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Tag: Monday Morning Art School

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Monday Morning Art School: what is fine art?

High Surf, 12X16, oil on prepared birch painting surface, $1159 includes shipping and handling in continental US.

What is fine art?

Fine art serves no practical purpose. It’s created for its aesthetic value and emotional impact rather than to do anything useful.

Calling something ‘fine art’ is not an assessment of quality. Something can be utter dreck and still fall under the heading of fine art, and fine craft is frequently better-executed than fine art.

The line between fine art and other disciplines is blurry. For example, Norman Rockwell and N.C. Wyeth were primarily illustrators, but they’re also considered among the best painters of their generation. And by any narrow definition of purpose, most pre-Renaissance painters would be lumped in with illustrators, since one of their main goals was to explain and amplify the Bible. What is fine art, then, is a difficult question to answer.

Sunset over Cadillac Mountain, oil on archival canvasboard, $869 includes shipping and handling.

What is the difference between fine art and commercial art?

The primary difference between fine art and commercial art is intent.

While fine and commercial art are both tools of communication, fine art’s focus is emotional, visual, and intellectual. Commercial art is made to sell a product, service, or idea. It is functional.

Fine art generally seeks to speak to its audience one-on-one, whereas commercial art is directed towards markets.

Fine art is judged on creativity, expression, technical skill, and its intellectual underpinnings. The individual artist and his or her vision is paramount. That means fine artists have the freedom to produce work that nobody cares about (although that’s likely to result in penury) whereas commercial artists generally work under another person’s guidelines and requirements.

Camden Harbor from Curtis Island, oil on canvas, $2782 unframed includes shipping and handling in continental United States.

Do fine art and commercial art use the same media?

There is no distinction between what is used in fine art and what is used in commercial art, although certain media (for example oil painting or lost wax casting) are more suited towards fine art. Other media (for example, neon or digital imaging) are more suited toward commercial art.

Belfast Harbor, oil on archival canvasboard, 14X18, $1,275 unframed includes shipping and handling in continental United States.

What is the difference between fine art and fine craft?

The line between fine art and fine craft is even squishier. Traditionally, fine craft creates functional objects, although that has never been absolute. Grinling Gibbons was Britain’s most celebrated woodcarver. He was an excellent businessman and much of his work falls firmly in the area of fine craft. However, he also produced amazing confections in lime wood that transcend any purpose.

Since both fine art and fine craft can create decorative objects, the distinction is usually a matter of focus.  Fine craft is said to emphasize skill and technique, whereas fine art emphasizes ideas.

The most comfortable distinction is in media. Fine craft includes ceramics, glasswork, textiles, woodworking, goldsmithing and other disciplines where the materials are critical to the results.

Which is best?

Since the 18th century, critics and gallerists have tried to rebrand fine art as an intellectual discipline, (although its practitioners generally remain stubbornly practical). Because of this, fine craft, illustration and commercial art have been perceived as lower art forms. This is an absurd distinction, and one that has led us to the worst excesses of conceptual art.

I’ve been both a commercial and fine artist, and I pursue some crafts. None is inherently better than another; it’s all a question of what you’re called to do.

Reserve your spot now for a workshop in 2025:

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Monday Morning Art School: How long does it take to get good at drawing?

Yesterday’s outdoor church service and picnic, drawing by Carol L. Douglas. I knew I didn’t have time to draw each figure, so I made them a single mass.

On Sundays, I have between 35 and 40 minutes to draw, because that’s how long Quinton Self will preach. After decades of drawing in church, I can tell you exactly where the pastor is in his or her sermon; I almost always wind up at the same time.

It’s helpful to know how long you have to draw, because you can choose your level of finish in advance. A 30-second gesture drawing and a three-hour portrait can both be stylish, finished drawings that tells the viewer something about the subject. But for either to work, they must be planned.

A preparatory drawing for a painting.

What’s the difference?

Gesture drawing captures the essence and movement of a subject quickly, focusing on flow and rhythm. A finished drawing involves refining details and form for a polished representation. The technique in gesture drawing is loose and spontaneous, whereas finished drawings require precision. Gesture drawings may take just a few seconds, while finished drawings can take hours or even days, depending on complexity and detail.

