watercolor Archives | Page 3 of 7

August 27, 2018

Monday Morning Art School: How to paint a really bad watercolor

Painting horrible watercolors isn’t just my special skill; it’s something anyone can do!

A lot of artists don’t like Winsor & Newton field kits, but they’re still my go-to for extreme backwoods drawing and painting.

Don’t test your colors

Beginning watercolorists usually put down washed-out, delicate colors. These have too much water in the mix. Or, they’ll use too little water, and their unloaded brush will scumble instead of flow. Sometimes they’ll miss the proper color entirely and spend the rest of the painting trying to fix their bad mix.

The answer is to make informal swatches on a scrap piece of paper. Just make sure you use the same paper and brush you plan to use for the final assault.

Pay attention to where excess water might be entering your process. Are you unconsciously washing your brush after every stroke, or not mixing enough paint and trying to stretch it out?

Fiddling

Putting layers and layers of light color down makes great mud. So does putting paint down and then endlessly fussing with it. See above, make the proper color, and lay it down in a few strong strokes.

Do a value study, unless your watercolor is a value study. Then do it anyway.

Too small a brush

Small brushes give you less control, not more. They’re harder to hold still and they run out of paint just when you need it most. Worse, artists get diddly with them. Practice with larger brushes and a lighter hand.

Bloom is almost unavoidable when painting off the deck of an ocean-going boat, but it’s still annoying.

Bloom

More properly known as backflow, this happens because the paper is still wet, even though the surface looks dry. Bloom can be used as a watercolor effect, but it more typically happens because the artist isn’t patient, or because environmental conditions are such that your paper will never dry. Or, in my case, because I’ve spattered water all over everything.

Use bad materials

Good watercolor paper contains sizing to keep paint from sinking into the paper. That allows colors to sparkle, and stops the paper from buckling. Cheap papers aren’t properly sized.

Brushes are more important in watercolor than they are in oils. It’s not necessary to have only expensive brushes, however; my go-to rounds are Princeton Neptunes.

As in all painting, cheap paints are a false economy. Better paints contain more pigment.

Watercolor can capture the passing scene better than any other medium. This was painted off the deck of American Eagle. The speckling in the sky was caused by salt spray. What a life!

Don’t bother with a preparatory value sketch

Value sketches are critically important in all media, but especially in watercolor. You should start with a plan, and your plain is laid out in lights and darks.

Unlike oils and pastels, you have few options to correct a bad drawing once you start it. It behooves you to work out all the kinks before you lift a brush.

Don’t mix your colors in advance

Time is a critical factor in watercolor, and if you have to stop and mix in the middle of a passage, you’re going to make a muddy, blotchy mess. Instead, mix the colors you think you need for that step and test them on your scrap paper.

Let your paper breathe!

Don’t leave white space

Watercolor is all about paper showing through, so why not let that happen?

Use all the colors

Watercolorists tend to carry far more pigments than oil painters. Want to keep it fresh? Pare down your palette and keep mixes down to three or fewer pigments per pass. And avoid hues and convenience mixes; they’re already mixtures and will further muddy the waters.

Get fussy, fast

Start by thinking out the big shapes first. Too much detail too fast throws the volume relationships off in a painting or drawing.

Watercolorists who fixate on detail at the beginning tend to delineate everything, everywhere. They haven’t given their minds time to sort out what’s important. Detail belongs in the focal point(s) of a painting.

August 3, 2018

Yupo this!

It has all the charm of a milk jug but takes watercolor beautifully.

Marshall Point, oil on Yupo vellum. The bottom right corner was spoiled by potato chip grease.

I’ve been carrying around a package of Yupo translucent watercolor paper all summer, but lacked an opportunity to work with it in any systematic way. Yupo is billed as an acid-free, archival synthetic surface. It has the hand-feel of a milk jug, and a similar milky translucent surface. That’s because it’s made from polypropylene pellets extruded in a factory in Chesapeake, Virginia. So much for my hemp-wearing Green credibility.

The initial wash for the above. It has possibilities.

I find the surface seductive and deep, for many of the same reasons I find cold-wax medium compelling. I’ve been turning over the idea of working with it during my residency at the Joseph A. Fiore Art Center at the Maine Farmland Trust. The point of a residency is exploration, after all.

