That drew out the predictable argument that talent is innate. This was my second tangle with the idea and it was only Tuesday.

Byron Carr should know something about talent, as he has it in spades. I think I can legitimately claim to know something about teaching art. In fact, I seldom hear professional artists banging on about talent. We talk mostly about hard work.

There is a strong streak in the human psyche that likes to believe that your destiny is written before your birth. The Greeks had the Moirai, spinning their fates; the Romans had the Parcae; the Norse had the Norns. In Christianity, that comes down to us as predestination. That’s a riff on the philosophical idea of determinism, where everything that happens has already been ordained by prior events.

Scratch away our religious underpinnings, as we’re doing today, and suddenly everything is genetic: you’re a foul-mouthed, lazy b@#$d because it’s in your genes.

Best Buds, oil on canvasboard, 12X16, oil on canvasboard, $1449 framed includes shipping in continental US.

It’s all so tiresome. Even if you don’t believe in free will (as I emphatically do), determinism doesn’t leave room for the impoverished, uneducated child to grow up to be Charles Dickens, or the abused, neglected child to grow up to be Eminem.

Why do people say this stuff?

The ‘innate talent’ argument has three endpoints, none of which are particularly nice. The first is exclusionary. You can’t be an artist because your stars didn’t align right. The second is a justification for not doing something in the first place: “I’d love to, but I’m not talented.” The third denigrates the value of the work, because it denies the effort and time that went into it.

“It’s astonishing how someone who knows another person well, and believes that person is ‘talented,’ must have been asleep while that person was putting in their 10,000 hours toward mastery,” Bobbi Heath mused.

“Ravening Wolves,” oil on canvas, 24X30, $3,478.00 framed, includes shipping in continental US.

In my own case, those 10,000 hours go back to my childhood. I was a terrible student. My sister and brother died in two separate, horrific accidents when I was 9 and 14. John’s was not just a family trauma but a public one; his driver ed car was hit by a drunk driver and two of his classmates and another young person also died with him. I was traumatized by these events, but nobody talked about grief counseling or post-traumatic stress back then.

I couldn’t focus, couldn’t sit still. I could, however, be calmed with a pencil in my hand, so my teachers generally turned a blind eye to my doodling, as long as I was quiet. I drew through all my classes, drew at home. It wasn’t a response to innate talent; it was a coping mechanism. But before long, I was drawing better than my peers. From that time forward, I was called ‘talented.’

My younger brothers, equally stressed and with the same innate intellect, chose different ways to cope. My brother Robert, for example, obsessively took things apart and put them back together again. Today he can build or rebuild anything.

Conversely, I was told as a youth that I had ‘no talent’ for mathematics. When I finally rejected that, I went on to take math up to multivariable calculus.

Tilt-A-Whirl, oil on canvasboard, 9X12, $869 framed and shipped.

You don’t have to be the best at something to derive great satisfaction from doing it. Are there innate differences between ‘talented’ athlete Josh Allen and me? Of course, starting with age and sex. That doesn’t, however, stop me from pursuing my own athletic pursuits, which have managed to keep this 64-year-old body in good running order.

“Our lives are the sum of all the choices we make, the bridges we cross, and the ones we burn… Fate, luck, and providence are the consequence of our freedom of choice, not the determinants,” wrote Judith Land, and I couldn’t agree more.

Reserve your spot now for a workshop in 2025:

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Monday Morning Art School: how important is drawing, anyway?

Toy Monkey and Candy, 6×8, oil on archival canvasboard, $435 framed.

I sometimes have students tell me, “I hate to draw!” What they usually mean is that they’re afraid of drawing. Part of this is because of the lie our culture tells us about drawing, that it’s an innate skill rather than a learned discipline. These students worry that when God was handing out the talent, they were elsewhere. That’s a horrible misunderstanding of how drawing works.

As with language, we all have different fluidity with drawing, but very few of us can’t do it. I once did an experiment where I taught Dr. Amy Vail to draw over her protestations of incompetence. “I thought measuring was cheating,” she told me. If you are not mentally handicapped and you have an interest, you can learn to draw.

Dish of Butter, 6X8, oil on archival canvasboard, $435.

