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Let’s paint some duds!

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

My husband can’t listen to the original cut of Jackie Wilson’s (Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher and Higher without pointing out that the guitar is out of tune. Still, it went to #1 on the Billboard R&B charts in 1967, and it’s one of Rolling Stone‘s The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.

There are works of art that confound in the same way. Nobody can doubt the genius of Michelangelo, but his women could be strangely muscle-bound. His Moses is a work of immense sensitivity and insight, but he has horns. (That was an iconographic convention of the time, based on a translation error.)

Édouard Manet is one of history’s greatest painters, but his Fishing and The Kearsarge at Boulogne are both (technically) duds.

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

The rut that once was a groove

Duds happen when you push the limits of your skill and ideas. They’re unlikely when you stay comfortably in your rut.

In Fishing, Manet was quoting Peter Paul Rubens. That early painting may have failed but Manet is the same artist who later gave us Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe, Olympia, and three versions of Execution of Emperor Maximilian, all of which rest on the same idea. Manet had the insight and skill to paint intellectually provocative subjects at the same time as he helped to advance the painterly development of Impressionism.

Manet pushed boundaries of technique, subject matter and artistic norms. To do that meant ignoring the pernicious voice of group norming, and ignoring the possibility of failure.

The Late Bus, 8X6, oil on canvasboard, $435 framed, includes shipping in continental US.

The risk

Of course, not conforming has its risks. Ralph Albert Blakelock was a celebrated painter of his day. He often mixed bitumen and varnish for rich depth of color in his thick, uneven paint. That has proved to be a conservation disaster, so when we look at his paintings today, we aren’t seeing what he laid down. In most of them tonalism has been replaced by something grubby and dark. And that’s why he’s fundamentally unknown today.

But done intelligently, non-conformity can result in innovative breakthroughs and the development of new artistic styles, techniques, and forms. It can break down our preconceived notions of what we’re doing.

Best Buds, 11X14, oil on canvasboard, $1087 framed includes shipping in continental US.

This applies to us, too

The plein air movement has reached its maturity. It is the greatest art movement of our time, but it’s also set limits in terms of finish, the time we spend on paintings, and style. I love plein air better than any other form of painting, but those limits are becoming clearer to me.

What will its evolution and growth look like? Am I willing to paint duds to paint something new? Do I even have the smarts to figure out what that ‘new’ will look like? Am I willing to experience the rejection and discomfort that comes from pushing limits? I don’t know, but it seems to me that growth demands it.

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Monday Morning Art School: five fast things you can do to improve your painting

Spring Greens, 8X10, oil on canvasboard, $522 unframed includes shipping in continental US.

Ditch the convenience greens

Sap green is a convenience mix, made of Indian (dairylide) yellow and phthalo or Prussian blue. Hookers Green is even more complex, using nickel azo yellow, indanthrone blue, and quinacridone magenta to get that deep, dull solid green tone.

Premixed colors suck the life out of your paintings, because they make dull mixtures. Instead, learn to use paired primaries. In particular, learn to mix greens. That’s the only way to avoid boredom in the ‘wall of green’ that the northeast is about to enter.

I explain this more fully in my online video class, The Perfect Palette.

Spring Allee, 14X18, oil on canvas, $1594 framed includes shipping within continental US

Clean your brushes

Oil painting is more forgiving of dirty brushes than watercolor, but they both need clean brushes, both within the process and after.

In watercolor, that means rinsing them in cool water until it runs clean, and then wiping down the excess water and setting them lovingly aside to dry. Unless you’ve dropped them in cow muck, soap is never necessary. But you should have enough water at hand to regularly clean your brushes during the painting process. Change it as soon as it gets dirty.

In oil painting, it’s best to rag-clean your brushes during the painting process. If you must rinse in mineral spirits, carefully towel the brush dry before you start painting again, or you’ll end up with soupy paint.

When you’re done, you need to get the paint out of bristles and ferrule. If your brushes have splayed, the most common culprit is paint dried deep within the ferrules. It’s impossible to get that out, so it’s best to get them clean right after use.

I have a video on how to clean oil brushes here.

Apple Blossom Time, 9×12, oil on canvasboard, $696 unframed includes shipping in continental US

Set out fresh paint

I store my oil painting palette in the freezer between painting sessions. The paint is good for several weeks, but as soon as it develops a film or becomes stodgy, it’s history. Oil paint is carefully formulated at the proper consistency and pigment load. You cannot refresh half-dried paint by adding mineral spirits or medium to it.