A detail of the spruces before I started cutting back in. It’s all experimentation, but I liked them better at this phase.

Before I started planning a major project, I needed to prove to myself that the product wasn’t just a gimmick. My main watercolor palette contains a mish-mosh of different paints acquired over decades. That’s not very scientific, but I do know how they behave on both hot- and cold-press watercolor paper.

Brad Marshall got surprisingly similar intensities on the Yupo (left) and cold-press (right). That, I think, is a function of the paint he was using.

Brad Marshall’s scientific control was much better; he pulled out the same Winsor & Newton pocket field kit he used on Wednesday. That’s a good solid kit; I have a similar one. However, it tends to a lighter pigment load than my tube watercolors.

Brad didn’t much like the vellum, but he’s a far more controlled painter than me. I think it works better for the Pig-Pen temperament.

Marshall Point lighthouse. There was no glazing possible in the dark passages; the water simply lifted the paint and redistributed it.

The sheet marks very easily. Next time I work with it, I’ll mount pages on drawing boards while wearing cotton gloves. Yesterday, I worked straight on the tablet with no board at all. It was windy and I found myself using my forearm and fingers to prevent fluttering. My sunscreen and skin oils created a film resist that I could lift with a paper towel and much scrubbing. The potato chip grease, however, made a far more permanent mark. I let paint pool over, but it had absolutely no tooth.

Of course, the same bad practice would mark rag paper as well, waiting to wreck the paper over time.

More rocks at Port Clyde. I found the separation between foreground and background difficult to control. That may mean there are no midtones possible.

Yupo’s main selling point is that you can lift paint up, solving the most significant challenge in watercolor painting. It’s fun, but I don’t think it’s any substitution for thinking out a good value structure in advance. As with all watercolor paintings, lifting affects the paints next to the paint being lifted, and the edges it leaves can be over-pigmented and gummy.

Glazing is next-to-impossible; with few exceptions, it just lifts the bottom layer back up. Glazing is such a fundamental part of watercolor technique that this changes the process altogether. Resign yourself to getting the value and hue right the first time, because you won’t be able to do the small modulations that make watercolor painting such a joy.

In some ways, the process felt like alcohol-marker drawing. At the same time, it encouraged me to finer drawing than cold-press paper ever does. The manufacturer says the paint can be fixed with Krylon Matte Finish. I’ll try that, because some method of permanent fixing is necessary before this product is useful. Putting it under glass would obscure its beautiful surface.

August 2, 2018

Don’t suck

Brad Marshall gives me some trenchant painting advice.

On the wall at Camden harbor, watercolor sketch, Carol L. Douglas.

I paint with my pal Brad Marshall about once a year—generally at Rye Art Center’s Painters on Location, and occasionally here in Maine. He’s retired from his day job as a sign-painter in New York City, and his paid gig these days is teaching watercolor on cruise ships. That’s influenced his practice. Instead of hauling his big field kit up to Maine in a minivan, he brought a small shoulder bag full of watercolor supplies in a Honda Civic.

This spring, the organizers at Parrsboro International Plein Air Festival gave each participant a hot-press watercolor block from Winsor & Newton. At 7X10, it’s the perfect size to slip into a backpack with my sketchbook, and this seemed like the perfect opportunity to try it.*

The big dark hull conundrum. I still don’t like the solution. It wasn’t until after I made the fatal brushstroke in the far water that I remembered this was hot-press paper. It, urm, doesn’t scumble well.

Since I don’t sell my watercolors, I give them less attention than they deserve. Still, I do a lot of them over the course of the year—as value sketches for bigger oil paintings, to work out composition issues, or when I just don’t have the steam to set up my full oil-painting regalia. Watercolor is a great medium for experimentation.

We painted in Camden, on a dinghy dock. All floating docks drop with the tide, but this dock is accessible by ladder instead of a ramp. It limited my time. Once it was at the point where I could no longer toss my stuff up and over onto solid ground, I was going to have a harder time climbing back up. It would be ignominious in the extreme to have to ask the harbormaster to rescue me.

But it’s all just an excuse to stick our feet in the water anyway. Photo courtesy of Kathy Jalbert.

