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Tag: Monday Morning Art School

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Monday Morning Art School: how important are collectors, anyways?

Marshall Point, oil on archival canvasboard, 9X12, $696, includes shipping and handling in continental US.

The first time you sell a painting to a friend, you feel a little guilty, as if it’s a pity sale. (That’s different from pity marketing, which is when artists relate their struggles to generate sales. Manipulating others’ sympathy is exploitative, it makes all artists look bad, and I wish people wouldn’t do it.)

The second or third time that person buys a painting, you start to suspect that, against all odds, they actually like your work. You have a collector. As you get more well-known, you’ll collect more collectors, but those first ones are everything to the fledgling artist.

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

My first serious collectors were Dean and Karolina. We went to church together and were friends. I knew they collected art, so when they bought their first painting from me, I was flattered. Then Dean asked me to paint a portrait of his children as a gift for his wife. He gave me an absolute deadline. That was a great lesson, as I realized that I could finish a painting with the same professionalism that I’d once finished design projects for customers.

Karolina was a great support when I was a mother of young kids without family nearby. Once she helped me pull all the wall-to-wall carpet from a house we’d just bought. As you can imagine, I’d love her if she never bought any art from me, but in fact she bought a painting just last year.

Eric’s Barber Shop (midnight walk), oil on archival canvasboard, 9X12, $869 framed, includes shipping and handling in continental US.

I met Martha when she came to my house at 0:dark:30 to watch William and Kate’s wedding. Our mutual friend Mary brought her, but we’d been corresponding for months. Martha bought her first painting from me at a Black Friday sale shortly thereafter. By the time she got married, we were close enough friends that I was invited to her wedding in Scotland; I brought them a painting as a wedding gift.

Her husband asked me to paint her portrait. It turned out to be as much a portrait of their drawing room as of Martha and her dog. Later, the room was destroyed by a catastrophic flood, which makes the painting that much more meaningful. I’m currently in the early phases of another painting for him.

Dean and Karolina were my friends before they ever bought a painting. Martha and I became close friends over subsequent years. I’ve had the good fortune to sell paintings to my friends, and to become friends with people I’ve sold paintings to.

Birches, 6X8, oil on archival canvasboard, $435 framed includes shipping and handling in continental US.

Your friends are perfectly free to ignore your art career. Most of them will, in fact. You may never meet your collectors if they’re buying through a gallery or online. But anyone who likes your work enough to own it is likely to share common emotional and intellectual ground with you, or the work would never have spoken to him or her in the first place. It’s no surprise that the lines of friendship and art often blur.

No artist can survive without collectors. Beyond that, my life has been immeasurably enriched by so many people who’ve pondered my paintings and drawings, corresponded with me about them, and, yes, occasionally purchased them. Thank you all.

For any of you who want to start collecting, here’s 10% off any painting on my website. Just enter the codeTHANKYOUPAINTING10.

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Monday Morning Art School: searching for meaning in Sedona

Winter Lambing, 36×48, oil on linen, $6231 framed includes shipping in continental US.

I’m in Sedona, AZ, painting in the 19th annual Sedona Plein Air Festival. I’ve written many times about how the question of meaning bedevils me. This place, with its crystals, vortexes, ley lines, and spiritualism ought to be chock full of meaning, but it’s not. That stuff is too glib and superficial for me.

For artists tucked into a corner of the Sedona landscape, it can be relentless. Casey Cheuvront was painting on a rocky promontory when a woman stopped in front of her to give her clients a spiel about the magnetic energy of the rocks. Another guide talked about how we were in a direct line between Cathedral Rock and Airport Mesa, which apparently confers special powers. Meanwhile, I was discussing reincarnation and non-attachment with a lovely gentleman from Princeton, NJ.

Midnight at the Wood Lot, oil on canvasboard, 12X16 $1,449.00 framed includes shipping in continental US.

Starting with an overarching concept like Sedona’s famous spirituality can easily veer into the sophomoric. That doesn’t mean that art can’t use symbols, metaphor, and allegory to convey deep layers of meaning. It’s just best to avoid the trite.

To me, one of the most important reasons to paint en plein air is to celebrate God’s creation. That has an emotional resonance with me; I am constantly struck anew by the variety and beauty of this world. Can I translate that in my paintings in a way that evokes an emotional response? Only if I paint something that also resonates with my viewers’ experiences and perspectives. Just as I am left cold by new age spirituality, others may be unable to engage with my deep feelings about the created world.