Modern art must take part of the blame here

Much 20th and 21st century art has the knack of looking like the artist can’t draw, when the exact opposite is true. Ann Trainor Domingue uses simplified forms of people and boats but don’t be fooled; I’ve sailed with her and she draws beautifully. That simplification is the endpoint of a lifetime of drawing, not its beginning.

Possum, 6X8, oil on archival canvasboard, $435.

Painting is drawing

What drawing-resistant students don’t realize is that painting is just drawing with brushes. It’s easier to understand some of drawing’s principles in graphite than in messy paint. Fixing mistakes is a lot faster with an eraser than a scraper.

Feeling the relationship between the brush and the pencil makes for better, lighter brushwork. They’re two variations of the same basic tool.

Think of drawing as the grammar of art, and color as art’s vocabulary. Just as with language, many of us understand grammar intuitively, but we need education to lift it to its highest level. We all start with some vocabulary, but that expands with reading and study.

That’s not to downplay the mysterious part of the brain that makes language and art possible. It’s just that we all have the basic tools imprinted in us.

In art school, students spend a year on the fundamentals of drawing and color theory before they ever start painting. In a way, this mirrors our natural experience of picking up a pencil or crayon long before we discover the brush.

Hiking, 6X8, oil on archival canvasboard, $435.

But I don’t have a lifetime to learn to draw!

I don’t expect you to spend a year drawing an extremely foreshortened skeleton. But understanding measurement, perspective, and shading will make your painting better. I’ve written innumerable posts on drawing-just go over to the box on the right and type in “how to draw” and start reading.

But reading isn’t enough. You must practice. The good thing is, drawing is easy and cheap. I like Strathmore’s Visual Journal and a #2 mechanical pencil. If you want more refinement, my readers and I recommended fancier products here.

Stick two pencils in the ring binder of your sketchbook and toss it in your backpack or purse. Pull it out whenever you have fifteen minutes to kill. The ‘news’ on your phone will remain unchanged whether you spend that time scrolling or drawing, and you’ll have something to show for your time if you draw instead.

Drawing from life is better than drawing from photos (because it’s more difficult) but any drawing is good practice. Just a few minutes a day is all you need.

Drawing is my personal refuge

I may not always make it to my easel, but I can always draw. Even a few moments with my sketchbook clears my mind, gives me ideas, and makes me feel creative again.

I’m watching a close friend struggling with early-onset dementia. She may not remember what she told me last week, but she can still draw beautifully. A habit of sketching and drawing has given her a vocabulary independent of words.

Reserve your spot now for a workshop in 2025:

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Traveling with more than one medium

American Eagle rounding Owls Head, 6×8, oil on archival canvasboard, $348 unframed.

One of my tasks this week was booking my air travel to my workshops in Sedona, AZ and Austin, TX in March. The price of rental cars and airfare have both dropped substantially from last year. That makes travel easier on everyone.

Often, workshop students will ask me about bringing a second medium with them. I encourage that. Watercolor and gouache kits are small and you can easily slip them in a bag with your other tools.

Mark Gale, who will be my monitor in Austin, recently bought a travel watercolor kit. At first, he was hopelessly confused by it; now he is thinking of bringing it on his next RV trip. It’s portable and dries fast. Some mediums are more appropriate for specific purposes than others.

Painting in multiple media has a loosening effect in your work. Once you get past the shock of thinking about values ‘backwards’, moving between oil and watercolor will lighten up your brushwork. Pastels can teach you to lay up colors in sparkling fields like an Impressionist, providing you don’t get sidetracked into blending. Acrylics will help you learn to not get bogged down in the weeds of modeling.

The Wave, 9X12, oil on archival canvasboard, $869

However, you have to carry this stuff

Each of these, however, requires its own set of tools and substrates, so you can’t bring them all. When I travel to workshops, I bring two suitcases. My carry-on has my personal belongings. My checked bag has my tools, canvases and paints.

Travel is always a compromise between canvas size and practicality. The less variation in size, the easier it is to pack. I like to paint big, but space is at a premium. Knowing I might bring home wet paintings, I’ll limit myself to 11/14 and 9/12. I’ll also bring a 9/12 Arches Watercolor Block and my watercolor kit.