In a tight harbor like Camden you’ll usually see big visiting boats on the nearest docks. These are too close for a good composition (unless you’re doing a boat portrait) and obscure the boats on moorings. Still, that overlapping jumble of hulls is the nature of the scene. I’ve been experimenting recently on using parts of boats, cropped tight, to suggest that jumble.

Dark hulls, close up, are not an inherently attractive composition. They make for a boring dull strip across the lower half of the paper. If there’s to be any background at all, all that darkness lands on one side and unbalances the painting. Still, it’s such a common situation, and I’d like to devise ways to deal with it.

I’m a mutterer when I paint, I’m sorry to admit. I wrestle through my ideas and problems out loud. Finally, Brad looked over at me and said, “Just don’t suck.” It seemed as good as any other advice, so I took it.

*I think this W/N sample block could convert me to hot press paper, if I can figure out the scumbling question. It’s a nice, flat sheet, easy to handle, and it tolerated the sea mist better than my usual Arches cold press does.

July 18, 2018

If Rembrandt and Van Gogh could time travel

What would they think of modern painting in Maine?

Some days it rains, by Carol L. Douglas.

Last week, I wrote about Maine’s Art Museum Trail. A reader commented, “Standing in front of Rembrandt’s Saint Matthew and the Angelat the Louvre, or Van Gogh’s The White Orchard in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam are sure to change one forever.” He’s right, of course, but were these two masters somehow superior to, say, Rockwell Kent?

I wonder what either artist would think of the contemporary work being done in landscape painting today. Both would have delighted in the wealth of pigments and materials at our disposal. That’s especially true of Rembrandt, who did so much with such a limited palette. Van Gogh was an admirer of the Primitivist Paul Gauguin; he would have understood that our contemporary painting style reflects the pace and shape of our lives. Both artists were misfits in their times and cultures. It is only retrospectively that they—and their styles—are lauded as brilliant.

Mostly, I think they’d like what they saw simply because mature artists tend to be very interested in other artists’ technique, approach and worldviews.

Ed Buonvecchio painted me painting the rain in the doorway of Ocean Park’s temple. We oil painters have it a little easier in a deluge than watercolorists. Russ Whitten’s solution was to run home and grab a hair dryer.

Russel Whitten and Christine Tullson Mathieu are having an especially tough time with the fog and rain at this year’s Art in the Park. It buckles watercolor paper and the paint never dries. This makes for extremely soft passages. Commiserating with Russ, I showed him the John Singer Sargentwatercolor from Monday’s post, with its great amorphous, wet blob of darkness. In response, Russ told me that Andrew Wyeth, after seeing a Sargent show, came out and told the waiting critics, “I want to kill myself.”

It’s comforting to imagine a painter of his skill and stature reacting like that. We’ve all said something similar along the way.

Sea Mist, by Carol L. Douglas.

Why don’t artists see their own brilliance, but are keen to recognize brilliance in others? We know our own work too intimately to be impressed with it. The more one paints, the truer that becomes. Running down other artists is the province of amateurs.

“People strengthen each other when they work together, and an entity is formed without personality having to be blotted out by the collaboration,” Van Gogh wrote to Anthon van Rappard. That’s exactly what’s happened to this group at Ocean Park. This is our fourth year painting in a small ensemble. We’re secure enough in our friendship to help each other.

It was inconvenient for painters and vacationers, but we needed that rain.

Meanwhile, the rain ended at midnight, and the last droplets are splattering down from the ancient trees overhead right now. That gives us a few hours before we have to pack our supplies, shower and deliver our work. Our show opens at 5 this evening at 50 Temple Avenue, Old Orchard Beach. If you’re in southern Maine today, come out to see us!

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

June 19, 2018

Not the Kardashians, but working on it

Parrsboro, NS, is working its way into being a regional arts center.

Breaking Dawn, by Carol L. Douglas. Second runner up at Parrsboro International Plein Air Festival.

This weekend there were lots of well-known faces at the Parrsboro International Plein Air Festival. Organizers snagged Richard Sneary to judge, and there were high-profile painters in the mix. It was a festival of luminaries, and the painting was first-rate. I’m hoping that translates into Parrsboro becoming an arts destination for tourists and city-slickers.