Lonely cabin, 8X10, oil on canvasboard, $652 framed includes shipping in continental US.

Ultimately, all we have is our own personal perspective. Our experiences, beliefs, and values add depth and authenticity to our creative expressions. That doesn’t mean I need to be overt about my ideas. They color my perception, and those who think the way I do will, hopefully, find my work relatable.

Of course, none of this works without paying attention to the formal elements of design. All meaning rests on technical skill. You may feel something deeply but be unable to communicate that to your viewer because you don’t have a cohesive visual language.

The Late Bus, 8X6, oil on canvasboard, $435 framed includes shipping in continental US.

Yesterday, Hadley Rampton and I demoed together at the Sedona Arts Center. It was an interesting way to do it, because our styles are very different, and the audience asked pertinent questions. When I finished, I asked the people watching what I should name my painting.

“How does it make you feel?” a man asked me.

“Oh, larky, I think, because I had a lot of fun painting it.”

“That’s not what it conveys to me at all,” he said. “To me, it’s pensive.”

Sometimes, what you think you’re painting is not at all what comes through. Other times, there is ambiguity or multiple tracks of meaning within the same painting. Viewers derive their own associations, and they may in fact be what you were thinking subconsciously all along. Although I’m having fun at this event, I have some serious matters clouding my immediate horizon.

The opposite of subtlety is intentional storytelling, where you’re crafting a narrative that’s explicit and easily comprehensible. Since a painting is essentially a snapshot that captures a moment in time, you must work to tell the before and after. Narrative painting can convey complex ideas, sometimes better than words can.

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Monday Morning Art School: it’s all in the preparation

The Pine Tree State, 6X8, oil on canvasboard, $435 framed includes shipping in continental US.

When I’m teaching workshops and classes, I frequently ask students, “What’s your takeaway lesson here?” Last week my workshop students got a deep dive into two artists’ working method: Andrew Wyeth‘s, through a guided tour of the Farnsworth Art Museum, and Colin Page‘s, from the maestro himself.

“Painting is easy,” Colin said. “It’s the preparation that’s hard.” I smiled, because that’s something I frequently say as well. Wyeth didn’t whisper it from beyond the grave, but his methodology is spelled out in the museum. For his studio paintings, he was a consummate draftsman who made many sketches and paid meticulous attention to detail.

Bracken Fern, 12X9, oil on canvasboard, $869 framed includes shipping in continental US.

Students frequently ask me how to achieve loose brushwork. My first question is why they want that, as it’s not a universal value. Rather it’s a question of style. Linear painting is based on line and boundary; the artist sees in clear shapes and outline. Painterly painting focuses on the interactions of masses, shadows, and merged shapes. An example of a contemporary linear landscape painter is Linden Frederick. An example of a contemporary painterly landscape painter is Kevin Macpherson. Neither style is ‘better,’ they’re just different. And there are many painters (including me) who work in the middle somewhere.

When Arthur Rubinstein was asked if he believed people when they told him he was the greatest pianist of the 20th century, he replied, “Not only I don’t believe them, I get very angry when I hear that, because it is absolute, sheer, horrible nonsense. There isn’t such a thing as the greatest pianist of any time. Nothing in art can be the best. It is only… different.”

What is a universal value in art is assurance, and that rests on the back of solid preparation. Rubinstein joked that he was lazy and didn’t like to practice, but he still spent 6-9 hours a day at the piano. “And a strange thing happened. I began to discover new meanings, new qualities, new possibilities in music that I have been regularly playing for more than 30 years.”

Larky Morning at Rockport Harbor, 11X14, on archival canvasboard, $869 unframed includes shipping in continental US.

The same thing is true of painting, as is its obverse-the less preparation you do, the more you’ll fumble in performance. And the more you must redraw, reposition, reset values, or restate, the less immediate and assured your brushwork will be. That’s as true in oils, acrylics and pastels as it is in watercolor.

What does that mean for the emerging artist? At a minimum, you should do a carefully-realized sketch, considered in terms of compositional patterns of darks and lights. This sketch should be moved to the canvas or paper accurately; if that requires gridding, then you should grid. Colors should be tested first for value, and then to how they relate to the overall key of the painting.

