Bjorn Runquist Archives | Carol L. Douglas

September 5, 2024September 6, 2024

Weeds, pests and other good design

First intimations of fall, 8X10, oil on prepared birch surface.

We’re in a long run of beautiful weather here in Maine. Ken DeWaard, Eric Jacobsen, Björn Runquist and I have been out plein air painting as much as possible. I really need to do some paperwork, but there’s no rain on the forecast. How do people in southern California get anything done?

Here in New England, we know that any long stretch of warm, sunny, rain-free weather is the exception. Like squirrels storing up nuts for winter, we’re storing up visual memories of these warm days.

Overgrown, 8X10, oil on archival canvasboard.

I haven’t concerned myself with results. I’ve just painted fast and immersed myself in the process. Are any of these finished? Absolutely not. But they’re better than what was on those boards before.

For some reason, it’s been all about the weeds for me this week. I’m a big fan of God-as-gardener; I don’t think artificial gardens can touch wild meadows for beauty.

Nature’s palette shifts as the season progresses. Spring starts with delicate pastel blossoms blooming alongside the lilacs and dog roses. By midsummer, the blossoms grow more colorful, with crown vetch, clover and fireweed (and the brief, glorious burst of red wood lilies). Now that we’re approaching our first frost, we see radiant spirals of white and purple asters among the goldenrod. All are punctuated with the dried husks of milkweed and other earlier-blooming plants.

An unmowed field, 9X12, oil on archival canvasboard.

Purple loosestrife is, of course, an invasive pest and noxious weed; the experts all tell us that. They suggest pulling the plants before they can set seeds or, if it’s not in a wetland, spraying with an herbicide. (However, it likes its feet damp, so it avoids wholesale chemical slaughter, for the most part.)

It’s been around longer than I have, but its press is so bad that I’ve avoided painting it. However, the color is like nothing else in nature, and it complements goldenrod wonderfully.

The heck with it, I decided. If Eric doesn’t mind that it’s growing in his back field, neither do I. “The bees love it,” Eric told me. And anyways, I’m kind of an invasive species here, myself.

Sunbathers at Beauchamp Point, 9X12, oil on archival canvasboard.

I’ve painted boats at Beauchamp Point many times, since Rockport is a haven for wooden-boat enthusiasts. This week, I was distracted by a group of sunbathers, laughing and talking in the sweet evening air. There’s no sand on this ‘beach’, just rocks and bigger rocks, but there’s something satisfying about stretching out on a sun-kissed boulder. Pro tip: if you want people to leave, just start painting them.

Yesterday afternoon, Björn and I were finishing up, the others having moved along. An onshore breeze picked up. The temperature dropped, the leaves showed their undersides; a large flock of gulls pirouetted over our heads. “Where I’m from,” I told Björn, “the leaves turning over means a weather change.” He’d heard that too, but no such weather change is on the forecast.

After a lifetime in western New York, I could predict the weather from the sky, the wind, and even the smell of the air. Even after a decade, I have no such ability in Maine. I once asked Captain John Foss, what signs he looked for to predict a weather change. “I listen to the weather forecast,” he told me.

Mark next Friday on your calendar

Grand opening
Carol L. Douglas Gallery at Richards Hill
Friday, September 13, 5-7 PM
394 Commercial Street, Rockport, ME 04856

For more details, see here.

Reserve your spot now for a workshop in 2025:

Canyon Color for the Painter, Sedona, AZ, March 10-14, 2025
Advanced Plein Air Painting, Rockport, ME, July 7-11, 2025.
Sea and Sky at Acadia National Park, August 3-8, 2025.
Find Your Authentic Voice in Plein Air, Berkshires, MA, August 11-15, 2025.
Immersive In-Person Fall Workshop, Rockport, ME, October 6-10, 2025.

May 16, 2024May 14, 2024

Marine art finally escapes drydock

Brigantine Swift in Camden Harbor, *24X30, oil on canvas, framed, $3478 includes shipping and handling in continental US.*

This painting benefitted from a good long spell in drydock.

I started it a few years ago on the docks at Camden harbor, for Camden on Canvas. That’s the brainchild of Colin Page, and it’s become a great venue for marine art as well as a successful fundraiser for the Camden Library. (I’m happy to say I’m in again for 2024.)

It was hot, I was parched, and for once the creak of wood and water wasn’t moving me. I threw down my brushes in disgust.

“I hate it,” I spat out as I scraped the canvas down. I almost never do that, but I was riled.

“I like it,” said Björn Runquist.