“I hate waste,” you say, and so do I. But the most precious thing I have is time. I won’t waste it on a painting that’s destined to fail.

Organize your palette

Watercolorists keep your paints in the same pans because you’re wetting and reusing the same paints over and over. You’re smart to arrange them in rainbow order. You do not need 50 different paints. A paired primary palette, plus a few more for fun, will get you to any point in the color spectrum.

Oil painters can plop their paint down anywhere, but it’s a terrible idea. Lay them out in a rainbow order and then stick with that. (That’s a good reason to not scrape your palette perfectly clean between uses; the trace colors will be your guide.)

I encourage my oil-painting students to paint with tints, because it’s a fast way to lay down bright midtones. But even without this, an organized palette that you understand is a fast route to success.

Owl’s Head fish shacks, 11X14, framed, $1087 includes shipping in continental US

Do a value drawing

If you tend to make more duds than successes, you need to slow down and do value drawings first. Don’t proceed to painting until you have a sketch you really like. The value drawing lays out the overall composition and the focal points before you ever get to paint. That fifteen minutes at the beginning is not just a tremendous time-saver, it saves you from setting off on a fundamentally-flawed path.

If you are unfamiliar with the concept, or don’t know how to do it, I recommend my online class, The Value Drawing.

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What is style?

Beautiful Dream (Rockport Harbor), oil on canvasboard, 12X16 $1,449.00 framed, includes shipping in continental US

Style is tricky. It can have different meanings depending on context, but we all know it when we see it. Just as we recognize Modern Farmhouse in decorating and Vintage in fashion, there are styles in painting.

The major families of painterly style are:

  • Realism, representing the subject as accurately as possible.
  • Impressionism, focusing on fleeting impressions of light and color.
  • Expressionism, emphasizing the emotional and psychological.
  • Abstraction, or non-representational painting.

Within them, however, are myriad other categories, classified by the choices the artists have made in each of the elements of design.

Larky Morning at Rockport Harbor, 11X14, on birch board, unframed, $869 includes shipping in continental US.

Don’t overthink your own style

I’m all for understanding our own points of view; that’s the deepest discipline in painting (and life). Yes, style ties our work together in one body, and it ties us to a specific time and place. It’s the art historian’s best tool for classifying artwork.

But style should develop naturally. Forcing it stymies development.

I can never be a Scottish colourist, any more than I can be Wayne Thiebaud. Imitating the style of Dead Masters is a sure path to irrelevance. Once you’ve learned to paint, you should spend at least as much time with your peers as with the past. Painting is, above all, a dialogue, and you live here and now.

Ketch and Schooner, 8X10, oil on archival canvasboard, $652 framed includes shipping in continental US.

It takes some deep scratching

Good painters choose truth over stylishness, even to the point of seeming awkward to their contemporaries. They investigate thorny questions, not just about the world, but about painting itself. When they’re answered, these artists move on. Often, by the time they get through the cycle of making and mounting a body of work, they’re no longer that interested in it. There’s another struggle engaging them.

Each time we pick up the brush, there’s variation in how we approach painting problems. That’s why it’s important that you have facility with big brushes, small brushes, palette knives, detail, broad strokes, and tiny strokes. Even if they’re not part of your regular repertoire, they increase your versatility and scope.

Don’t box yourself in

‘Embrace your style’ is a trap that painters may not be able to escape.

There’s a difference between style and being stylish. I enjoy fluid, assured brushwork. That’s not styling; it’s self-confident skill.

Sometimes, what people call style is just technical deficiency. For example, some painters separate their color fields with narrow lines-white paper in watercolor, dark outlines in oils. That could be a design choice, or it could be that they never learned to marry edges.

Skylarking II, 18X24, oil on linen, in a handmade cherry frame, $2318 includes shipping in continental US.

Direct and unconscious

I do not love painters who use the same scribing or pattern-making on the surface of every painting. If you study the best mark-makers, like Vincent van Gogh, you’ll see that their surfaces are highly varied.

Style for its own sake is just a ruse to cover up badly-conceived paintings. “People often mistake verbose for skill,” a reader mused recently. “The best writing it direct and almost unconscious. I think the same thing is true of painting.”

Mature artists don’t generally think about style. At that point, style is the gap between what they perceive and what comes off their brush. That’s deeply revelatory, and it can be disturbing when we see it in our own work.

