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Category: workshop

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“I can’t draw a straight line.”

Street in Saintes-Maries, ca. July 17, 1888, by Vincent van Gogh–done as a mature artist. 
The good Lord willing and the creek don’t rise (which is, sadly, not wholly rhetorical right now) I will have a new drawing student this week. My friend has internalized the message that she can’t learn to draw; in fact she told me that she “lacks the gene to draw.” I think that is absolutely wrong, and I challenged her to let me teach her. She has risen to the challenge:  “I have a special brand-new sketch-book and a special old and beloved pencil all in readiness.”
I am not a big believer in an art genius, any more than I’m a believer in a math genius or a language genius.* People are more facile at some things than others, but almost everyone can learn to draw, just as almost everyone can learn to do sums, conjugate verbs or sing.
An early drawing of houses at 87 Hackford Road in London by Van Gogh. He was an adult when he drew this, but untutored. Good thing he never told himself “I can’t draw.”
My friend has a PhD in Classics, can rattle away in several antique languages, and has been entrusted with the molding of impressionable minds at a Catholic college. On that evidence alone, I doubt she is learning-impaired. So I am confident she will learn to draw very quickly.
Imagine if we taught other subjects like we teach art:
Here is Drusilla in English class. Her teacher encourages the class to write down words that express their feelings, without ever discussing spelling, syntax, or structure. Having no notion of grammar, Drusilla gets herself totally balled up in ‘can and could/may and might/shall and should/will and would,’ and throws down her pencil in frustration. “Oh, Drusilla,” says her teacher in a sad voice. “That’s OK. Not everyone can learn to write.”
Here is Drusilla in math class. Day after day, her teacher stands at the board calling out numbers in vast, voluptuous streams of ever-changing patterns. Drusilla, however, wants to calculate the volume of a sphere. “Oh, Drusilla,” says her teacher in a sad voice. “That’s OK. Not everyone is good at mathematics.”
Exploring creativity is instructive for five and seven year olds. By age 13, a kid needs to be taught the tools of art if he or she is going to succeed. We have, by and large, abdicated teaching those tools. We place self-expression above craft, and the results are predictably poor.
Oddly, virtue is another subject where the educational establishment has decided it has no right to impose standards. Virtue is unquestionably a learned discipline, as any person who’s ever struggled to civilize a child can tell you. Is the decline in teaching art somehow related to the decline in teaching ethics?

There is only one slot open for my July workshop at Lakewatch Manor in Rockland, ME, and August and September are sold out.  Join us in July or October, but please hurry! Check here for more information.

*Speaking of “genius,” the word originally referred to a tutelary god or guardian deity or spirit. Using it to refer to a person of outstanding ability is the product of the Renaissance, which shows how our thinking has morphed over time.
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I’ve never painted like this before, but I am finally satisfied.

Completed landscape, Mendon, looking north.

A year in the painting, and it’s finally finished to my satisfaction. My very patient clients are coming tomorrow to see it.

All technique innovations start with an unanswerable problem. In this case, it was capturing the thousand prismatic details of a fallow autumn field. In fall, red leans against purple which leans against gold which leans against teal. Trees seem to be less about volume than about sheer exuberance.
After much experimentation, I ended up dry scumbling layer after layer of pigment mixed with cold wax to create the foliage. This was extremely time-consuming because it required waiting for each layer to dry. (That’s also a great way to lose the thread, I found.) It’s a good way to create impasto, and it will save the client having to have the work varnished, because the wax won’t allow oxidization (or so has been my experience).
Applying paint like this seemed a lot more like working with pastels rather than with oils.
Scumbling detail

 The sky, on the other hand, was painted with a series of thin glazes. The clouds are rather a mix of the two techniques.

It’s a big painting for a big wall in a relatively big space, and it had to have enough character to stand out.
Scumbling detail.

 I don’t know if I’ll ever paint this way again, but overall, I’m very satisfied with this work. I hope they like it as much as I do. I’ll sign it in the morning and it will be on its way.

Scumbling detail.

There is only one slot open for my July workshop at Lakewatch Manor in Rockland, ME, and August and September are sold out.  Join us in July or October, but please hurry! Check here for more information.

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It’s painting weather!