Sea Fog, Castine, 9X12, oil on archival canvasboard, $869 framed includes shipping in continental US

Yes, I know artists who don’t do these things. They can be sorted into two groups. The first are those who are very experienced. They’ve learned what corners they can cut (which are not the same for everyone). The second are impatient beginning and intermediate painters. They almost always fail in the preparation, and then they wonder why they’re flailing around in the painting stage.

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Monday morning art school: how do I know I’m finished?

Dawn Wind, Twin Lights, 9X12, oil on archival canvasboard, $869 includes shipping and handling in the continental US.

“I know it’s not done, but it’s where I stop because I’m afraid I’ll mess up what I have,” a student messaged me. She was painting in a plein air event where ‘unfinished’ and ‘overdone’ were both errors.

“I think you won’t mess it up, and you can always scrape back to this level if you do,” I replied. She was painting in oils, which have the advantage of a partial undo. In fact, that can be the resolution of many problems, because the average of your errors, revealed by scraping back, is often the right answer.

Apple Blossom Time, 9×12, oil on canvasboard, $869 includes shipping and handling in the continental US.

For most of us, figuring out when a piece is finished is an almost-intuitive process that varies from one piece to another. My answer is, “I’m done when I’m sick of working on it,” but that isn’t particularly helpful advice. There are, of course, some objective factors guiding me:

Intention: I often start with a specific idea for a piece. I’ll never realize that 100%, because the human mind has its own ideas. However, I want to know that I’ve at least made my point.

Composition: I’m a bear about understanding the composition from the very beginning. If I haven’t done that, no technique at the end can save the painting. That said, there may be adjustments needed to strengthen my original idea-darks restated, or brushwork softened or made more precise.

Bracken Fern, 9X12, oil on canvasboard, $869 framed includes shipping in continental US.

Technique: Have I built up my paint level to a satisfying conclusion? Is my brushwork fluid? Are there places of rest? Are there passages that just need more energy?

Emotional impact: This is a question that’s best asked in the design phase, but if I finish and it’s just meh, I might need to ask why. If it’s that I have no emotional connection with the work, I will scrape it out. However, sometimes the emotional impact of a piece is dampened by overworking passages, and that is something I can put right. In oils or pastels, I can scrape or brush out the offending passage. In watercolor the solution is usually to start again. The second version of a watercolor is often much looser than the first. (That’s one of many reasons to paint the subject in grisaille before you jump to color.)

My energy levels: I’m not superhuman. That feeling of exhaustion can be the signal that it’s time to quit before I do something stupid. Or, it just might mean I have to come back another day.

Feedback: I rarely ask for feedback, and then only from a very small cadre of fellow painters. However, you may feel you need critique. In the context of a class, that’s important: you should be open to new ideas. At a painting event, you run the risk of chasing back and forth trying to incorporate everyone’s comments into your work. That’s a sure-fire way to wreck a painting.

Church & Maine, 22X30, Cooper Dragonette, Oil on Panel, 2023. This is a great example of a highly-detailed, highly-finished painting that is nevertheless not overdone. (Courtesy of the artist.)

Personal Style: I’m usually a moderately-loose painter. That influences when I consider a work finished. You may be much more detailed and polished. While the technique remains the same, the endpoint differs. A person who is making a highly-detailed painting like Cooper Dragonette‘s fabulous painting of downtown Belfast, above, will take much more time getting the details right.

Deadlines: In some cases, I’m working against external factors like customer-dictated deadlines. I have always found that such deadlines sharpen my focus, but others may find them horrifying.

Endless revisions: Almost every artist has, at one time or another, had a painting in the studio that won’t leave. I’ve had a few of these, upon which I dabbled until flummoxed, only to pull them out again in six months to dabble again. For me, this never ends well; I might as well have tossed them at the beginning.

Ultimately, the decision about when we’re finished is highly individual. It involves technical assessment, emotional connection, and our own unique creative process. As we gain experience and refine skills (which we should do throughout our lives) that endpoint changes.

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Monday Morning Art School: composition is about light, not objects

Fog over Whiteface Mountain, 11×14, $1087 includes shipping in continental US.

“From now on, I’m gonna stop thinking about composition being about things,” my correspondent wrote, “and start thinking about it as shadows.”

I feel like a deficient teacher, because composition is always about light and dark. Hue, chroma, line and objects may feed into that, but it’s value that makes a composition weak or strong.

Beauchamp Point, Autumn Leaves, 12X16, oil on archival canvasboard, $1449 includes shipping in continental United States.