It’s not an impossible dream. Five miles down the road from my home is Rockland, ME. It started as a shipbuilding and fishing town, expanding to include canneries, grain mills, foundries, lumber mills, cooperies, tanneries, quarries, and other miscellany of coastal living. By the mid-twentieth century, its historic industries were moribund.

The Age of Sail workshop aboard American Eagle was scheduled to coincide with a gam, a rafting up of the historic vessels on Penobscot Bay.

Enter the Farnsworth Art Museum, established by Lucy Farnsworth in 1948. It’s now the nucleus of a gallery scene that now rivals any art scene anywhere, both in volume and in quality. Roughly 36.7 million tourists visited Maine in 2017, and we’re on track to break 40 million this year or next. Art is a big part of that tourism, and an important part of Maine’s image. I wish that for Parrsboro. If anyone can do it, the folks at Parrsboro Creative can. They’re smart, focused people.

One of the nicest things about traveling is meeting new people who tell me, “I read your blog.” This weekend, many added that they subscribe to two art things, my blog and Poppy Balser’s newsletter. We’re both daughters of the Great White North and we both love boats. Poppy is a terrifically nice person, so I don’t mind at all being lumped in with her.

Hard at work about American Eagle, photo courtesy Ellen Trayer.

My blog is an example of that old maxim about genius being 99% perspiration. It works because I get up early every morning to write it, Monday to Friday. Other than holidays, the only time I don’t write is when I’m out of network range, which was the case during last week’s Age of Sailworkshop.

It’s such a pity that I couldn’t share it with you because it was downright magical. American Eagle should really be called the Kindness, because the crew is so good-hearted. Any doubts as to whether a painting workshop on a boat could work were laid to rest. All participants enthusiastically said they’d do it again next year.

Ellen demonstrates a paint-throwing technique to Lynn. We waited until we were off the boat before we did this.

Michael Fuller isn’t a plein air artist but he gamely tried the Quick Draw at Parrsboro anyway. “It makes you notice the transient things,” he told me. I think that’s what the boat workshop did as well. In a sketchbook done on the move, one takes away impressions, not finished pieces. The discipline will make you put away your cell phone and change how you work.

The discipline of getting up early is equally hard to break. I found myself restively trying to ‘sleep in’ on Saturday, so at 4:30 AM (Atlantic time) I quietly dressed and headed from my host billet near Fox River to the beach below Ottawa House. I stopped for coffee and a bagel at Tim Hortons and figured I was too late for the sunrise. I was wrong; the subtle pyrotechnics went on for some time.

This piece was the second runner-up, or third prize winner. I figured Richard Sneary gave it to me as a reward for being the only person nuts enough to get up that early.

Neither Parrsboro Creative nor American Eagle have set their calendar for next year, but I have every intention of doing both again. It was a wonderful week. I’m just sorry that you couldn’t be there with me.

June 5, 2018

The car cures itself

Summer for a professional plein air painter can involve as much driving as painting.

Cape Blomiden makes its own cloud, by Carol L. Douglas, was painted during a rainstorm in the first annual Parrsboro International Plein Air Festival.

One of my students missed last weekend’s workshop due to a painful flareup of plantar fasciitis. Another student, himself a doctor, told me about taking the disease into his own hands. He simply stretched the offending tissue until it audibly tore. “The relief was instantaneous,” he told me as I stared at him aghast.

My little Prius has done something similar. It has, over the last year, developed a loud scream at high speeds. Turning up the radio was useless. I had the tires rotated to see if that helped. No luck. A front wheel bearing was replaced in March; I replaced its mate two weeks ago. The right rear brake locked up while my car was in Logan Airport long-term parking in April. That wasn’t the root of the noise either. Meanwhile, every month I’ve been spending more money on this car than the payment on a Ford F-150.

I appreciate AAA’s tow service, but I’ve seen too much of it recently.

But even the money hasn’t been the real problem. “It’s no longer reliable,” I lamented to my husband. Next week I drive alone to Parrsboro, NS, where I’m painting in the second annual Parrsboro International Plein Air Festival. There are some lonely stretches up that way, and I don’t like the idea of getting stranded. I’ve started car shopping, but I don’t have the time to do proper research.