Some of us try to cover that up with stylings, not realizing that those moments of revelation are what viewers hunger for. They-not the nominal subject of the piece-are the real connection between the artist and his audience.

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I’m learning a new art form

I’m slowly learning to act naturally in front of the camera. It’s been a difficult process.

The ancient Greeks used ποίημα (poiÄ“ma) to describe workmanship. It comes down to English as poem and poetry. Poesis, which means bringing something into being that did not exist before, is another derivative.

It’s no surprise that ancient Greeks thought of creativity in poetic terms; they were masters of verse. We do the same thing today, letting language romp across various art forms willy-nilly. Composition and dissonance, for example, mean the same thing to a musician as to a painter.

That’s because the structure of art is oddly consistent across genres. My bass player husband can pick up any string instrument and coax decent sound from it, because the principles are universal.

There are exceptions, of course. “What is the equivalent of a sketch in photography?” Ron Andrews mused in response to this post. Ron’s right about static photography not needing sketches, but storyboards are just sketches for moving pictures.

The two classes I have finished so far; number three should join them shortly.

You don’t know what you don’t know

At the beginning of this year, I set out to make a series of online classes about painting. I want to get through the seven steps of a painting by the end of this year. I’m almost done with step three, composition. It’s been a doozy. The lesson is long and complex, but so is the subject of composition.

Just the brain dump would be challenging enough. On top of that, I’m still learning the medium. I have no director, so I’m learning to speak slowly and naturally to a camera in an empty room. I’m learning to do voice-overs and tinkering with ways to demonstrate technique. I’ve learned to edit audio and video on three different platforms.

Then there are the exercises and quizzes. To write them is easy; to make them work interactively online is more difficult. Thank goodness for Laura Boucher. She’s my operations manager, daughter, and software guru.

Then there’s Monday Morning Art School, which is free, of course.

Look to the experts

I don’t watch television or movies and I’m too old for Tik-Tok. To overcome this, Laura has me studying YouTube videos. Sandi Brock is a middle-aged sheep farmer from Ontario with close to a million subscribers. She’s an improbable influencer. I learn a lot from her.

The most liberating lesson is that people really don’t care about my flat Buffalo accent or wrinkles. To some extent, the artifice of perfection is irrelevant in contemporary social media. People find their own tribe and ignore the rest.

Painters today have incredible resources compared to the last century. My father taught me to paint, but for most people, learning opportunities were limited to what the local art gallery had on offer. If, like Bob Ross, you were interested in realism in a town where abstraction was king, tough. You were out of luck.

Today you can go online and study with just about anyone, including me. You’re the captain of your own ship, for good or ill.

I have already made a few hundred ‘resources’ for this online class. I’m getting better at it as I go along.

I’m a convert

When I was young, I took voice lessons. I still love to sing, but my voice is a mess. Right now, I’m looking for a place to take voice lessons online. The beauty of this scheme is that I don’t need to show up at 6 PM on Tuesdays; I can do the lessons whenever I want.

Three years ago, at the start of COVID, I fought the idea of teaching online. Today I’m a convert. The proof is in the pudding, and my Zoom classes have proven more effective than ‘real life’ classes in creating professional artists, and almost as effective as intensive workshops.

And that’s why I’m, at age 64, learning a whole new form of ποίησις. The medium may change, but the impulses of creation are universal.

So tell me in the comments, what new skill are you working on?

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Monday Morning Art School: Subject vs. focal point

The People’s Census at Bethlehem, 1566, Pieter Brueghel the Elder, courtesy Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium

The number one question you must ask about your painting is: is it boring? If your painting is boring, nobody is going to engage with it.

One way to do keep things interesting is to manipulate where you put the subject of your painting. You don’t need to plop the subject in the center of your canvas and the subject does not necessarily have to be the focal point.

Consider Pieter Brueghel the Elder‘s masterpiece, The Census of Bethlehem, above. It’s unlikely that Brueghel consulted a text about composition, because those things didn’t exist back in the 16th century. He came up with this visual trick on his own and used it over and over.

The Procession to Calvary, 1564, Pieter Brueghel the Elder, courtesy Kunsthistorisches Museum. This is a veritable “Where’s Waldo” of a painting.

