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Category: Winslow Homer

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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.”
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The mysterious perfection of watercolor

It can be either deliciously finicky, or wildly out of control. Or, in a perfect world, both.

St. Elias Mountains, Yukon Territory, by Carol L. Douglas. Think you can’t paint from a boat? This was done from the passenger seat of a car. 
Yesterday I got an e-blog that read, “Want looser watercolors? Pour your paint.” Well, I like pitching, throwing and otherwise making a mess with watercolors, so I opened it in great anticipation. What it was really talking about was drawing a meticulous cartoon, blocking off the light areas with masking fluid, and then setting the darks with a wallowing, graduated wash that gets a little bit psychedelic by virtue of watercolor’s great sedimentation qualities.
That’s a beautiful technique, but nothing that starts with masking fluid can be described as loose. We can’t use these shadowy washes in field painting, unless we’re willing to hang around all day reblocking paper and waiting for it to dry.
A field sketch of Houghton Farm (New York) by Winslow Homer.
Watercolor is a curious medium. It’s quite capable of the ultimate control, as in Albrecht Dürer’s Large Piece of Turf, 1503. It’s equally capable of insouciance, as in Maurice Prendergast’suntitled seascape, below. You can go anywhere you want with it.
Untitled seascape by Maurice Prendergast.
Frank Costantino is a painter who manages to pull off meticulous renderings in watercolor in plein air events. Frank’s drawings are spot-on and his framing is clever. On the other end of the spectrum is Elissa Gore, whose field sketches always burble in the style of Ludwig Bemelmans.
You know my pal Poppy Balser, who shares my adoration of boats, the sea, and color. Although she’s primarily an oil painter, Mary Byrom does lots of sketching in watercolor.
Large Piece of Turf, 1503, Albrecht DĂźrer. 
There hangs the moral of my tale. Every one of these painters works in more than one medium—in Frank’s case, watercolor and colored pencil, in the rest of them, watercolor and oils. That’s true of me, too.
I first learned to paint in watercolor. That was standard procedure in the mid-century, when no right-minded teacher was going to hand a kid a box of toxic chemicals and tell her to go to town. It’s a private possession for when I travel or when I’m thinking. I never sell my watercolors, and I don’t intend for them to be shown. Watercolor, for me, is deeply personal.
Preparatory sketch of Marshall Point, by Carol L. Douglas.
But it’s also the perfect travel medium, which is why I took it to Australia and to London and plan to bring it along to Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi in March. When it’s just you, your suitcase and a Prius, you want to travel light.
All of this has been much on my mind recently as I’ve debated the best sketchbooks to buy for my Age of Sail workshop on the American Eagle, in June. I’ve tried many myself. As with everything else, each one has its plusses and minuses. One friend suggested that I cut down sheets of paper and make my own, but I want every student to have a takeaway book with a nice binding.
I plan to have students working in both gouache and watercolor. I need to find the right paper for both. So every time a friend posts a new work in a sketchbook I query him or her relentlessly on the materials. And I’m narrowing it down, slowly but surely.
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Willful ignorance

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it
Trooper Meditating Beside a Grave, 1865, Winslow Homer, Joslyn Art Museum

Tomorrow is the celebration of the consecration of the Soldiers’ National Cemetery at Gettysburg, PA, where President Abraham Lincoln delivered what is now known as the Gettysburg Address. Since that day in 1863, when Union Soldiers marched with Lincoln from the bustling town to the cemetery, people have marked the occasion with a solemn parade on the Saturday closest to November 19.