We’ve been stuck in this weather pattern for weeks. It’s hard to paint in.
I got an email this week that read, “This being the 4th of July weekend, summer is officially here and it is time to do your plein air painting. No more excuses about it being too cold or whatever…”
Clouds stacking up to the west.
That is very true, but it has been tremendously wet up and down the East Coast. A little rain isn’t a problem, but deluges are. We’re complaining of Florida weather here: it rains every day. My Floridian friends are complaining that it’s not just raining every day, it’s raining all day, every day.
Lyn sketching as she debates whether she will have time to paint this view.
We had a preacher visiting from Nigeria recently who mentioned in passing that Americans love to complain about the weather. He’s right about that—if it’s 90° F., it’s too hot; if it’s 60° F., it’s too cold. And yet we live in a kind of peaceful Paradise here.
Some of us had the good sense to work from the porch.
All kinds of weather are good. They’re just not necessarily good for plein air painting.
But not Carol and Joe… and that’s a good thing, because they both did fine paintings.
On Wednesday evening, an electrical storm rumbled into Rochester just as my students and I were getting in our cars to drive to Cindy and Danny Barben’s farm in Honeoye Falls. Driving south out of town, there were tree limbs down and flooding in the intersections. I picked up my cell phone half a dozen times to cancel, but I’m caught in a conundrum of modern life: a third of my class only texts, a third emails, and a third can only be contacted through Facebook. Quick changes in plan aren’t that easy.
If I ever painted from photos, I might be tempted by this view. Note how wet the fields are here in the Genesee Valley.

But it was all fine, because shortly after we arrived, the sky cleared, with tremendous peach and blue clouds rising in great heaps to the south and west. (The moments after a rainstorm are often the most glorious of the day.) And although the sky feinted, it didn’t really start raining again until we were packed up to go home.

Cindy guiding in a missing painter.

You can study painting with me in Rochester (Wednesday evenings this summer), or you can study painting with me in Maine. There is only one slot open for my July workshop at Lakewatch Manor in Rockland, ME, and August and September are sold out.  Join us in July or October, but please hurry! Check here for more information.
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The Winnowing Fork

I threw out 90% of my drawings, keeping only those of sentimental value. This could be nobody but my friend, clothing designer Jane Bartlett, posing for a quick sketch.

I recently bought new pads of newsprint , and they tipped me into chaos. I finally faced the truth that there wasn’t a single corner in which to shove one more thing in my studio. It wasn’t a simple question of emptying one drawer to accommodate the newsprint, either. My whole studio had become a tangled skein of art supplies, finished work, and projects under way.

And this, of course is my long-term plein air pal Marilyn Feinberg, being unusually still.
Twelve man-hours later, the winnowing fork has done its duty, and I can think again.
Of sentimental value for a totally different reason. This is the cartoon for a painting I envisioned of my doctor removing my staples after my first cancer surgery. I probably will never paint it, of course, but it would have been more fun than the surgery. Imagine that green florescent hospital lighting of old…
Artists tend to be pack-rats—after all, one never knows when that beaver skull or fake mustache will come in handy. But at a certain point, the clutter overwhelms. I paint best in a spare, very ordered environment, and much of my working day is spent trying to stop myself from trashing that.
The plein air board stash. Neatly reduced (although I suspect there’s another box of them in my frame shop).
Out went the acetate and rubylith left over from the days when designers stripped in pages. Out went stained or marked paper.  Out went damaged prints.
About a decade ago I decided to save all my gesture drawings. I have no idea why; I’ve never looked at any of them since. Out they went, too, netting me a full flat-file drawer for other purposes. I tossed a large stack of mediocre drawings, keeping only a few of sentimental value and a couple of painting cartoons that still amuse me.
I’ve finally realized that rubylith and amberlith and hand-stripping tabloid-size pages are never coming back. OK, I realized that a decade ago, but I still thought I could think of something to do with all that stuff. It’s on the curb now.
About once a year, I toss out several pounds of paintings I no longer like. I slash these canvases and boards, because I never want them returning, zombie-like, to embarrass me in the future. I reserve the right to edit the story of my life, and that includes my work.
What remains is a mixture of unfinished work that is in some way instructive, finished work that’s just “resting” outside frames for a short while, and a whole range of stuff I’m still not sure about.

Next up, my frame shop. That’s a scary thought.

Now that I’m so darn organized, I can start thinking about what’s coming up. There is only one slot open for my July workshop at Lakewatch Manor in Rockland, ME, and August and September are sold out.  Join us in July or October, but please hurry! Check here for more information.