Unless I have multiple pastel students, I don’t carry my full pastel kit. It’s too cumbersome. Instead, I can bring a small kit of NuPastels and some sanded paper. That’s enough to get my point across.

Wreck of the SS Ethie, oil on canvas, 18X24, $2318 framed.

Oil painters who travel should be familiar with Safety Data Sheets (SDS). The flash point is in section nine, Physical and Chemical Properties. This tells you what you can and cannot fly with. A flash point at or below 140° F (60° C) indicates it is a flammable liquid and may not be carried in airline baggage. You’ll have to hunt, but all vendors are required to provide SDS for every product.

Turpenoid has a flash point of 129° F (54° C), so it can’t fly. Gamsol’s flash point is 144°F (62°C) so it’s legal. I buy a fresh small bottle and wrap it in its SDS with the flash point highlighted. Remember to completely empty and clean your brush washing tank before flying.

Most painting mediums have drying agents added. This gives them a flash point of under 140° F, so they can’t fly. I’ve switched to using linseed oil instead. Again, I wrap the bottle in its SDS with the flash point (500° F) highlighted.

American Eagle in Drydock, 12X16, $1159 unframed.

A small tube of oil paint is 37 ml. or 1.25 oz, so is safe for your carry-on. A large tube is 150 ml., or 5 oz. It must be in your checked luggage or it will be confiscated. I pack this handy label with my oil paints.

Watercolor tubes are tiny and harmless, but the only trouble I’ve ever had flying with paints was with watercolors. Now I squeeze out what I need for the week into a palette and leave the tubes at home.

It’s very easy to forget to wash your oil painting brushes on the road, and dried brushes are unredeemable. If you can do nothing else, rinse them thoroughly in solvent and wipe them down until you can treat them properly. I sell a brush soap that I can recommend without hesitation; my daughter makes it for me.

There are several portable painting racks available, but when painting on the road, I simply lay my paintings out on a flat surface, with newspaper underneath. Unframed work gets separated with waxed paper, taped together, and packed in my checked luggage. If the paint isn’t too thick, it won’t be harmed.

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Looking at paintings on your video screen

A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, 1884-86, by Georges Seurat, is ten feet across. All those dots shimmer in real life. Courtesy Art Institute of Chicago.

Frederic Edwin Church’s Heart of the Andes is a monumental work in every sense of the word. At 10 feet wide and 5.5 feet tall, it takes up an entire wall in the Met. It’s intricately detailed, but that is not what makes you suck in your breath when you first see it. It’s the sheer audacity of the work, its scale.

Imagine the response at its unveiling in April, 1859 in New York. In a massive, theatrical frame that increased its breadth and height, it was artificially lit in a darkened chamber. An epic success, it drew 10-13,000 viewers a month, each shelling out 25¢ for the privilege. (Church went on to sell the painting for $10,000, setting a record for the highest price ever achieved by a living American artist. Yay, Church!)

The Heart of the Andes, 1859, Frederic Edwin Church, courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art

And yet, if you’ve only ever seen it on your computer screen, it looks-well, meh. It’s a lovely example of the picturesque, that English ideal of beauty, but it’s hardly moving. It’s only when you experience it in person that you begin to understand what the excitement was all about.

Rembrandt’s The Night Watch is even more colossal, at about 14 feet wide by 12 feet high. The Rijksmuseum published a 44.8 gigapixel image of it in 2020, right after it was restored. I’ve crawled over that image. It allows me to get closer to the painting than I ever could to a ‘live’ Rembrandt. But what it can’t do is give me the sense of scale of the actual painting. I’ve been to the Met innumerable times, but, alas, I’ve never been to Amsterdam.

The Night Watch, 1642, Rembrandt van Rijn, courtesy Rijksmuseum

How we see

Humans have tunnel vision compared to other animals, but our peripheral vision is still important. It is not acute, and it gets worse as we get to ‘the corner of our eye’. Peripheral vision helps us perceive sudden changes, like cars veering into our lane of traffic. More importantly, we ‘know’ what’s happening in our peripheral vision because we know what the images on the edges ‘mean’ without needing to focus on them. Our brains interpolate and fill in the information. When they can’t, we turn our heads and figure it out. It’s an irresistible impulse.