The subject is not in the middle of the canvas. Nor is it the focal point. In fact, the subject will only be clear to you if you know the Bible story about Mary and Joseph traveling to be counted in Bethlehem. Because of the overall energy of the canvas, you’re engaged enough to hunt for them, and to realize that Mary and Joseph are at the very bottom of the canvas, heading towards the census-taker at the bottom left.

That’s different from the focal points, which are within the swirl of activity that made up the daily life of a medieval village.

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, c. 1558, either Pieter Brueghel the Elder or a close copy thereafter, courtesy Royal Museums of Fine Arts

Brueghel often made the subjects of his painting seem like almost an afterthought to the big scene. Another great example of this is Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, about which William Carlos Williams wrote:

According to Brueghel
when Icarus fell
it was spring

a farmer was ploughing
his field
the whole pageantry

of the year was
awake tingling
near

the edge of the sea
concerned
with itself

sweating in the sun
that melted
the wings’ wax

unsignificantly
off the coast
there was

a splash quite unnoticed
this was
Icarus drowning.

In that short poem, Williams says everything about Brueghel’s compositional technique.

The Peasant Wedding, 1566-69, Pieter Brueghel the Elder, courtesy Kunsthistorisches Museum. Brueghel also painted many genre paintings, meant to illustrate a known story or moral argument.

So, what’s the difference?

The focal point is a visual engagement, whereas the subject is what the painting is about. The subject of a painting can be a story or fable, as were Brueghel’s paintings. It can be an object or person. Or, in the case of abstraction, it can be nothing at all.

Focal points are something quite different. They are the points that your eye rests on at it moves through a painting.

What draws the human eye to a specific passage in a painting?

  • Contrast in value, hue and chroma, with value being the biggest driver of the three. If you have a dark shape next to a light shape, the eye tends to look at that place.
  • Detail. Assuming the whole painting is not overloaded with detail, if there’s a lot of detail in a passage, that is where the eye will go first.
  • Line. Lines within the composition act like arrows, drawing your eye to the focal points.

Is there just one focal point in the painting?

I sure hope not, because your job as the composer is to get the human eye to dance its way through the composition, to engage the viewer for as long as you can keep them interested. The longer they spend looking at your picture, the more involved they become with it.

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Exercise and the artist

Bracken Fern, 12X9, oil on canvasboard, $869 framed includes shipping in the continental US

Once upon a time, I was a serious runner. I got up extremely early to get in my miles before packing the kids off to school and heading to my studio. My kids remember that I always touted the value of exercise. They claim that I once told them: “if your head was cut off, it would grow back because you were a runner.” They are, of course, full of malarkey, but I certainly believed that running had healing properties.

Then at age 40 I had a miserable bout with cancer. My fitness stood me in great stead, but a year of chemo, radiation and surgery put paid to my running forever. Instead, I started to walk miles every day. Among my happiest memories are the hours my pal Mary and I walked in our suburban neighborhood, working through the issues of our lives.

Mountain Path (the susseration of dried leaves), 11X14, oil on archival canvasboard, $1087 framed, includes shipping in continental US

It turns out that I have a cancer gene. It reappeared in a different form several years later. As with the first time, I had barely recovered from the anesthesia before I was struggling back into my sneakers. But repeated insults to your body take their toll.

My friend Jane, who’s going through a terrible health problem, told me, “I keep wondering if I’ll ever have a stretch of time to regain strength.”

I’ve been there, sister. It takes longer than you hope, but if you persevere, you’ll recover.

We’ve had a stretch of miserable weather here in the northeast. I gauge its impact by the number of people I see along the trail. Recently, it’s been as empty as it was in the dead of winter. Rain, fog, cold, and more rain are disheartening in the pre-dawn hours. The urge to go back to sleep is almost overwhelming.

Yet I don’t. Part of that is habit, and part of that is fear. My aunt, two of my uncles and my grandfather were all dead of heart attacks before they reached my age.

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

Exercise can reverse physical decline

Last week I wrote about reversing cognitive decline by learning a new skill like drawing. The corollary to that is that you can reverse physical decline with regular exercise. Many studies bear that out. It’s not that exercise is a miracle cure; it’s that our sedentary lifestyle ages us before our time.

At the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, when the effects of modernity were just beginning to be felt, physician William Buchan wrote, “Of all the causes which conspire to render the life of a man short and miserable, none have greater influence than the want of proper exercise.”

Mountain Fog, 11X14, $1087, includes shipping in continental US

Most of us have no idea how sedentary we are compared to how we were designed, because our whole world has been one of inactivity, generation after generation. We artists spend hours in front of our easels; that’s really no better than spending them in front of a computer.