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Teaching color theory to the wee tots

Corinne Kelly Avery will have her munchkins make smocks that coincidentally teach them color theory.
I tried teaching my own young kids art many years ago; I made them cry. So whenever a gifted art-teacher friend tells me about lesson plans for youngsters. I’m blown away. For example, Corinne Kelly Avery recently told me about her ideas for her Summer Art Camp for Munchkins (4 and 5 year olds) at Parkminster Presbyterian Churchlater this month.
Corinne has taught Sunday school at Parkminster all but one of the past 34 years. “I call myself the Oldest Living Sunday School Teacher,” she said. Corinne attended SUNY Potsdam for fine art, crossing over to St. Lawrence University for art education. She has her master’s in art education from Nazareth College and substitute teaches in Gates-Chili, Churchville-Chili and Spencerport schools.
Dip one palm in red, one in yellow, and then rub them together, and you have a kinesthetic understanding of orange. Dang that’s brilliant.
Corinne ties the story of creation to art in an arresting way. “Before God made light, there was no color. How did he create all things? He started with light. So the first thing we’re going to do is make sun-catchers. The next thing we’ll explore is color, because we wouldn’t be able to see color unless God created light.”
Corinne will have her munchkins make their own smocks. “I want them to feel they are covered and that they created that cover,” she said. At a local home center, she found a fiber paper dropcloth with a plastic lining, which she cut into 20X48” pieces with holes to go over the kids’ heads.  The kids will do an art project on the fabric side.
“I’m teaching that God is the creator of all things and he created each of them uniquely, as shown in their fingerprints. Why not take that forward and let them create?

Watercolor resist fish for Corinne’s munchkin camp.
“Their hands are a stamp of who they are and how God created them. I remembered a book called Mouse Paint I read to my own kids years ago. I thought, I can take that concept and do that with these kids. They can take red paint on one hand and make a print, and then take yellow on the other hand and make a print, and put their hands together and mix them to make orange. It’s a kinesthetic way to appreciate color; it’s almost magical. It’s basic, but it’s also satisfying.”
Being a good planner, Corinne made test smocks before she actually teaches her class, which is how she realized that not all blues and reds make purples. Sometimes they make mud. Back to the art store!
Corinne will take her kids through the Genesis account of creation, using, for example, Van Gogh’s Starry Night to talk about the heavens, and a watercolor resist mobile to talk about the birds and fishes.
I asked Corinne the question that is always on my mind when someone tells me about something so far out of my own area of expertise: why is it that she’s so smart about teaching little kids, and I’m not? “What if we were all autobots and had exactly the same thoughts?” she answered. “What a boring world this would be! God made this a world of infinite variety. Look at insects, snowflakes, flowers, plants. How would it be if we all thought and acted the same? We wouldn’t be attracted to anyone because they would all be just like us. There’d be no communication or community or life at all.”
And that sounds like a great answer to me.
If I had a munchkin, I’d definitely send him or her to this program. There are two sessions: July 15-19 and July 22-26. The first week is sold out; the second has four openings left. If you’re interested, the cost is $50 per kid, and you can call 585-247-2424 to register.

I really got to know Corinne on our drives back and forth to my workshop in Maine this June. There is only one slot open for my July workshop at Lakewatch Manor in Rockland, ME, and August and September are sold out.  Join us in July or October, but please hurry! Check here for more information.
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This is the story of a small miracle

The caption reads, “Life is so beautiful with hope and courage.” It was hand-painted and a gift from a friend when I was fighting my own battle with cancer.
Some of you don’t like miracles. You’re free to write this off as a mistake or a flat-out lie.
I have a friend and painting student who is suffering from a rare and tenacious form of ovarian cancer. She was rushed to hospital in great pain and is waiting for yet another emergency surgery. There is no time that’s convenient for a mortal battle, but when you have two young teens at home, well, that seems like particularly bad timing.
One of the many things I resent about her cancer is that it has taken away her joy in painting. She is—when healthy—an exuberant watercolorist, but since her diagnosis, she’s laid her brushes aside.
This morning I found a patch of sweet peas that the city mowers had missed. I picked some. I decided that I could augment them from my own half-drowned garden to make her a bouquet. And I could bring her my watercolor kit and maybe that would somehow give her the psychic energy to follow in Manet’s footsteps and paint a few watercolor florals from her sickbed.
Everything my friend needs to paint like Manet: a pocket watercolor kit  (which was a gift from her to me many years ago), my field notebook (which was a gift from Jamie Grossman a few years ago), my brushes, a folding tank, and an atomizer. I told her she is unlikely to do a worse job than some of the watercolor sketches in this notebook.
Vases tend to get lost in hospitals, so I looked around for an empty jar. Then I remembered that I had a lovely but cracked vase that I’ve been trying to throw away for years. It was given to me when I was fighting my own cancer. Sadly, I dropped and shattered it, and my husband mended it.
My sentimental attachment to this vase always warred with my irritation at the all-too-visible crack. I never quite managed to toss it away. But, I reasoned, my friend would not mind a cracked and mended vase and it would be a way for me to let go of the darned thing.
I pulled it out, and looked in vain for the mend. It just isn’t there.
One of Manet’s little sickbed still-lives.
I was so bewildered, I asked Sandy to try to find the crack for me. She couldn’t see it either. And then she directed me to this piece in this weekend’s New York Times, which ends with this quote:
When a vase falls from the mantel, most people’s first impulse is to dispose of the shattered relic, throw it out, begone the tainted thing, the broken dream.
Stop. Don’t do it. Get a broom and dustpan. Pull out your tiny brush. Save every piece, every jagged shard. Do not lose a sliver. I have witnessed the miracles. I have seen them happen under my own hand.
Everything is not perfect. Everything can be fixed.
St. Paul described us as “jars of clay” in which the light of the Gospel is stored. And he goes on to say:
We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed. We always carry around in our body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body.  For we who are alive are always being given over to death for Jesus’ sake, so that his life may also be revealed in our mortal body. So then, death is at work in us, but life is at work in you.
So it is hardly coincidental that this pottery vase—truly a jar of clay—was somehow restored. Such a tangible miracle can only point to my friend’s total restoration. What form that will take, I cannot say. She may take up her crutches and walk, or she may pass beyond us to a new existence free of the pain and suffering of cancer. But there is no doubt in my mind that God sent us a clear sign that his hand is on her shoulder.
There is only one slot open for my July workshop at Lakewatch Manor in Rockland, ME, and August and September are sold out.  Join us in July or October, but please hurry! Check here for more information.
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Heavy Weather