Meanwhile, I’ve had a busy spring. On the night of my daughter’s wedding rehearsal, I stopped for a light at a busy intersection. I woke up seconds later to find that I’d rolled right into the line of oncoming cars.

I have more than a million miles of accident-free driving under my belt and I’d like to keep it that way. Yesterday when I found myself blinking away sleep on the New York State Thruway, I did something I never do: I relinquished the wheel to my co-pilot. Thus, it was he, not me, who was driving when a tire burst on the interstate.

Two Islands in the Rain, Carol L. Douglas, also from Parrsboro International Plein Air Festival

In the end, this turned out to be the Prius healing itself. A few hours later, we were back on the road. The sound that’s been plaguing me for months was gone. It was a defective tire after all.

We rolled into Rockport around the time that the fishermen are up rubbing the sleep from their eyes and checking the weather. The thermostat in my car read 43° F. and it was foggy and pouring.

I have a short tight week here in Maine. I leave to teach watercolor on the schooner American Eagle on Sunday evening. After we dock, I leave directly for Parrsboro, NS.

Teaching watercolor aboard American Eagle mercifully involves no driving. The dock is just minutes from my home.

I’ll be missing the opening reception for the latter, but Poppy Balser kindly stopped by on her way to Paint Annapolisto collect my boards for me. She’ll get them stamped so I don’t have to spend half of my first day there trying to find someone to stamp them for me. I’ll just have to find Poppy.

And the eco-warrior is back on the road, all healed.

This is nothing unusual; it’s the life of many of my friends each summer. We sort events into boxes. Sometimes we can stop at home, swap the boxes, and do our laundry. But often we stack our calendars up in the back of our vehicles: frames and supports for the different events share trunk space. If we’re crossing the border, we take a deep breath as we approach Customs. We’re not breaking the law, but a search of our cars will result in an awful mishmash of our supplies.

April 16, 2018

Monday Morning Art School: Basic principles of painting

Some painting rules are meant to be broken. But they all exist to make painting faster and easier.

Cadet, by Carol L. Douglas. That’s American Eagle in the background. That’s the boat my June workshop will be on.

It’s closing in on plein air season again. Here are some basic rules to speed up your field painting.

Buy the best materials and equipment you can afford: I was reminded of that this weekend as I struggled to get my low-end sewing machine to handle layers of tulle. If you invest in decent paints and decent brushes at the onset, you’ll make better progress in the long run. You’re better off with a decent limited palette and two decent brushes than more stuff of lower quality. Then you can add to, instead of replace, over time.

Skinny layers in the beginning, please!

Fat over lean (oil painting only): This means applying paint with more oil-to-pigment over paint with less oil-to-pigment; in other words, use turpentine or odorless mineral spirits (OMS) judiciously in the bottom layers and painting medium in the top layer.

The more oil, the longer the binder takes to oxidize. This keeps paints brighter and more flexible. However, oil also retards drying. Using too much in underpainting, will result in a cracked and crazed surface over time.

The makers of Galkyd and Liquin say their products are designed to circumvent this rule. However, we have no track record for these alkyd-based synthetic mediums, whereas we have centuries of experience layering the traditional way.

Even if we could change it, why would we want to? Underpainting with soft, sloppy medium gives soft, sloppy results. The coverage is spotty and thin. The traditional method is tremendously variable and gives great control. It just takes a little while to learn it properly.

Can’t tell what that’s going to be? No matter; it’s the shapes that drive a painting, not the other way around.

Big shapes to little shapes: Work on the abstract pattern before you start focusing on the details.

The untrained eye looks at a scene and thinks about it piecemeal and in terms of objects: there’s a flower, there’s a path, there’s a tree. The trained eye sees patterns and considers the objects afterward.

Is there an interesting, coherent pattern of darks and lights? Are there color temperature shifts you can use? In the early phases of a painting, you must relentlessly sacrifice detail to the good of the whole. This is true whether the results you want are hyper-realistic or impressionistic. Composition is the key to good painting, and the pattern of lights and darks is the primary issue in composition.