There’s another good reason to spend time hiking or walking, and that is how it changes your perception of nature and landscape. If you only look at a place from the window of your car, you’re seeing only a fraction of it. This week, I’m watching the ferns slowly unfurl. I know where they are because I walk these same woods every day. Later today, if the skies clear, I’ll go paint near them. I probably won’t paint the ferns themselves, but I will paint the green blush that is starting to-finally!-overtake my world.

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Why I don’t buy Bob Ross merchandise

Bob Ross Toaster
Image courtesy Amazon.

Bob Ross’ The Joy of Painting first appeared on PBS when I was 24 years old. At one time, his show was PBS’ most popular offering ever, but that was lost on me. We didn’t own a television set during the eleven years he broadcasted.

That is not to say that I didn’t recognize his gentle voice, his fabulous perm, or his Happy Little Trees. The mesmerizing dullness of his show was wildly popular among my stoner friends. I had a Bob Ross contact high, understanding his cultural significance without watching the show.

Bob Ross Happy Little Tree mints
Image courtesy Amazon.

Ross can be forgiven for making 20th century sofa art. His art was secondary to his career in the Air Force, where he rose to the rank of Master Sergeant. He took classes at the Anchorage, Alaska USO at a time when Abstraction reigned. His teachers wanted nothing to do with representational painting. “They’d tell you what makes a tree, but they wouldn’t tell you how to paint a tree,” he recollected. I felt his pain; I was learning to paint at the same time.

After the Air Force, Ross worked for Bill Alexander, a PBS and workshop teacher who claimed to have invented wet-on-wet painting. Through this, Ross met Annette and Walt Kowalski. They were his ardent fans, friends and supporters. They were instrumental in creating both the PBS series and Bob Ross Inc., which sold painting supplies and instructional videos.

Bob Ross slow cooker
Image courtesy Amazon.

The company became wholly-owned by the Kowalskis upon Ross’ untimely death from non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. He had already signed over his rights to his name and likeness to the firm, a move his son Steve said he regretted and was trying to reverse. The company continues to this day, run by the Kowalskis’ daughter, Joan. She is responsible for the unending stream of Bob Ross dreck on the internet.

Some of it is cute, some is funny, and occasionally someone buys me some of it. I thank them, of course, but Ross’ family didn’t see a penny from the bobble heads, socks and mint tins I’ve been given.

Who’s entitled to that money?

In his will, Ross left the rights to his name and likeness to his son Steve and his half-brother Jimmie Cox. The Kowalskis claimed that Ross’ life work was wholly owned by them, and they prevailed in court. The millions of dollars earned from Bob Ross’ likeness have benefitted the Kowalskis, not Ross’ family.

The Kowalskis maintain that they deserve it. “If not for the efforts of the remaining founders and their dedication to this mission, Bob’s artistic and cultural relevance-and his expressed desire to become the world’s most beloved painting teacher and friend-would have been lost decades ago with his passing,” they wrote.

Is that any more honest than the claim that Bill Alexander invented alla prima painting? Having been around during Ross’ first flush of popularity, I think not.

Bob Ross action figure
Image courtesy Amazon.

Bob Ross’ enduring appeal lies in his character. If he gave the art world nothing else, saying “We don’t make mistakes, just happy little accidents,” is reason enough to remember him.

Theirs isn’t the first or last business partnership that has foundered over money. Mercifully, it doesn’t really tarnish Ross’ reputation, which is as a fine person, not as an artist. But as for me and my house, we will never buy Bob Ross merchandise.

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Monday Morning Art School: what’s the point of a three-hour painting?

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

Near the wonderful, loose Andrew Wyeth watercolors at the Farnsworth Art Museum is a small room dedicated to his painting practice. You are surrounded by his careful investigation of details, compositional sketches, and studies. “When I was painting Christina’s World I would sit there by the hours working on the grass, and I began to feel I was really out in the field. I got lost in the texture of the thing. I remember going down into the field and grabbing up a section of earth and setting it on the base of my easel. It wasn’t a painting I was working on. I was actually working on the ground itself,” he said.

Edward Hopper, who mined similar veins of alienation as Wyeth, was known for meticulously storyboarding his major paintings. He drew thousands of preparatory sketches. A comparison of one of his final sketches for Nighthawks with the final painting shows just how important his drawings were in cutting things down to the bone. He used drawing to shake off the burden of representational reality.