A quick sketch, not more than ten minutes.

Why draw in the first place?

I primarily draw as the first step in designing a painting. It’s far faster than sketching out the idea in paint, only to realize that the composition I had in mind is weak. I’ll draw when I don’t have time to paint or it’s not appropriate (as in church). But all that implies that drawing is somehow lesser than painting. Drawing is a powerful form of expression on its own.

Sometimes I’m the only one who’s amused. From a poem by John Betjeman.

How long does it take to get good at drawing?

It’s a disservice to beginning painters to not insist that they first learn to draw. It’s also a disservice to let them think that drawing is a magic trick or something we’re born knowing innately. Anyone of normal intelligence and vision can draw; they just need to learn how.

It doesn’t take long at all to learn. I taught my friend Amy Vail to draw in one short session; a week later, she was drawing like an old pro.

And sometimes I’ll work out something I don’t plan to paint.

From sketch to realized work

Sometimes you need to sketch before you can draw. Finished drawings require composition, proportion, lighting and perspective, just as finished paintings do. Andrew Wyeth created many drawings before he dragged out his paint kit, and many others just for the sheer joy of drawing.

Knowing how long you have to draw is your best tool to finish strong. That’s not always possible; for example, you will never know how long you have to wait at the doctor’s office. But when you do, you can direct your pencil to what matters in a sensible way.

I don’t have a drawing class scheduled, but if you want to take it next time it’s offered, email me here and I’ll put you on a list.

An apology

Right before I left to teach aboard American Eagle last week, my laptop converted itself to a brick. (That happens to me frequently, and I can’t really explain why.) Friday’s blog post was written on my phone, and it reads like it. Sorry about that.

When I got home, I told my daughter I needed to order a replacement. “Don’t do that!” she said. “Your new one is already there!” I’m typing on it now, using remote desktop. Any bumps in the road going forward are just from reinstalling software and restoring my last backup. I hope this one lasts longer than 29 months I got out of the last one. Sigh.

Reserve your spot now for a workshop in 2025:

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Is the ocean a reflection of the sky?

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

If you’re looking for me this weekend, I’ll be out on Penobsot Bay, teaching my Art and Adventure at Sea workshop aboard American Eagle. That means no connectivity and therefore no blog post on Wednesday. One of the most common questions I’m asked is, how do you paint water. Water is so immense, slippery, and mercurial, that it is impossible to nail it down into a schtick. Instead, the painter must rely on observation.

Heavy Weather (Ketch Angelique), 24X36, oil on canvas, framed, $3985 includes shipping and handling in continental US.

Is the ocean a reflection of the sky?

Reflections are a distortion of the surrounding environment. That’s true whether you’re painting them on the ocean or in a glass of water. These reflections are never going to be consistent but they will follow the laws of physics.

Imagine an ocean that is perfectly flat, and that you can walk on water. Looking at your feet, you can see straight down into the water. It’s not reflecting anything. Looking at a rubber ducky floating ten feet away, you’re looking at the surface at about a 26° angle. You’ll see a reflection of the ducky, the sky, and a glimpse of what’s under the surface. As you look farther away, the angle gets smaller and smaller, and all you see is the reflected sky.

Reflection involves two rays – an incoming (incident) ray and an outgoing (reflected) ray. Physics tells us that the angles are identical but on opposite sides of a tangent. This is why the reflection of a boat needs to be directly below the real object in your painting. You can add other colors into that area, but the reflection can’t be wider than the object it’s reflecting.

Breaking Storm, oil on linen, 30X48, $5579 framed includes shipping and handling in continental US.

Water is transparent, but it has a shiny surface. Some rays of light make it through and bounce back at us from the sea floor. Reflections in glass work the same way. You can see through the glass in the surface that’s facing you, but the curving sides reflect light from around the room. Because glass is imperfect, these reflections will be distorted.

The ocean complicates matters by being bouncy. Even on the calmest day, the surface of water is never perfectly flat; it’s wavy or worse, just like a fun-house mirror. Waves are a series of irregular curves. How they reflect light depends on what plane you’re seeing at that nano-second. It seems like the easiest thing to do is to capture it in a photo and paint from that, but what we see in photos is sometimes very different from what we perceive in life.