Following the fat-over-lean rule, above, allows you to think about broad shapes first. In the field an underpainting done with turpentine or OMS will be mostly dry when you start the next layer. Stop frequently to make sure you haven’t lost your darks. If you have, restate them.

Follow the natural working characteristics of your medium: For oil painters, that’s dark to light. For watercolorists, that’s light to dark, because dark is impossible to eradicate. Acrylic painters can proceed any way they want, as long as they’re using opaque paint.

Doing the drawing in a dark neutral follows the natural working characteristics of oil paints. By Carol L. Douglas.

In oils, it’s easy to paint into dark passages with a lighter color; the reverse isn’t true. This doesn’t mean oil painters don’t jump around after we set the darks; we can and do. In watercolor, it’s almost impossible to erase a dark passage, so it’s best to know where it belongs before you commit to it.

Don’t choose slow-drying or high-stain pigment to make your darks. The umbers are great because the manganese in them speeds drying. However, I don’t want to carry an extra tube just for this. I use a combination of burnt sienna and ultramarine.

By the way, this is a common rule of painting to break. Just be sure you have the process down before you start experimenting.

Drawn slow and painted fast by Carol L. Douglas.

Draw slow, paint fast: This isn’t a classic tenet; it’s something my student Rhea Zweifler coined in my class years ago. Nevertheless, it’s a great rule.

Taking time over your drawing allows you to be looser and more assured in your painting. Do value studies and sketches before you commit to color. Your mind needs time to think about the shapes it sees. Spend that time in the drawing phase, when ideas are easy to assess. Otherwise, you will be doing it on canvas, where your mistakes are more difficult to clean up.

Value study at Point Prim, Nova Scotia, by Carol L. Douglas.

Value studies and sketches allow you to be inventive. When you’ve only spent three minutes on a sketch, you don’t lose much by throwing it out. Drawing and value studies at the beginning actually speed you up, rather than slow you down.

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

This post was originally published in May, 2017 and has been edited and updated.

April 4, 2018

Everyone can be an artist

A tragic gentleman amateur gave England its first watercolors of America

Religious rite of the Secotan-Indians in North Carolina, by John White, c. 1585, courtesy of the British Museum

I’ve written before about how the Cult of Genius gave society the misguided notion that art is a special gift for only a special few. Before the 18^th century, drawing and painting were part of the gentleperson’s toolkit.

John White is remembered as the governor of the tragic Lost Colony of Roanoke. He was also a fine painter. His field sketches spurred a mania for exploration and settlement of the New World.

Almost nothing is known about his background. He attended St. Martin’s Church, Ludgate, married Thomasine Cooper in 1566, and fathered at least two children. He was involved with the court of Elizabeth I, and a friend of Sir Walter Raleigh. He had the education of a gentleman.

Woman of the Secotan-Indians in North Carolina, by John White, c. 1585, courtesy of the British Museum

Raleigh sent White as artist-illustrator to the mad Sir Richard Grenville‘s first voyage to the New World. His paintings from this trip are an historical treasure. They’re our sole visual documentation of the natives of North America before European settlement.

A plan of the coast near Roanoke Colony, by John White, c. 1585, courtesy of the British Museum

White’s paintings were a sensation in Europe. They were reproduced through engraving by Theodore de Bry and published in 1590 under the title America.

Raleigh next gave White the task of organizing a new settlement in Chesapeake Bay. White convinced more than a hundred colonists to join him, including his daughter Eleanor and son-in-law Ananias Dare. In reward, he was named the colony’s governor.

An Algonquin sorcerer, by John White, c. 1585, courtesy of the British Museum

Roanoke Colony was never their goal. Their navigator simply refused to bring them north to Chesapeake Bay. His argument was that “summer was farre spent, wherefore hee would land all the planters in no other place.”

Grenville had left 15 men to defend his old discovery. They were all dead. The new settlers fixed up the old cabins. In their first military foray against hostile tribes, they accidentally killed friendly natives instead. Henceforth, relations with the locals—already fraught because of Grenville’s “intolerable pride and insatiable ambition”—would steadily deteriorate. Still, things went well for a time. White became a grandfather, to the New World’ first European baby, Virginia Dare.