The scene, on a warmer, brighter day.
“Lemme tell you something,” said Mr. Steptoe. “The moment I’ve got Duff’s dough in my jeans, this joint has seen the last of me. I’m going back to Hollywood; that’s what I’m going to do, and if you’ve a morsel of sense you’ll come with me. What you want wasting your time in this darned place beats me. Nobody but stiffs for miles around. And look what happens today. You give this lawn party, and what do you get? Cloudbursts and thunderstorms. Where’s the sense in sticking around in a climate like this? If you like being rained on come to Hollywood and stand under the shower bath.” 
(From Quick Service, by PG Wodehouse, c. 1940, Doubleday Doran)
As far as I got on an earlier day, painting with my old pal Marilyn. This is a big field painting, 20X24.
I left Maine with a hankering for painting boats. (They’re really one of my favorite things.) As I had to be in Irondequoit anyway, today seemed like a great opportunity to run up to Genesee Yacht Club to finish a painting I started a few years ago.  I don’t like to paint from photos—not because of some arbitrary rules about what constitutes plein air, but because I see better in real space. And this painting has been sitting around since Marilyn Feinberg moved to Florida and quit being my painting buddy.
The forecast was for intermittent light rain. That’s very doable with oil paints, so I packed my stuff and headed north. However, there’s a fine line between light rain and the kind of rain that works your paint into a solid emulsion. What we were getting this afternoon was on the wrong side of that line. We live in a naturally damp city that’s currently stuck in a heavy-rainfall pattern. There isn’t much one can do about it except move on to something else, like cleaning bookshelves.
Notice, however, that I’m not complaining. It may be dark, cool and rainy here too much of the time, but we don’t often have forest fires, tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, or any of the other natural phenomena that plague other parts of the country.  “Just throw your mind back to Hollywood, honey. Think of that old sun. Think of that old surf at Malibu,” said Mr. Steptoe. For my money he can keep it.
There is only one slot open for my July workshop at Lakewatch Manor in Rockland, ME, and August and September are sold out.  Join us in July or October, but please hurry! Check here for more information.
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This week’s meme is a particularly pernicious one

You may as well look at a photograph. No, you’re better off looking at a photograph.

Constable’s The Hay Wain is accessible without being kitschy, sentimental without being mawkish. It has been voted the second most popular painting in Britain (after Turner’s The Fighting Temeraire). Last week it was assaulted by a protester from Fathers4Justice, who stuck a picture of a child to its surface. The painting is not believed to be permanently damaged but has been removed for repair.