“It’s not that bad,” said Eric Jacobsen.

“What is the matter with you?” asked Ken DeWaard, who never cuts me any slack.

What’s the point of having friends if you never listen to them?

The only part I really liked was the filtered, haloed sun, but that wasn’t enough to hang a whole painting on. Still, I respect their opinions, so I didn’t use the canvas as a sail for my dinghy. Instead, it went into my giant pile of unfinished marine art. It was bigger than most of the others, so I was constantly catching it with my foot or in the corner of my eye. Gradually, it grew on me.

Its spars (the things the sails hang from) are so delicate that they look as if they couldn’t possibly survive the North Atlantic. Even worse, they looked cockeyed to me. “You’re a better draftsman than that,” I chided myself.

I almost never take reference photos, preferring to whine at my friends if I discover I need one. However, I did find a picture from the dock that day. Those spars looked just as cockeyed in the photo as they did in my painting. The only other square-rigger I know of at rest is Cutty Sark, in Greenwich, England. Her spars are perpendicular to the keel, but she’s not exactly docked; she’s more trapped, like an insect in amber.

Cutty Sark stuck in her permanent installation in Greenwich. She’s going nowhere. Photo courtesy of Ethan Doyle White/

I called my resident expert on all matters maritime, Captain John Foss. He told me that, despite the name, a square-rigger can, in fact, turn its spars. They can be angled from running straight across the vessel (‘square’), to a beam reach or even a close reach.

I learn something new every day, darn it.

Marine art is complicted

Many years ago, I was wrapping up a painting on the Camden docks when two young salts stopped to look at it.

“Should we tell her?” asked one, quietly enough that he thought I couldn’t hear.

“Nah.”

I might love painting boats, but I don’t think I’ve ever done a spot of marine art that didn’t include an error or omission. Sometimes they’re intentional, for compositional purposes. Sometimes they’re oversights, and sometimes they’re mistakes. I think this one is fine, but if not, one of my friends is sure to tell me.

I’m in Britain on another lovely, long, blister-inducing hike. I’ve turned my phone off and while I’m gone, Laura will be running the office. Just email me as usual if you have questions or problems registering for a class or workshop. (Who am I kidding? She fixes all that stuff anyway.)

Reserve your spot now for a workshop in 2025:

Canyon Color for the Painter, Sedona, AZ, March 10-14, 2025
Advanced Plein Air Painting, Rockport, ME, July 7-11, 2025.
Sea and Sky at Acadia National Park, August 3-8, 2025.
Find Your Authentic Voice in Plein Air, Berkshires, MA, August 11-15, 2025.
Immersive In-Person Fall Workshop, Rockport, ME, October 6-10, 2025.

July 23, 2023July 23, 2023

Monday Morning Art School: simplifying shapes in the landscape

Thinking about the landscape as a series of planes will help you create depth in your painting.

Ice Bound Locks, *John F. Carlson, courtesy Vose Galleries*

When Eric Jacobsen told us that he was teaching the theory of angles and consequent values in his recent workshop, I was baffled by the big words. “What’s that when it’s at home?” I asked him. Ken DeWaard was equally confused, responding in a torrent of emojis.

“C’mon, guys, it’s John F. Carlson 101!” Eric exclaimed. Björn Runquist immediately checked, and announced that there was nothing about any angles on page 101. (Actually, it’s in chapter 3; I checked.)

It’s no wonder that Eric’s no longer returning our calls.

Sylvan Labyrinth, *John F. Carlson, courtesy of Virginia Museum of Fine Arts*

All kidding aside, Carlson’s Guide to Landscape Painting is a classic. His theory, although it has a high-flown title, is actually quite intelligible to even the meanest intellects (and you know who you are, guys).

“Every good picture is fundamentally an arrangement of three or four large masses,” Carlson began. That’s as good an organizing principle as any in art. Value is what makes form visible, so we should see, translate, simplify and organize form into value masses.

Carlson wrote that any landscape would contain four groups of values bouncing off three major planes:

The horizontal ground plane;
The angle plane represented by mountain slopes or rooftops;
The upright plane, which is perpendicular to the ground plane, such as trees.

In the middle of the day-our most common circumstance for painting-the value structure would be as follows:

The sky is our light source. It should be the highest value in our painting.
The ground plane gets the most light bouncing off it, so it should be the next-lightest plane.
The angle planes such as rooftops or mountain slopes, are the next lightest planes.
The upright objects in our painting, such as trees, walls or people, should be the darkest value element.