Instead, sit a moment with and watch how patterns seem to repeat. They’re never exactly the same, since waves are a stochastic process (think random but repeating). But they’re close enough to discern general patterns.

Beautiful Dream, oil on archival canvasboard, $1449 framed includes shipping and handling in continental US.

Solid objects can also trip you up in their reflections. Consider the humble spoon. It’s concave. That distorts its reflections. There’s no point in trying to predict what you might see; it’s best to just look. Likewise, a mirror only reflects straight back at you if you’re in front of it.

There are times when the ocean makes no reflection at all. Only smooth surfaces reflect light coherently enough to make reflections. That’s why burlap has no reflections. Sometimes, when water is being wind-whipped, it doesn’t have reflections either. To paint such a sea, keep the contrast low. A grey, windy day, or a turbulent sea will have a surface too broken up to reflect anything but the most general light.

Some people say that reflections should be lower in chroma than their objects, but I don’t think that’s true. Often, the ocean seems to concentrate color. Sometimes, the water will be lightest at the horizon; other days there will be a deep band there. However, the farther away, the more its colors shift toward blue-violet.

Paintings by Ray Roberts, courtesy the Page Gallery.

If you’re in town this weekend

Colin Page tells me there’s still room in Oil Painting On Location in Camden, Maine with well-known western artist Ray Roberts. That’s next Saturday and Sunday, September 21-22 from 9-4, and the fee is $300

This workshop will be in oils, but all media are welcome.

Reserve your spot now for a workshop in 2025:

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Monday Morning Art School: do you see what I see?

Marshes along the Ottawa River, Plaisance, 8X10, oil on archival canvasboard, $522 includes shipping and handling in continental US.

There is a young maple tree that I watch from my living room. This morning, it’s green overlaid with bronze. The maple behind it has a golden hue where it’s hit by the sun, but the part in shadow is a very dull blue. Closer to my house, the neighbor’s tree is developing dull violet overtones.

We old-timers say that maple trees start turning color before the kids go back to school. That’s not strictly true, because maple trees change their color throughout the season, starting with the brilliant red buds that we recognize as one of the first signs of springs. New leaves are chartreuse and mature into the full-throated, deep, dull “wall of green” that’s the undoing of many painters. There summer sits for a few hot weeks before it begins to slide inexorably into the cooler air and warmer tones of fall. By autumn’s end, all the deciduous leaves will be gone except those of the young beeches and oaks, which will dry yellow and bronze on their stems and create a quiet susurration in the winter woods.

The Pine Tree State, 6X8, oil on archival canvasboard, $435.

But ask us what color a tree’s leaves are, and we’ll invariably say, “green.” We won’t specify the glossy dark green of summer oak leaves, or the delicate light green of the katsura tree. (I have one in my back yard, and as the leaves dry and fall, they smell like apple pie.)

The green that many painters use for foliage bears about the same relationship to the natural world’s green as Gatorade does to juice.

The Vineyard, oil on linen, 30X40, $5072 framed, includes shipping and handling in continental US.

Do you see what I see?

Sometimes I paint with sunglasses on, because I like painting contre jour and the light hurts my eyes. As much as people tell you not to do that, I never notice much problem matching values; my glasses are limiting the light reflecting from my paint and canvas as much as they are the light bouncing off the ocean. (Where they make a difference is in specular highlights, but forewarned is forearmed.)

Visual perception varies from person to person, but within our own brain, we make consistent adjustments. If you always see things as pinker than I do, you’ll see your paints that way, too, and unconsciously make the correction. Not that we really know what anyone else sees; how could we measure that?

Are you looking or thinking?

We humans are too smart for painting. We paint with our reason rather than our eyes. For example, we ‘know’ that the irises of the eye are round. We paint that without noticing that for most of us, our top lids cut off a wedge of this pie shape. We know that barns are red, so we don’t notice that the bright red barn on a far hill is in fact objectively brown; our minds interpolate the color for us.

“Eastern Manitoba Forest,” Sandilands National Forest, Manitoba

What do you really look like to others?

“Who is this old woman looking at me in the mirror?” my mother once asked me. Most of us carry around a mental snapshot of ourselves that’s a combination of all our prior selves, real or imagined. That can make a candid photo or unexpected compliment tough to take.