At first, it was Civil War veterans themselves who organized the remembrance. As they petered out, it became reenactors, from both north and south, coming together to make a powerful statement of unity.
Union and Confederate veterans shake hands at the Assembly Tent at Gettysburg, US Library of Congress
This year will be no exception, but participants and visitors have been told to not bring backpacks or coolers to the parade route or other scheduled events. They’ve also been warned not to engage with ‘anti-Confederate groups’ that might be in the crowds on Saturday afternoon. This is because they’ve received a ‘credible threat,’ which is now being investigated by the FBI, state police and local cops.
This is only the latest threat against Civil War reenactors. In October, a reenactment of the Battle of Cedar Creek was marred by threats and the discovery of a pipe bomb. Manassas, VA, cancelled its annual tribute to the two bloody battles fought there due to similar threats. Also canceled was a similar reenactment at McConnels, SC.
Reenactors are the dramatists of history. They tend to be fascinated with specific periods, learning about them with great accuracy. I know specialists from the French and Indian War, the Revolution, nautical history, and the domestic economy. But the most visible reenactment community is the Civil War one.
Sharpshooter, 1863, Winslow Homer, Portland Museum of Art
They are, in my experience, history buffs with a strong creative streak, well-read and meticulous. They’re not donning the blue and grey to advance any kind of political agenda. They’re harmless. For many people, seeing a Civil War reenactment is a cheap and painless history lesson.
“A 2012 ACTA survey found that less than 20 [percent] of American college graduates could accurately identify the effect of the Emancipation Proclamation, less than half could identify George Washington as the American general at Yorktown, and only 42 [percent] knew that the Battle of the Bulge occurred during World War II,” reportedNational Review.
If Americans weren’t so woefully ignorant of their own history, could a book entitled Did Lincoln Own Slaves even exist? It was written by a college professor in response to his students asking dumb questions. That should indicate the depth of our cultural illiteracy problem.
Organizers have played down the threats to Civil War events. They don’t want to alarm the public unnecessarily. But as citizens, we need to calmly consider why they’re happening and what we ought to do about them.
Song of the Lark, 1876, Winslow Homer, Chrysler Museum of Art
“I believe it’s part of the monument issue, about rewriting history,” one reenactor told me. The parade isn’t about reenactors strutting their stuff, she added, but about recreating the historic parade itself. 
“Truly, you can’t change history, only the story that’s told,” she noted.
Intimidation always threatens free speech. “I am afraid that the threats will make it so expensive for the local governments that we will no longer be welcome to put on the events. Then they win,” another reenactor told me.
The Civil War is something we should never revise, downplay or forget. Almost one in 30 American citizens died in the fighting.
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” wrote George Santayana. I’d add a coda to that: Willful ignorance is the worst offense possible against your fellow citizens. We all end up paying for it.
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What is romanticism?

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

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

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

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

At their best, nocturnes strip away all extraneous detail, leaving us with powerful impressions and nothing more.
Nocturne in Gray and Gold, Westminster Bridge, c. 1871-1874, James Abbott McNeill Whistler. Courtesy Glasgow Museums.

I’m preparing for my workshop at Schoodic Institute, which starts on August 6. There will be a full moon on August 7. According to the Farmer’s Almanac, this is known as the “Sturgeon Moon” because Native Americans fished for these big brutes at that time. Why they wanted sturgeon in the first place is not explained. Perhaps they fed it to their enemies.

If the weather cooperates, we’ll be painting a nocturne one night that week. We haven’t had that opportunity for several years. The jack pines and thundering surf should make excellent foils for the moon over the water.
The Artist’s Studio in an Afternoon Fog, 1894, Winslow Homer, courtesy Memorial Art Gallery of Rochester
As delicious as this sounds—and I’m quite looking forward to it—it’s also the most worrisome part of the workshop for me. I’m the antithesis of a night owl. By 8:30 PM I’m yawning uncontrollably. Luckily for me the moonrise is going to be at 7:49 PM. I ought to manage a few brushstrokes before I’m fast asleep.
It’s a pity, because I love nocturnes. They’re mysterious, edgy, moody. In fact, I’m working on one right now—on the easel in my studio, where I can look at it in the full light of day.
The Polish Rider, c. 1655, Rembrandt van Rijn, courtesy Frick Collection.
“Nocturne” started out as a musical term; it was introduced to painting by James Abbott McNeill Whistler. His nocturnes are reductions to value studies and focus on composition.
Whistler did not invent night painting. It’s integral to chiaroscuro, meaning that it was used by everyone from Caravaggioon. Rembrandt famously used it in The Night Watch, (1642).
Moonlight Wolf c. 1909, Frederic Remington, courtesy Addison Gallery of American Art.
Frederic Remington started his career as an illustrator, gradually moving to fine painting and sculpture. Around 1900 he started a series of paintings focusing on the color of the night. By his death in 1909, he had painted more than seventy nocturnes. They are filled with color, but they also shroud his illustrative temperament in mystery.
One of my favorite paintings of Maine, Rooms for Tourists by Edward Hopper, wasn’t painted in Maine at all. It’s 142 Bradford Street, Provincetown, MA. While it exists today, it’s awfully swank compared to its 1945 incarnation.
Rooms for Tourists, 1945, Edward Hopper. Courtesy Yale University Art Gallery. 
At the time he painted it, it was a private residence. By cloaking it in darkness, Hopper could strip away all extraneous details, leaving only a coastal boarding house.
The Artist’s Studio in an Afternoon Fog (1894) features Winslow Homer’s trademark diagonal composition, but is pared down to its essential form. We must imagine the rocks, sea, and the color of fog.
Moonrise, 1894, David Davies, courtesy National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Historically, nocturnes were about solitude. In our jazzed, electric world, they’re more likely to focus on lighting and energy. Contemporary painter Anthony Watkins is particularly good at nocturnes. He painted a brace of them at Ocean Park and sold them all in a whirl. I love them; I just can’t see how he can stay up all night painting.
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Heavy weather