Failed attempt #1 at Chauncey Ryder trees. I’ll go back up the hill and try this again if it ever dries out. Dialing back the chroma will help.

Modern plein air painting

On the flip side, there’s contemporary plein air painting, dashed off in alla prima technique in a matter of a few hours. I love plein air painting myself, but a recent conversation with a student had me wondering about its lasting value. She is frustrated with her local painting group, which never works more than two or three hours. “What’s the point of rushing like that?” she asked me.

There are hundreds of plein air events in the United States every year, each of which has around thirty juried artists, each of whom in turn produces 5-10 works per event. That means the art market is flooded with tens of thousands of paintings from these events alone. Not all of them are good. I’ve produced more than my share of duds.

These events create a commodity that’s affordable to a middle-class audience. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that; it’s what drove the Dutch Golden Age of Painting, which gave us Vermeer, Frans Hals and Rembrandt.

Failed attempt #2 at Chauncey Ryder trees. Boring composition and I made a messed up stew of the buds on the branches.

But it’s equally true that mass movements give us our share of dreck. The paintings done at plein air events are often safe (read ‘boring’) and dashed off without a lot of thought. That’s because plein air events are a production grind.

Loose brushwork has become the norm of plein air painting. But there’s no law that says that plein air must be quick, or that loose brushwork is the apotheosis of outdoor painting. These are just tropes of our times. Leaning into them too heavily just makes you a copier of other people’s ideas.

This start I like. Luckily, it’s steps from my house, so I can revisit it the next time there’s a break in the rain.

Go outside and take your time

This spring in the northeast is miserably cold and wet. I’ve painted outdoors just twice. Out of the three things I did, the one I like is the least-finished (above). In the other two, I was tinkering, trying to feather trees like Chauncey Ryder. Everything else in my paintings suffered. I don’t care; I’ll wipe out the boards and try again.

I have my eye on another stand of trees, small spruces. I want to see if I can mimic the soft brushwork of Anders Zorn in them, since to me he’s the only person who ever painted baby evergreens convincingly.

“You’re going to confuse yourself with all this mimicry!” Eric Jacobsen chided me. Well, no, because I don’t really want to paint like Ryder or Zorn. I want to figure out how they did this specific soft-focus thing on trees. I could never do this if I was still rushing around churning out three-hour paintings at events. The cost of failure is too great.

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Cadaver tombs and skull watches

Cadaver monument of John FitzAlan, 7th Earl of Arundel, c 1435, courtesy Fitzalan Chapel, Arundel Castle, Sussex

I grew up with the 11th Edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica, which is why I’m conversant with the careers of Gladstone and Disraeli (they fought a lot) and not so hot on quantum mechanics. As fun as it was to follow rabbit trails across the Encyclopædia‘s 28,150 pages, Wikipedia is faster and easier, and better-indexed, too.

That’s how I came across the cadaver monument, which is a type of effigy tomb featuring a decomposing body. In the best of these, the deceased is freshly laid out on a bier and we can ‘see’ his decomposing corpse beneath. Death was a significant part of life right up to modern times, but the cadaver monument was characteristic of the late Middle Ages, when the Black Death kept sic transit gloria mundi on everyone’s lips.

These monuments are a form of memento mori, meant to remind us that life is transient and all earthly striving is vanity. Of course, the people with cadaver monuments were those whom earthly striving had rewarded well, including Richard Fleming, Bishop of Lincoln, whose tomb reads:

“Stand, seeing in me, who is eaten by worms, what you will be. I, who was once young and beautiful to look on… lie under thick clods. Worldly pomp, honour, recognition, what heights there are, what they, pray, if not dreams, folly? …All things are put to flight by cruel death, like shadows…”

Alice de la Pole’s tomb, details from en-vie (left) and en-transi (right), Church of St Mary, c. 1475, courtesy St Mary’s Church, Ewelme.

Pray your loved ones out of Purgatory

By the late Middle Ages, Purgatory had become an established part of Catholic theology. Praying for the dead was practical, as it could effectively reduce their time and suffering in purgation. Cadaver monuments reminded the living to pray for the dead, along with powerfully suggesting that they knock off their own sinning.