That’s, I think, the same phenomenon as described above. Our inner selves know us rather than see us objectively.

What’s the solution?

Time and practice are the great healers for this problem. Meanwhile:

‱ Consciously look at things as if you were seeing them for the first time. 
‱ Take the time to measure; that forces you to be objective.
‱ Draw or paint the same subject from different angles.
‱ Look for subtle color shifts and patterns.
‱ Observe light and shadow without thinking about what object you’re drawing.

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:

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Monday Morning Art School: what is alla prima painting?

Cinnamon Fern, 9X12, oil on archival canvasboard, $869 framed includes shipping and handling in continental US.

Occasionally, I’ll hear someone fumble for a description of a painting and come up with plein air style. Plein air isn’t a style or technique; it simply means painting outdoors instead of in a studio. Plein air allows an artist to capture natural light and colors from direct observation, and it’s a very important movement in art history, starting with John Constable and still popular today.

What these people are groping for is the term alla prima. The confusion lies in the fact that most (although not all) plein air painters also use alla prima technique.

American Eagle in Drydock, 12X16, $1159 unframed includes shipping and handling in continental US.

What is alla prima?

Alla prima (also called au premier coup, wet-on-wet, or direct painting) is a technique where the artist applies paint directly onto the canvas without letting earlier layers dry. This contrasts with indirect painting, which I describe below.

Alla prima is used mostly in oil painting, but it has its equivalent in wet-on-wet watercolor. In alla prima painting, the artist strives for fast, incisive brushwork. It requires skill to avoid making mud, and the artist must work with confidence and speed.

Alla prima has been in use since the Early Netherlandish painters. It became popularized with the rise of Impressionism, but painters as disparate as Frans Hals, Claude Monet, Vincent van Gogh, John Singer Sargent, Chaïm Soutine and Willem de Kooning have all painted directly. Rembrandt van Rijn painted indirectly for the most part, but pointed up his work with alla prima passages.

Skylarking, 24X36, oil on canvas, $3985 framed includes shipping and handling in continental US.

Alla prima paintings are not necessarily completed in one session, although the goal is to not let the bottom layers dry before adding more paint. There is minimal layering, and the focus is on capturing the essence of the subject with bold, confident strokes. It prioritizes expression and immediacy over meticulous detail.

This lends itself to a more expressive, loose style, with visible brushstrokes and a sense of movement. In fact, when people tell me their goal is to ‘get looser,’ what they generally mean is that they want to master alla prima painting.

Indirect painting

Before we had oil painting, we had egg tempera, encaustic, fresco and distemper, none of which lend themselves to bravura brushwork. It’s no surprise, then, that meticulous, detailed painting was the first form oil painting took. Just as tempera is layered, so was early oil painting.  

In indirect painting, the artist builds up the image with transparent layers. Each layer dries completely before the next one is applied. Indirect painting allows for a high level of control and detail. Artists can build up subtle transitions of color and light, creating a realistic, highly polished finish. Indirect painting’s great virtue is that it creates luminosity that’s impossible to achieve with direct painting. That comes, however, at the expense of brilliant color and brushwork.

Belfast Harbor, oil on archival canvasboard, 14X18, $1,275 unframed includes shipping and handling in continental United States.

Indirect paintings start with a monochromatic underpainting or grisaille: While most direct painters do this as well, the grisaille in an indirect painting is intended to show through subsequent layers. This establishes the composition and tonal values retained throughout the piece.

This base layer is allowed to dry and is followed with diluted, transparent layers of paint (called glazes). These are applied over the underpainting to modify the color. Each glaze layer dries before the next is added. White is lousy for glazing, so in a well-painted indirect painting, the light is reflecting through the paint from the grisaille layer.

Indirect painting was widely used during the Renaissance and Baroque periods. (It’s the only way to achieve true chiaroscuro.) There are artists using it today, but they’re doing so almost self-consciously, as a throwback to earlier periods in painting history.

Back in the last millennium, I learned indirect painting first, alla prima second. (Rembrandt’s style was undergoing a miniature renaissance then.) Today, there are far more modern painters pursuing alla prima than indirect painting, but one isn’t inherently better than the other. In fact, with new materials solving the age-old problems of chroma and cracking, who knows if indirect painting is due for a rebirth?   