Curing fish over a fire, by John White, c. 1585, courtesy of the British Museum

Unfortunately, the colonists were starving. Their supply ships were expecting to find them a hundred miles to the north. White returned to England, much against his will, to fix the problem. After a harrowing sail, he arrived in Ireland in October of 1587. His timing was atrocious. The Spanish Armada threatened, and all shipping from England was embargoed

In early 1588 White was able to scrape together a pair of small pinnaces which were useless for military service. They were set upon by pirates and lost all their provisions. White and his crew narrowly made it back to England.

Clay pot boiling over a fire, by John White, c. 1585, courtesy of the British Museum

Finally, in March 1590, Raleigh was able to send help. They landed at Roanoke on Virginia Dare’s third birthday. The buildings were gone and the settlers had disappeared. The Englishmen spent months looking for them, but they were never found.

White never fully recovered. He ended up on Raleigh’s estates in Ireland, where he brooded on the “evils and unfortunate events” at Roanoke. He never gave up hope that his daughter and granddaughter were somewhere, still alive.

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

March 22, 2018

How Winslow Homer transformed himself

Before he became Maine’s greatest painter, he needed to shed his sentimentality. He did that in part by taking up watercolor.

Five boys at the Shore, Gloucester, 1880, Winslow Homer

After working as an illustrator during the Civil War, Winslow Homer concentrated on two distinct oeuvres: postwar healing and homely, nostalgic paintings of American innocence. These were well-received by the public but not universally respected.

“We frankly confess that we detest his subjects… he has chosen the least pictorial range of scenery and civilization; he has resolutely treated them as if they were pictorial… and, to reward his audacity, he has incontestably succeeded,” said writer Henry James. Winslow Homer’s work in the late 1860s and ‘70s was done in paint, but it was still illustration. When he depicted children as symbols of the nation’s lost innocence, he was playing on a common, well-worn theme of the time.

To be fair, Homer was a young man, and he hadn’t had the advantage of an extensive art education. He was just 29 when the Civil War ended. Snap-the-Whip was finished when he was 36 years old. It was about this time that he was able to give up illustration to focus on painting. It was also around this time that he took up watercolor seriously.

Three Fisher Girls, Tynemouth, 1881, Winslow Homer, courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

By the middle of the 19th century, the influence of critic John Ruskin led to an interest in watercolor as a serious medium. The American Society of Painters in Watercolor, later to be the American Watercolor Society, was founded in 1866. In 1873, this group mounted an exhibition of nearly 600 paintings at the National Academy of Design.

Homer was living in New York at the time and almost certainly saw this show. It’s also probable that he was already familiar with watercolor painting. It was a genteel medium, widely used by ladies and children, but not respectable enough for galleries.

In 1873, Homer left for Gloucester, where he made his first professional watercolors. That summer he sketched and painted children playing on the waterfront. They clam, row, pick berries, play on cliffs and stare longingly out to sea. These paintings were a continuation of his interest in the lost innocence of America.

The Boatman, 1891, Winslow Homer, courtesy Brooklyn Museum

What was different was how he applied the paint. He drew in graphite, and then painted over his drawing. He didn’t wet his paper, which was common practice at the time. This made for a less-detailed, more sparkling finish. Critics were mixed about the results. Some admired the rawness; others hated it. “A child with an ink bottle could not have done worse,” wrote one.

By the end of that decade, Homer had come to two points in his personal life which would mark his mature work—a tendency to reclusiveness and a fascination with the sea. But before he could become Maine’s quintessential painter, he needed to shed his obsession with the American myth.

Casting, Number Two, 1894, Winslow Homer, courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

He spent 1881 and 1882 in the English coastal village of Cullercoats, where he focused on the men and women who made their living from the sea. His palette muted; his painting became more universal. And he made much of this transition in watercolor.

He had, by changing up both his medium and his locale, made himself a painter of an elemental truth—the relationship of man and the sea.

Between 1873 and 1905 Homer made nearly seven hundred watercolors, transforming the medium and his artistic achievement as a whole. “You will see,” he said, “in the future I will live by my watercolors.”

March 14, 2018

Goodbye, New Orleans

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

Live oak branches, by Carol L. Douglas

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

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

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

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

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

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

My friend’s former home on Arabella Street.

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

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

Spanish moss in City Park.

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

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

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