The en-vie (in life) figure, on top, was a status symbol. He was dressed in his swishest best. It’s the en-transi (in transit) effigy in conjunction with the en-vie figure that makes the cadaver tomb so powerful – that and the sculptors’ obvious familiarity with death and decomposition.

Upper section of the Transi de René de Chalon, c. 1545-47, Ligier Richier, the church of Saint-Étienne at Bar-le-Duc, France.

Isolated en-transi sculptures are more typical, although none of them are common – there are only 44 extant cadaver monuments of any kind in Britain. The British examples are more restrained than their continental counterparts, which sometimes include the vermin that speed corpses into decomposition. Perhaps the greatest of these is the Cadaver Tomb of René of Chalon, by Ligier Richier. Legend says that the putrefied figure originally clutched René of Chalon‘s actual withered heart in its raised right hand.

Alice de la Pole, the grand-daughter of Geoffrey Chaucer, is the only British woman with a cadaver monument. Wealthy and powerful in her own right, she chose to be shown as an emaciated old lady. Her eyes are half-open, the better to see the saints above.

Death’s Head watches

Engraving of a skull-shaped memento mori watch associated with Mary Queen of Scots, engraved with figures of Death and Adam and Eve, c. 1820-35, Charles John Smith engraver, courtesy British Museum

Then there’s the phenomenon of the Death’s Head pocket watch, which continues to this day, albeit in a stylized form. These are memento mori lite, as they reached their vogue in the 17th and 18th centuries, the so-called Age of Reason. The cases were engraved with images of Adam and Eve, Death with his sickle, and other morbid themes. The watch was viewed by opening the skull’s jaw.

It’s rumored that Mary, Queen of Scots had one. That’s a possibility, since pocket watches were an innovation of the 16th century. According to legend, it was given to her favorite lady-in-waiting upon Mary’s execution. If it ever really existed, it’s long vanished.

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Reverse aging by learning to draw

Stuffed animal in a bowl, with Saran Wrap. 6X8, oil on archival canvasboard, $435 includes shipping in continental US.

For decades, I’ve been telling my husband: “When they come to take me away, tell them I never could remember anything.” It’s true; I have a terrible memory for names and dates. I’ve watched a loved one take a digit-span test and shuddered; I couldn’t recite a string of numbers backwards at age 25, let alone now.

Recently I’ve noticed my short-term memory is improving. I’ve attributed that to the infernal modern need for passwords, which we need to unlock everything from our bank accounts to our house.

We take for granted that older people lose cognitive ability – especially memory – over time. But what if that is preventable, or even reversible? That would be tremendous not only for the people involved, but for our aging society.

Pull up your Big Girl Panties, 6X8, oil on archival canvasboard, $435 includes shipping in continental US.

I’ve got good news for you

Recent research suggests that not only can cognitive loss be delayed, but in some cases even reversed. Researchers had elderly (55+) participants engage in intensive learning for three months in a program designed to mimic the schooling we put our kids through. Not only was there cognitive improvement, it lasted through the one-year follow-up test.

This wasn’t a casual learning program. Study participants took twelve weeks of classes in three subjects about which they had no prior knowledge, choosing from Spanish, photography, iPad operation, drawing, and music composition. They had homework (hah!). That and their attendance were tracked.

Both the six-month and one-year scores were significantly higher than the subjects’ pretest scores. The researchers were careful to note that they’d tried to replicate the environment in which young people learn, so the social bonds created in classes could have been as important as the learning itself.

This wasn’t a lone study, either; they were duplicating the results of earlier research.

Back It Up, 6X8, oil on archival canvasboard, $435 includes shipping in continental US.

A half-hearted approach won’t work

What’s equally important is what doesn’t promote cognitive improvement. Just listening to classical music doesn’t cut it-you must pick up that cello and try to master it. There’s no duffing it to mental acuity. You must focus, intently, on a new skill for it to make a difference.

Most painting students are older adults. The ones who stick with it are the ones who are slightly obsessed. They don’t just paint during class; they work tirelessly during the week. Most of my students stick with me over long periods of time, and build an esprit de corps among themselves. Perhaps their peer-to-peer learning and encouragement are as essential to their success as artists as anything I tell them.

Hiking, 6X8, oil on archival canvasboard, $435 includes shipping in continental US.

It seems that any skill that requires long-term effort and concentration will help the older mind, and drawing and painting certainly qualify. The beautiful-and maddening-thing about painting is that it’s not ever really mastered. I’ve been at it for decades and there’s still always something to learn.

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