Reserve your spot now for a workshop in 2025:

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Monday Morning Art School: the color of light

Is the light warm or cool in this painting? Two Peppers, oil on archival canvasboard, 6X8, $435.00

Additive and subtractive light refer to two different color systems, each operating under different rules. The difference between the two is fundamental in color theory. They both affect painting, as one influences what we see, and the other influences what we put down on our paper or canvas.

Is the light warm or cool in this painting? Tricky Mary in a Pea-Soup Fog, oil on canvas, Carol L. Douglas, courtesy private collection.

Additive Light

Additive color mixing involves combining different colors of light to create new colors. The more colors you add, the closer you get to white light.

The primary colors of additive mixing are Red, Green, and Blue (RGB). When you mix these three primary colors of light at full intensity, you get white. By varying the intensity of these lights, you can produce a wide range of colors.

This is the light system of computer screens, televisions, and stage lighting. More importantly, it’s the light system of the world that surrounds us, thanks to our sun.

Subtractive Light

Subtractive color is what happens in printing, painting, and any medium that relies on reflected light. In them, mixing means absorbing (removing) certain wavelengths of light to produce color. Pigments, dyes, and inks all absorb certain colors and reflect others.

The primary colors of subtractive mixing are, more or less, those you learned in kindergarten: cyan (blue), magenta (red), and yellow. In printing, black is added, creating the CMYK model.

Is the light warm or cool in this painting? Michelle Reading, oil on linen, 24X30, $3,478.00 framed, includes shipping and handling in continental US.

Color temperature

Color temperature is a measure of the color of light, expressed in degrees Kelvin (K). It describes the appearance of light and how warm or cool it looks to the human eye. Understanding color temperature is essential in painting.

At lower temperatures, the light appears red or orange (warm colors). As the temperature rises, the light shifts to yellow, white, and eventually blue (cool colors). Yes, that’s counterintuitive, because what we call warm or cool is influenced culturally, not by science.

Now that lightbulbs are tunable for color temperature, we may change how we feel about this, but historically, we’ve said:

-Warm light appears yellow/orange, and creates a cozy or sunlit atmosphere.

-Cool light appears blue/white, and creates a crisp and focused atmosphere.

-Neutral light: doesn’t have a color
 and neither does its shadow.

Manipulating these in painting gives paintings an overall mood, which is why photographers covet the golden hours of early morning and late afternoon.

Is the light warm or cool in this painting? View from Bald Mountain, 24X36, oil on canvas, Carol L. Douglas, private collection.

The color of shadows

Shadows being the absence of light, they are also the complement of the light source (what’s left when the light is blocked). However, they’re not the complement within the subtractive light system, but the additive light system. It’s not as simple as saying “it’s gold light, so the shadow is purple,” although most people wouldn’t quibble about that.

Every color of light has RGB values, which are a system for representing colors on digital displays. We could find the complement, or shadow color, by subtracting the RGB values of the light from 255, which would give us a blue-violet. However, that would be an absolutely insane solution to the question. Instead, use your eyes, which will tell you that the shadows of evening are blue or violet. Or, better yet, use your imagination along with your eyes.

Bouncy, bouncy light

There are some surroundings where reflected color is so strong that it blows out this kind of light structure. The greens of the deep forest are one, sitting under an awning is another, and my studio with its natural wood paneling is a third. In these instances, the dominant color influences everything.

Learn more

I got home to find that I only have one more seat left in Applied Color Theory, which starts tomorrow. But there are always my workshops, below.

Reserve your spot now for a workshop in 2025:

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Monday Morning Art School: human vision and color theory

Rachel’s Garden, ~24×35, watercolor on Yupo, museum-grade plexiglass, $3985 includes shipping and handling in continental US.

Is human vision subjective? Absolutely; so are cameras (although they cheat less than our eyes). We don’t perceive things as they really are, and the gap between what we do perceive and what is ‘real’ is probably unmeasurable. It’s no surprise that witnesses often report wildly different events.

Bunker Hill overlook, watercolor on Yupo, approx. 24X36, $3985 framed includes shipping and handling in continental US.