Heavy Weather, underpainting, by Carol L. Douglas
For this painting, I am trying to envision a sailboat being hit broadside by a large wave, with the question of whether it will capsize or right itself left unanswered.
My own sailing has been seriously curtailed for decades. That means that if I have questions about what a boat might do under sail, I have to consult an expert. My go-to guy is my cousin Antony. Not only does he get to sail in the southern Indian Ocean, but he’s in a totally different time zone, so hopefully he will answer my questions while I sleep.
The Gulf Stream, 1899, by Winslow Homer.
This morning I was looking for photos of boats in heavy weather. I came across the following, by a blogger who identifies himself only as Joe:
Sometimes the sea can be a very scary place.

A very, very scary place.

Before you undertake a voyage to adventure, make sure you are well trained, have some real sailing experience, and know how to survive if things go wrong. Believe me things can go wrong. Thank God I have my Navy training.

Fishermen at Sea, 1796, J.M.W. Turner
Don’t assume that the guy sitting in his flight suit on the ready alert is going to come and rescue you. You might be out of range.

For God’s sake, learn how to read the weather!

For home work, I made my sailing students keep a notebook chronicling the daily weather. It had to have the forecast from the newspaper with their own observations.

The Fog Warning, 1885 by Winslow Homer
That might be a great idea for my painting students, too.

Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in Maine in 2015 or Rochester at any time. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops! Download a brochure here.
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The Lure of the Sea

Sunlight on the Coast, 1890, Winslow Homer
I have been pushing myself to do a little more each day since my surgery, and yesterday I hit the wall—a persistent stitch in my side put paid to doing any more work. But at least I finished one sketch of a breaking wave.
Whenever I consider painting surf, I start by thinking about Winslow Homer’s great Maine paintings.  Homer knew the value of a diagonal in a painting, and he used it repeatedly, always to great effect.
Rochesterians know The Artist’s Studio in an Afternoon Fog, 1894, by Winslow Homer, because it is owned by the Memorial Art Gallery. I was pleased as punch to see it have pride of place in the Portland Museum of Art’s Weatherbeaten show.
WinslowHomer is providing inspiration of another sort to me these days. I’ve been debating whether I’m capable of picking up sticks and starting again in Maine at my advanced age. Yet Homer was almost 50 when he moved permanently to Prouts Neck, ME.
It was here he produced his most famous maritime paintings. These paintings established his reputation “as the most original and one of the strongest of American painters.” (New York Evening Post) He could never have made that great push had he not chosen to live a hermit-like existence in Maine.
It’s so easy to weaken the diagonal in a sketch, and I did so here. Will fix it on the next permutation.
One bit of advice of his I’ve never been able to fathom was this: “Leave rocks for your old age—they’re easy.” I’ve never found it to be true, especially the scrambling-over-rocks part.
The rocks in my sketch are from my imagination, but the reference photo of the boys was taken in S. Gippsland, Australia, during a picnic with my cousin and his boys.
A tidal pool on the Southern Ocean, off the coast of S. Gippsland. The sea is a universally beautiful thing.
In photos, the Southern Ocean off Victoria and the North Atlantic off Maine can look very similar, filled as they are with tidal pools, vast rock formations, and myriad shellfish. In life, they are very different. The Southern Ocean is warm, aquamarine, and has fairy penguins. The North Atlantic is cold, grey, and full of gulls. But both are magical.
Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in Maine in 2014 or Rochester at any time. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops!
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Artistic license