I ask my critique students to analyze their compositions based on Edgar Payne‘s exhaustive list of possible compositions in Composition of Outdoor Painting. (This used book is now so expensive that I can no longer recommend buying it. Check it out of the library.) The idea isn’t to slavishly follow one of his designs; it’s to understand whether you have an underlying design in the first place, and how you might strengthen it.

But these compositional armatures are always about value, even when that value takes the form of an object. There are many times when objects and shadows coincide; for example, a large piñon and some small creosote bushes can combine in a dark triangular mass, because they’re both dark objects usually set against light-colored grasses. On the other hand, sidewalk chalk isn’t going to create any kind of structure against a concrete sidewalk unless the artist thinks about the shadows rather than the chalk.

Quebec Brook, oil on canvasboard, 12X16, $1449 framed includes shipping in continental US.

By now, most of you have gotten the message that a painting needs to compel on a tiny screen (or from thirty feet) as well from three feet or three inches.

You do this with value. It’s not enough, for example, that an object is at a diagonal; you must make a persuasive shift between light and dark along that diagonal. This is the primary lesson a painter can take from Winslow Homer’s incredible seascapes.

This is also why plein air painters dislike murky grey skies; they make it harder to find compelling shadow patterns.

Composition rests on the following principles:

  • The human eye responds first to shifts in value, and following that, in shifts in chroma and hue;
  • We follow hard edges and lines;
  • We filter out passages of soft edges and low contrast, and indeed we need them as interludes of rest;
  • We like divisions of space that aren’t easily solved or regular.
Best Buds, 11X14, oil on canvasboard, $1097 framed includes shipping in continental US.

But I just want to paint what I feel!

Music, sculpture, poetry, painting, and every other fine art form relies on internal, formal structure to be intelligible. This is easiest to see in music, where the beginner starts by learning chords and patterns. These patterns are (in western music, anyway) universal, and they’re learned long before the student starts writing complex musical compositions. In other words, you start at the very beginning.

Music is an abstract art because it’s all about tonal relationships, with very little realism needed to make us understand the theme. A composer doesn’t need little bird sounds to tell us he’s writing about spring. Likewise, the painter doesn’t need to festoon little birdies on his canvas to tell us he’s painting about spring. That should already be apparent in the light, structure and tone of his work.

The strength of the painting is laid down before the artist first applies paint, in the form of a structural idea-a sketch or series of sketches that work out a plan for the painting.

All good painting rests on good abstract design. Take a good look at Christina’s World by Andrew Wyeth. Whatever meaning we’re supposed to take from it, it’s a strong triangular composition juxtaposed with a mid-century curving line.

Still, most realist painters don’t spend nearly enough time considering abstract design, even when they understand the critical importance of line and value. Christina’s World doesn’t rely much on hue for its impact. It’s a washed-out pink, a lot of dull greens and golds, and a significant amount of grey. And yet it was the most successful figurative painting of the 20th century. Wyeth was almost obsessive in his drawing habits; that translates into powerful finished paintings, driven by value.

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Monday Morning Art School: How do I get started in painting?

Bonnie and Laurie had never painted before. By the end of the trip, they had a system in place to keep working and improving.

I just got off schooner American Eagle, where I was teaching watercolor. (Next year’s workshop will be September 15-19, but the details aren’t solid.) I always have a few beginning painters mixed in this group. They start not believing they can do it, and end by feeling they’re on the road to mastery. Painting is hard, but anyone can learn it.

Materials

This is an area where beginning painters can go spectacularly wrong, buying hundreds of dollars’ worth of stuff they don’t need and won’t use.

Often, beginning painters will buy cheap materials because they’re worried they might not like painting. That’s akin to buying a kazoo and deciding that you can’t make music. Bad art supplies will just frustrate you.

The inverse of that is buying lots of stuff you don’t need, because you’re not sure what is necessary. I freely distribute my supply lists for watercolors, oils, pastels and acrylics. If you stick with them, you can paint for the lowest cost possible.

My online class, The Perfect Palette, is meant for oil painters, but beginning painters in any media will benefit from learning how pigments work.

The seine boat is a surprisingly comfortable place to paint.

Drawing

Drawing is the human’s basic tool of communication, and it’s never more important than when planning a painting. The good news is, anyone can learn to draw. If there’s not a class near you, start with this book.