How our eyes work

No other organ is quite like our eyes; they’re really an extension of our brains. The retina and optic nerve develop from the same tissue as the brain and that direct connection is maintained through life. The eyes are not merely sensors; they’re processing information before sending it up to the brain. They use the same neurotransmitters and signalling mechanisms as the brain. No wonder they’re so good at fooling us!

The primary visual cortex processes and interprets the signals received from the retina. That gives us the interpretive part of vision, where we sort color, motion, and depth. It’s there that we integrate and interpret visual data into coherent images and meaningful information.

Clary Hill Blueberry Barrens, watercolor on Yupo, ~24X36, $3985 framed includes shipping and handling in continental US.

How our eyes trick us

All humans have tunnel vision, some of us more than others. We focus on what’s in the center of our vision. What’s peripheral falls off, to various degrees depending on the person. One of the great lies of painting and photography is that they smooth out this tunnel vision.

There’s also wide variation in the distribution and density of rods and cones, which affect how we perceive color. Then there’s the condition of our lenses and corneas. (That’s why I keep hoping I’ll qualify for cataract surgery, but it never happens.)

Once the eyes send their signals to our brain, the relationship to ‘reality’ becomes even more tenuous. It appears that different individuals process various aspects of vision differently in their visual cortex. Our interpretation of what we see is also influenced by our experiences, our mood, and the degree to which we’re attending. And of course, lighting affects how we see (and how we fill in what’s missing).

Context affects how we see color

Certain visual patterns can trick our brains into seeing things that are not there or misinterpreting what we think we see. This is the basis of optical illusion, and it’s helpful for the painter to understand. Colors look different depending on what’s around them. Prolonged exposure to a particular color can create afterimages that affect how we see subsequent colors.

Most importantly, our expectations alter our color perception. For example, knowing that a distant roof is red can mislead painters into painting it brilliant scarlet, even when the atmospheric color shift has made it a far softer tone.

Path to the Lake, ~24X36, watercolor on Yupo, framed in museum-grade plexiglass, $2985 includes shipping and handling in continental US.

How do we sort all this out?

If we could separate what we see from what we ‘know,’ we’d be left with simple patches of light and color, because that’s all vision is. It’s very hard to do that, but the more we strive for that, the better our representation is.

After all, in our field of vision, things are not inherently large or small, close or near; our brain sorts the data and makes these comparisons.

Why am I thinking about this stuff?

I’m swotting to teach a new class, Applied Color Theory, on Tuesday evenings, starting on August 20. And it all starts with the brain, so that’s what I’m thinking about first.

There are just a few seats left, so if you’re interested you should enroll as soon as possible.

Reserve your spot now for a workshop in 2025:

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Top ten questions for artists

A Woodlot of her own, 9X12, oil on archival canvasboard, $869 framed includes shipping and handling in continental US.

I’ve written about why we do art and about the artists’ statements we all loathe. Targeted questions sometimes help us think through the bigger issues with greater clarity. I hope you can use these questions for artists as a jumping off point for your own thinking.

  1. What inspired you to create this piece?

    The answer for me is always:
  • The idea fascinated me;
  • It was a challenge; or,
  • I thought it was beautiful.

How would you answer that question about one of your paintings?

Best Buds, 11X14, oil on canvasboard, $1087 framed includes shipping and handling in continental US.

2. What is your creative process?

My painting process is outlined here and here. This is the same process I teach, so it’s straightforward.

For areas outside my discipline, I start by learning the technology. For me, this is hands-on and spatial; for example, I’d rather work with a printmaker than read a book or watch a movie about lithography.

What is your working process?

3. How do you come up with your ideas?

I have more ideas than I could ever execute, and when they’re still rattling around my head, I’m always convinced they’re the best ideas ever. Are you ever short of inspiration? If so, how do you deal with that?

4. What materials or techniques do you use?

I’m conversant with oils, watercolors, acrylics, pastel and gouache—in fact, with most two-dimensional art forms. Drawing is personal for me. I wish I knew more about 3D art, and particularly about building things.

What is your preferred medium? What medium would you like to spend more time with?

In Control (Grace and her Unicorn), 24X30, $3,478 framed, oil on canvas, includes shipping in continental United States.