This comes on the heels of another assault on a painting, by a member of the same group. The painting in question—Queen Elizabeth II’s Diamond Jubilee portrait—is by no means in the same class as The Hay Wain, but the damage it sustained is more serious. Tim Haries spray-painted it in an action characterized as a desperate plea for help for a father wrongly separated from his two daughters.
I’m in no way diminishing the anguish of fathers who lose custody of their children, but these two men seem to suffer from a lack of impulse control that is at cross-purposes with parenting.
There are works of art which for all practical purposes can no longer be seen in person: Michelangelo’s Pietà and da Vinci’s Mona Lisa are two famous examples. Both are behind bullet-proof glass in niches specially designed to keep viewers from any kind of contact.
Laszlo Toth being wrestled to the ground after attacking the PietĂ . From a strategic standpoint, his subsequent history was instructive: he was confined for just two years.
Both paintings have been vandalized repeatedly. However, the art vandals of an earlier age tended more toward mental illness, not activism. For example, the PietĂ  was attacked by geologist Laszlo Toth, who screamed, “I am Jesus Christ!” while chipping away at the Virgin Mary with his rock hammer. (That wasn’t universally true:  in 1914, militant suffragette Mary Richardson took a meat cleaver to VelĂĄzquez’s Rokeby Venus, protesting the arrest of Emmeline Pankhurst. Still, the nutters significantly outnumbered the activists.)
That has changed, and so have the consequences. The Little Mermaid sat undisturbed on her perch in Copenhagen Harbor until 1964, when her head was sawed off and stolen by members of a group called Situationist International. They’ve been consigned to the dustbin of history, but their violence toward the Little Mermaid lives on—in subsequent beheadings, paintings, and one memorable explosion that blew her right off her perch. She has been assaulted so many times that city officials have broached the idea of moving her farther out into the harbor.
The first time the Little Mermaid was attacked, in 1964.
And that gets to the root of the problem. Already, gallery visitors in many countries find their access to paintings more and more restricted by alarms, glass, and security guards who intervene instantly if you get too close to the work. Of course they have no choice, because our artistic heritage is the very heart of our patrimony, and its protection is their first priority. But immeasurably important things can be learned from looking at paintings up close, things that can never be understood from photographs. I’ve never seen—nor will I ever see—the Mona Lisa or PietĂ  in anything resembling “real life.” I had the awesome good fortune to have closely studied The Hay Wain a few years ago, but I doubt I ever shall again.

Sometimes I think about art, and sometimes I paint, and sometimes I teach painting. There is only one slot open for my July workshop at Lakewatch Manor in Rockland, ME, and August and September are sold out.  Join us in July or October, but please hurry! Check here for more information.

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A day late and a dollar short

I love job lot stores, but I confess, I would have no idea what to do with this stuff. On the other hand, the old farmer in me would sure like to learn.

 (Sorry this is late but it’s harder than you think to post while driving at 74 MPH down the NYS Thruway.)

Friday morning we were scheduled to take the ferry to paint at Monhegan, but we awoke to the sound of heavy rain being driven by a stout wind. My painters were leery of the ferry in that weather, especially knowing that the other side was socked in with rain, and that rain often brings fog. (We have a roof under which to paint on Monhegan, but the views would have been seriously compromised.)
There was still a line at Red’s Eats, even in the rain. People are truly wonderful. (Photo by Corinne Avery)
I’d been working them very hard and they were tired, so we switched gears and decided to poke around galleries in Rockland. We included a stop at the Island Institute’s Archipelagoshop, which showcases a broad and range of art, craft and design made by Maine island residents. After this, we had a quick lunch, packed for us by Lakewatch Manor—and, no, I didn’t remember to take a photo—and took a side trip through Damariscotta, just to enjoy its loveliness.

This poor bridge on the Mohawk seems to get regularly knocked around by flood waters. (Photo by Corinne Avery)
Once again, our timing was exquisite. That volatile, capricious river—the Mohawk—had overflowed the New York State Thruway earlier in the day. By the time we were passing through, it had retreated and was merely nipping at the margins of the road. What could have been a difficult drive was, in fact, easy as blueberry pie. Nine hours later, I was happily home, reading about flooding all over our state and grateful to have arrived unscathed.
There is only one slot open for my July workshop at Lakewatch Manor in Rockland, ME, and August and September are sold out.  Join us in July or October, but please hurry! Check here for more information.
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Painting at lovely Camden harbor

As it was misty and cool today, we went to Camden harbor, with its many lovely wooden boats and fine galleries.

Intrepid dockside painters.

C’s color temperature study from yesterday.

Rearranging dinghies to suit.

A lovely sensitive sketch of dinghies, by C.

Dinghies, painted by S.

J, painting the scene across the harbor.

Other J, painting her first boats ever… and doing a lovely job of it.
And an ice-cream sundae for dessert–with fresh berries, chocolate, and a delish cookie.
There is only one slot open for my July workshop at Lakewatch Manor in Rockland, ME, and August and September are sold out.  Join us in July or October, but please hurry! Check here for more information.