Snow Lyric, *John F. Carlson, courtesy of The Athenaeum*

That doesn’t mean that the shapes are crudely simplified, as a glance at Carlson’s own paintings confirms. The shapes can be beautiful, elegant, complex, and lyrical without too much value overlap.

Thinking about the landscape as a series of planes will help you create depth in your painting. However, it can be tricky to see the landscape as a series of planes rather than objects. It can be helpful to keep each value group completely separate, with no overlap of values, but, in reality, there will always be overlap.

*Your assignment is to find a photo among your own snapshots and reduce it to a series of four values. Then paint it.*

As you try to integrate this idea into your painting, exaggerate the separation of planes.

Of course, there are many circumstances where this doesn’t hold true-where the sky is leaden and darker than a snow plane, or when the fading evening light is hitting the vertical plane rather than the ground. But understanding it will help you paint the exceptions in a more arresting way.

This post originally appeared in 2021, but the information bears repeating.

Reserve your spot now for a workshop in 2025:

Canyon Color for the Painter, Sedona, AZ, March 10-14, 2025
Advanced Plein Air Painting, Rockport, ME, July 7-11, 2025.
Sea and Sky at Acadia National Park, August 3-8, 2025.
Find Your Authentic Voice in Plein Air, Berkshires, MA, August 11-15, 2025.
Immersive In-Person Fall Workshop, Rockport, ME, October 6-10, 2025.

July 15, 2022July 15, 2022

Is that painting finished?

Drying Sails, oil on canvas, 9x12, available on my website later this morning.

When I’m wondering, “is this painting finished?” the answer is usually yes.

Camden Harbor before the day begins, 8x10, oil on canvasboard, available on my website later this morning.

I’ve been carrying a small 8x10 around in my backpack for a few weeks, hoping to run into Ken DeWaard so I could ask him if he had a reference photo from that day. It’s of the ketch Angelique, on the left, and Lazy Jack II. I’ve got a good visual memory, but that was last summer or perhaps the summer before. Not only has the detail faded in my mind, any sense of what I wanted to ‘finish’ has disappeared as well.

I caught up with him Tuesday, when our respective painting classes ended up on the same beach. (If you haven’t seen this story from Owl’s Head, it’ll encourage you to keep your footsies out of deep water this summer.) Ken shook his head and said, “I got nothin’,” and laughed. “If it was earlier this summer, maybe.” Such a day is indistinguishable from a thousand other painting days, unless it results in a painting one loves enough to keep. (We paint a lot of dreck along the way.)

I propped it up on a bench and pondered. Is it really not finished? There’s detail I’d love to add, and the masts look chunky. But they so often do on windjammers, which were originally built not as yachts but as working boats. The color is coherent and evocative, and the brushwork is unified and expressive. What’s really left to add?

Owl's Head, Early Morning, 8X16, available.

The painting of Owl’s Head lobster boats, above, is another example of one I toted around until I realized it was done. I recently popped it into a frame and now I love it just as it is.

I’m in a boat-painting tear, and it’s not always going well. “I’m channeling George Bellows,” I told Bobbi Heath as I hacked farther and farther into the weeds on a canvas that probably ought to go in the woodstove. As always, the problem started out compositionally, but the students in my Zoom critique class suggested that I get rid of a big green dumpster on the dock. That helped, but it’s still way too busy and way too bright—without Bellows’ incisive wit and commentary. No reference photo will save this canvas. It’s overbaked and underthought.

Meanwhile, I met Björn Runquist to practice our chip shots in advance of Camden on Canvas. “There’s a nice angle of Lazy Jack from that bench over there,” I told him. Had either of us been smarter, we might have asked why I wasn’t painting that schooner myself. The answer, riding in my subconscious, is that she’s a daytripper. You can’t trust her. You get her limned in, all beautiful, and she up and leaves you. Sure enough, that’s what happened to Björn. Oops.

Coming Around Owl's Head, 6x8, is available through Cape Ann Plein Air's online sale.

It had rained, so Lazy Jack was running her sails up and down to dry them off. This is a subject that fascinates Ken DeWaard, so I try to avoid it. Occasionally, however, it’s irresistible, because it adds another compositional dimension to boats in harbor. Having learned my lesson, I finished the painting, at top, quickly, before I forgot what I was doing.

I’m absolutely horrible at taking reference photos. I get caught up in the moment and the light. By the time I remember, it’s too late. Still, it’s something I’ve resolved to do better. But taking the painting back into the studio and adding details has the potential to stomp on its beauty. When I’m wondering, “is this painting finished?” the answer is usually yes.