5. What is the story behind this piece?

There’s sometimes a very simple answer, such as with In Control: Grace and her Unicorn. Sometimes there’s no story at all.

Can you articulate stories for your paintings, or are they less tangible?

6. How long does it take you to finish a painting?

This is the most-commonly asked of all questions for artists. The only proper answer is that made by James McNeill Whistler during court testimony in 1878. Whistler was asked by a lawyer about the stiff price he had set for a painting.

“Oh, two days! The labour of two days, then, is that for which you ask two hundred guineas!”

“No;—I ask it for the knowledge of a lifetime.”

The Servant, oil on linen, 36X40, $4042.50 framed, includes shipping and handling in continental US.

7. What are you trying to convey?

I suppose if you must ask that, I’ve failed, but if it’s in an artist’s statement, I’d just say my work is a pale imitation of the glories of God’s creation.

What are you trying to say in your work? Can it be reduced to words?

8. Do you have any upcoming projects or exhibitions?

It’s good to have something in your future. I’ll be at an opening in Camden on Tuesday, and then there is Camden Art Walk for August-October. Meanwhile I have three workshops remaining this season. And I’ll be at Sedona Plein Air in October. There are also a few one-day plein air events scattered in there.

If your calendar is overbooked, you’ll burn yourself out, but if you aren’t working toward a goal, you may not be working hard enough. If you’re not yet advanced enough to be showing regularly, a class or workshop is a good way to hold yourself accountable.

9. Why are you an artist?

I’ve been an artist since I was old enough to sit up. I’ve been lucky enough to be a professional artist for the past 28 years. I tell people it’s either that or greeting at Walmart, but in fact I do it because I have a pressing need to communicate. How about you?

10. How do you handle criticism or feedback about your work?

In that it’s morally wrong to crush the skulls of your enemies, I’m forced to be philosophical about rejection. The more it happens the better I deal with it, but at times, I admit it’s painful.

Usually I just kvetch. How about you?

Reserve your spot now for a workshop in 2025:

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Monday Morning Art School: angle drawing

Slightly more obtuse than 90°, almost exactly 90°, more acute than 90°. It’s far easier to see when you can compare it to accurate reference (and no, you don’t have to know those terms).

During last week’s workshop, Beth, Sharon and I were looking at a house on Pearl Street in Camden. I’d given them a lesson on two-point perspective and then said, “That’s just so you understand the principle. In real life, you’re going to measure angles rather than draw to a vanishing point.” That’s harder to do, because angle drawing takes practice. However, all drawing rests on angles and measurement.

“That gable end looks like it’s at a 90° angle,” Sharon said. Beth and I immediately disagreed. Of course we were roughly twenty feet away from her, so what we were seeing wasn’t what she was seeing. I heaved myself up (it was a hot day) and looked at what she was doing. She was holding an L-shaped composition finder up to the sky. Immediately I grasped an important new idea.

The angles that matter, very roughly, because it’s hot as a pistol in my driveway.

If you hold something that you know to be a right angle up to the angle you’re measuring, you can see how it deviates.

We’re all carrying around something that’s got a right angle: our sketchbooks. Failing that, we always have our cell phones.

Sharon’s view was, in fact, exactly 90°, but the idea was also useful to Beth and me. From our location, the angle formed by the gable end was about 10° flatter than Sharon’s view. I experimented holding my sketchbook up to various angles in the landscape and was pleased at how easily I could see angles.

(By the way, a roof where the gable end is at 90° looking straight-on would be a 12/12 pitch, which is pretty steep. Most of the time, when you see a 90° angle, it’s because you’re looking at it from off to one side.)

What if it’s so far off 90° that it’s hard to make a comparison?

I was on a roll, so I estimated other angles using Sharon’s idea. That was fine until I was so far off 90° that making a comparison no longer worked.

Drawing a hashmark parallel to the top and bottom of the fence was easy. Taking a photograph of those marks was hard.

What if I held my sketchbook level with the ground and marked that angle as a hash mark in the corner, I asked myself. Then I can easily translate that line into a parallel one where it belongs in my sketch. And, yes, that worked too.

My neighbor’s fence. Three minutes, tops, because I was standing along Route 1.

