Watch Me Paint: World-Class Art, World-Class Instruction
Mount Rundle, oil on canvas, by Carol L. Douglas While the storm raged outside my studio yesterday, I retouched paintings from my Canada trip. I’m nearly done with this task. I’m working on paintings whose emulsion was damaged by being stacked before they were completely dry. There isn’t much thinking involved, since I did all …
“Swells,” by Carol L. Douglas Yesterday a visitor to my studio told me about recently purchasing her first piece of artwork, a print by University of Maine’s own Karen Adrienne. My friend had sold some possessions to pay for it, trading unwanted treasures for something she really loved. The look on her face as she told me …
“Rattlesnake Falls (version 2),” John Killmaster One of the nicest things about social media is how much art I see. In particular, I love a feature in my Facebook newsfeed: Keith Linwood Stover’s The Cyber Art Show. Stover is from Bucksport, ME. He started The Cyber Art Show as a Facebook page; today it’s a freestanding website with …
“SalomĂ©,” 1870, by Henri Regnault. This Election Day is as much a mirror to our society as it is a precursor of things to come. We have endured 22 months of the basest kind of electioneering, and what that will tell future historians about our culture is not a lie. I knew very little about Alexandre-Georges-Henri …
“Shelter,” by Carol L. Douglas When I was younger, my dream job was to be a New York City cabbie. At that time, there was no GPS, so cabbies had to learn the city by heart. Driving in the city was like rolling around in a giant pinball game, and it was fun. Either Maine …
“Whiteface makes its own weather,” by Carol L. Douglas. High contrast clouds and a flat brush imply rain. Clouds are a terrific, rampaging part of the landscape, and often the best part of a composition. I love painting them. They seem so easy that I never figured there was much secret gnosis to painting them, any more …
Maple Tree, week 1, by Victoria Brzustowicz. We all know very competent painters whose best students end up painting exactly like their teachers. This is not what any of us set out to do. It happens because the teacher focuses on technique, not process. I occasionally talk to my students about mark-making, but only in …
“A Little Bit of Everything,” by Carol L. Douglas (sold). Mary Byrom is doing something she calls chunking, which is concentrating on a single problem every day in small studies, which take her about 20 minutes. “It could be color temperature, or composition, or line, or whatever you are working on and thinking about,” she explained to …
“Historic Fort Point,” by Carol L. Douglas While it was fresh in my workshop students’ minds, I shot pictures showing the step-by-step progression of a painting. I took these while participating in the Third Annual Wet Paint on the Weskeag this past weekend. The site I chose was the ruins of Fort St. George, overlooking Thomaston. Not much remains but …
“Kathy reading,” by Carol Douglas (not finished). I met Brad Marshall years ago, when I was active in New York Plein Air Painters. We tried to hold a meet-and-greet in a Czech beer garden in Astoria, but we were washed out by a crashing thunderstorm. In those days, I lived in Rochester, had a crash-pad on the Upper West …