The Veteran in a New Field, 1865, Winslow Homer
I’m preparing a drawing of a wheat field with hail damage. I started by considering the greatest wheat field painting I know. Winslow Homer’s The Veteran in a New Field is surely one of the iconic paintings of American history.
Homer painted this in the summer of 1865, immediately following the end of the Civil War and  President Abraham Lincoln’s assassination. We understand the farmer to be a Union veteran by his jacket and canteen at the lower right. Holding his scythe, he is at once the Grim Reaper and the man returned to civilian life. He grieves, and yet he has returned to life. There has been no greater work ever painted on the wages of war.
My sketch for a wheat field with hail damage. Homer’s painting tells us me that it doesn’t need to be complicated; in fact, I’m not sure a painting of a wheat field can be complicated.
You learn something every time you look at a painting. Surely no wheat has ever reached the height of that in this painting. Even Timothy-grass, the tallest component of hay, seldom reaches these heights in the Northeast, but the golden color of the stalks tells us this is no hay-field.
Another favorite field painting: Jules Bastien-LePage’s Haymaking (Les Foins), 1877. The look of blank exhaustion in their faces is recognizable to anyone who has worked hours under a hot summer sun.
And I was just worrying because in my next sketch I’m pointing something that faces east decidedly to the north. Well, if Homer can get away with wheat that tall, perhaps I can reconfigure the Maine coastline.
Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in Maine in 2014 or Rochester at any time. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops!
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Seven days of wood smoke and crackling leaves—Winslow Homer

The Veteran in a New Field, by Winslow Homer, 1865
I’m in Maine for my last 2013 painting workshop! The frost isn’t quite on the pumpkin (at least not in Rockland or Rochester) but autumn is in the air. I’m leaving some wonderful fall landscapes for you.
To say that a work is the greatest painting of a great painter is presumptuous, but I think this painting is Winslow Homer’s best. It was painted at a black moment in our nation’s history: Robert E. Lee had surrendered and President Lincoln had been assassinated just months earlier. The nation was just starting to look at the scope of its loss: almost half a million dead, another quarter million wounded.
This demobbed Union soldier holds his scythe like the Grim Reaper. We know too clearly the nature of the implied harvest. And yet there is something redemptive and hopeful in it, an echo of Isaiah’s “they will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks.”

The Pumpkin Patch, by Winslow Homer, 1878 (watercolor)

Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in Maine in 2014. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops!
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Misty

Winslow Homer, The Artist’s Studio in an Afternoon Fog (1894)

We set out today to discuss Winslow Homer’s use of the diagonal in his coastal paintings. Could there be a more lovely example than The Artist’s Studio in an Afternoon Fog(1894), which is owned by Rochester’s own Memorial Art Gallery? And yet this painting proved even more appropriate than I anticipated, for we painted through mists all day.
Nancy hard at work on a misty bluff.

Arlene painted along the shore.

Matthew among the rocks.

Sue was in the pines.
Rocks and sea are far more energetic than meadows and flowers. To organize them, one must first consider the motive power driving the composition and harness the elements to that force. But added to the constant motion of the sea are the cyclical tides. They make a value sketch invaluable. Inevitably, the painter will lose the thread of his or her composition as the tide rushes in or out or the light suddenly changes. Being able to refer back to one’s value sketch is often the only way to save a floundering painting.
A value study by Pamela… everyone did them.
And look how fantastic the results were!
Pamela’s seascape.
Sue’s seascape.

Nancy’s seascape.

Matt’s seascape.
The second of my Maine workshops is half over, and we’re having a great time. August and September are sold out , but there are openings in October! Check here for more information.