Angle drawing is important

Angles are critical to representing perspective. They also create the illusion of depth and space. Being able to sight-draw them allows us to draw objects from different viewpoints.

But, wait, there’s more. Angle drawing is important for:

Measurement: it’s often easier to see spatial relationships through angles than with the thumb-and-pencil method of drawing. (Fast, loose  painting rests on a base of good drawing. If you haven’t been taught to measure with a pencil, start here, here and here.)

Anatomy: Angles are essential for capturing the relationships between different parts of the body. This is particularly important in drawing limbs, posture and facial features.

Shading: Angles influence how light falls on an object and how shadows are cast.

Dynamism: Angles contribute to a sense of movement and energy in a drawing.

Foreshortening: You can’t foreshorten an object if you can’t see the angles, period.

That means any trick that makes angle drawing easier, I’m going to use, and I hope you do, too. Thank you, Sharon.

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Monday Morning Art School: what is a fine art print?

Early Spring on Beech Hill, oil on canvasboard, Carol L. Douglas, 12X16, $1449 framed includes shipping in continental US.

This past weekend, I sat down with a pencil and a template and signed and numbered 75 prints of Early Spring on Beech Hill for Coastal Mountains Land Trust. I’m happy to do this little thing; I’m on their properties almost daily. If I’m not up Beech Hill, I’m on Ragged or Bald Mountains. If you look at a list of their preserves, you realize how much they shape everyday life here in midcoast Maine.

Back in the day, I sold a lot of prints. They are a great way for people of modest means to start collecting art, and they can introduce young people to your work.

Signing work with a template. If you think you can’t misspell your own name, try writing it over and over again.

What is a fine art print?

A fine art print is a high-quality reproduction of an original artwork. There’s overlap between fine art prints and the art of printmaking. For example, until the turn of the last century, etching was both an artform and a way to reproduce other artwork for publication.

The gap between fine art prints and what you can get from your ink-jet printer has narrowed. Even the cheapest art book published in this century has better illustrations than an old Janson’s History of Art, which was once the preferred text for art history classes.

The goal being to handle the paper as little as possible, I used a paint stirrer to push the pieces in place inside their acrylic sleeve.

Fine art prints are made with an eye to durability, color accuracy, and aesthetic integrity. They are often produced in limited editions and signed and numbered by the artist. The main printing methods for fine art prints include:

  • GiclĂ©e Printing: This is the most common method of making small-run art prints. GiclĂ©e printers have higher resolution than standard inkjet printers, and use a 12-color printing system instead of the standard 4-color CMYK system. They use high-quality inks that can last a lifetime, and the prints are resistant to damage from smudging, sun, and humidity.
  • Commercial Lithography: That’s the traditional printing process used in bookmaking and periodicals, and is done on an offset press. It’s suitable for mass runs, so if you were to buy a print of, say, Constable’s The Hay Wain from the National Gallery it would be made in this manner.
  • Screen printing, where ink is pushed through a mesh screen onto paper or canvas. This is how you’d reproduce your paintings on textiles, pens, coffee mugs, or huge signs, if you were so inclined.
Seventy-five prints signed and ready to rumble.

Limited edition prints

Collectors often seek out limited edition prints due to their rarity and because they might appreciate in value. There is no difference in quality between the limited edition print and its open-run cousin; the value rests in the artist’s signature. For example, I can never make another limited-edition run of Early Spring on Beech Hill, because I’ve already done a set run of 75 copies.

The quality question

My color laser printer does a fine job of printing, and with the proper paper its output would be highly durable, but I wouldn’t use it for high-end prints; it’s too small and there are visible differences in quality. There are many sources online for archival-quality giclĂ©e prints at a reasonable price.

Most of the quality of your print rests in the photography, not the printing. In the past, I’ve had my paintings shot by a service, but I now have a high-end camera. If you go that route, however, you need to understand color correction, compression, and other issues that affect output.

Should you sell prints?

That’s a question only you can answer. Prints can increase your market reach and give you a more consistent revenue stream. If your print becomes popular, it can generate revenue over time.

However, there’s still the initial investment of time and money to consider. And you never get away from marketing. Prints are an already-saturated market, although a much larger one than the market for original paintings.

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