When we look at a painting in real life, we’re using every part of our visual field-both the focus and the periphery. We flick through the painting’s focal points with our tunnel vision, just as we would flick through a natural scene. That gives us a sense of reality. That’s far different from when we look at a painting on a screen, especially when the screen is tiny, as on our phones. Then we’re just seeing it with our narrow tunnel vision. We lose the spatial sense that our eyes are designed to use.

The Water Lilies – The Clouds, 1920-26, Claude Monet, courtesy MusĂ©e de l’Orangerie. At 14 yards across, it simply can’t reproduce on the small screen.

That’s not even considering the color inaccuracies and loss of detail that are inevitable in photographs. Large canvases can look overworked and stilted in photographs even when the brushwork is lyrical in real life. A small photo reduces brushwork to an afterthought.

The 21st century artist must constantly think of his work in relation to the small screen, in addition to its real-life appearance. In some ways, that’s healthy, because it drives good composition. But it does change our approach to painting. How would Monet’s Water Lilies series have turned out had he had one eye on our phone screens?

I love living in a time where I can tour the world’s museums at a click of a mouse, but that should never be confused with the tactile experience of paintings.

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Monday Morning Art School: ruthless pruning

Prom Shoes 2, oil on archival canvasboard, 6X8, $435.

Sorry about my absence last week, but it was a lovely vacation.

A major part of learning to paint is learning to see, and in the process, learning to draw. This means not getting caught up in the details, but seeing the big shapes and how they fit together. This is fundamental to painting.

This means we stop thinking of the object we’re looking at as something we can identify, and start to see it as a series of shapes, or more accurately, a light pattern. That’s difficult, and even experienced painters can be tripped up.

Two Peppers, oil on archival canvasboard, 6X8, $435.00

Oops! My bad.

A few years ago, my student Sheryl drew the lobster-boat Becca & Meagan, which is moored year-round at Rockport Harbor. It’s painted a signature red, and I have painted and drawn it many times. Sheryl measured and drew, and I patiently corrected her. This went on for most of the class, until Sheryl finally insisted that I sit down and take measurements with her.

Whoops! It wasn’t Becca & Meagan at all. Its owner had launched a new boat, Hemingway. She was painted the same red and moored at the same buoy, but with her own unique configuration. I was so used to seeing Becca & Meagan there that I had stopped really seeing at all. I was drawing what I ‘knew’, not what was there.

Back It Up, 6X8, oil on archival canvasboard, $435.

It’s not what you know, it’s what you can see.

If I set a teacup in front of you, you’ll be guided in part by what you know about teacups: they’re rounded, squat and hollow. That gives you some checks on your drawing, but it also allows you to make assumptions about measurements and values. That can lead you astray.

To draw it successfully, you must stop reading it as ‘teacup’ and start seeing an array of shapes, planes and values. For most of us, that takes time. My process is two-fold. First, I sketch to figure out what I’m looking at. That’s investigative. Then, I ruthlessly prune, forcing my drawing into a series of shapes and values.

All objects can be reduced to a certain, limited number of shapes. These build on each other to make a whole. When you see things as abstract shapes, you expand your possible subject matter. A plastic pencil case is not inherently much different in shape from a shed. A shed, in turn has the same forms as a house. If you start with a pencil case, you can ramp yourself up to Windsor Castle in no time.

Primary Shapes, 6X8, oil on archival canvasboard, $435.

Notan and all other value studies are, above all, about cutting the picture frame into shapes, what Arthur Wesley Dow called “space cutting.”

Dow wrote the definitive 20th century book on composition, which sets down fundamental principles still used today. He taught his students to restrict the infinite range of tonal values in the visible spectrum to specific values-perhaps black, white and one grey. He wanted students see all compositions as structures of light and dark shapes. The success or failure of a painting rests on whether those shapes are beautiful.

Students sometimes chafe at being asked to do still life, but it’s the best training to learn space cutting. Just as important, it’s easy to set up and execute quickly, so you can practice on paper in just a few spare moments.

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