Classes and workshops

Classes and workshops are enormously helpful, which is why I teach so many of them. But a class is only as good as its teacher, so ask around. If you’re not interested in a classical style, an atelier might not be the right place for you to study. Likewise, a loosey-goosey class will drive a serious student mad. There are plenty of good, conscientious teachers out there who steer a middle course. Wherever you go, make sure the teacher follows an accepted protocol of painting and knows how to teach it.

Don’t rule out an online class. I’ve been teaching online since the pandemic, and I believe students learn more from it than from live weekly classes, because the interaction is, paradoxically, closer.

A grisaille is a way to simplify color decisions and work out your composition before you commit to a painting.

Inspiration

Most new painters start working from photographs. However, painting from life is much more instructive. Photos distort size relationships and colors, and they do all the thinking for you. Even experienced artists can find themselves slavishly following the photo instead of using it as a starting point.

You can paint any subject for practice: the house across the street, your tree, or an old barn you love. Seek out a plein air painting group in your area to give you the courage and camaraderie to paint in public. If the weather is bad, set up a still life in a corner of your studio and paint that. Anything can be a still life, including your sleeping dog, the jacket you threw over a chair, or your kids’ toys.

Peas in a pod: painters in the seine boat, soaking up the sun.

Developing your own unique style

In short, don’t worry about style. It comes from assured brushwork and color management, and those come from practice. Seeking a style in the early days of painting just puts you in a box that’s hard to escape. Instead, let it develop naturally, over time.

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Monday Morning Art School: thinking outside the box

The Logging Truck, 16X20, oil on canvas, $2029 includes shipping in continental US.

Bob the Builder was making humorous suggestions about how a surgeon might fix my husband’s spine. A little expanding foam, some nuts and bolts strategically deployed…

“Ah, thinking outside the box, are we?” Doug laughed.

“Nope, just being silly,” Bob answered. “Unless you can build the box, define the box and work inside the box you're not thinking outside the box. You're just being random.”

Albert Einstein challenged classic Newtonian physics by arguing that time and space are relative, but he did so after earning a doctorate in physics. Elon Musk is a business disruptor, but he holds degrees in physics and business (from the Wharton School). Warren Buffett acquired an incredible $121 billion with value investing but he’s another Wharton School (and Columbia Business School) graduate. And the list goes on and on.

The Late Bus, 8X6, oil on canvasboard, $435 framed.

There are two kinds of behavior that aren’t thinking outside the box. The first is excessive orthodoxy. In investment, medicine and—yes—painting, that’s a strategy that inevitably leads to failure. “No change is itself change,” my friend Lois Geiss was fond of telling me.

The second problem is more common among artists, and that’s confusing technique with hidebound conservatism. Those who’ve made the greatest intellectual leaps in painting, like Einstein, Musk, and Buffett, first learned the conventional way it’s done.

I’m not advocating for a college degree in art here—in fact, with prices as they are I think private art colleges are bad value for money. But I am advocating for learning traditional technique.

Dance of the Wood Nymphs, by Albert Pinkham Ryder. It was probably a lovely painting when he finished it, but his disregard of commonly-accepted protocol meant it was an archival disaster.

Creativity rests on technique

Once a friend was fretting about how she couldn’t find an uncomplicated muffin recipe. “But they’re all just lists of ingredients,” I said. “You always assemble them in the same order: sift the dry ingredients together, beat the wet ingredients together, and then fold the two mixtures into each other.”

I mentioned this to Jane Bartlett, who remarked that when she taught shibori she frequently told her students that nobody owns technique. This is a very apt observation for both baking and the fine arts. There is nothing one can patent about artistic technique, any more than one could patent the order of operations for baking.

Painting is so straightforward that departing from the accepted protocols is often foolish. For example, there’s excessive oiling-out or painting into wet glazes. The tonalist Albert Pinkham Ryder did something similar in the 19th century, and his works have almost all darkened or totally disintegrated.

One can learn a lot from books, but one can’t learn everything.  A decade ago, my goddaughter told me she was going to make an apple pie. Her parents ran a Chinese restaurant, so all of them are excellent cooks. However, pie wasn’t in their repertory. Imagine my surprise when this was what she came up with:

Elegantly layered, but it’s not an apple pie. Not everything can be learned from books.

Ten years later, Sandy’s helped me make many apple pies. She knows what one looks like and tastes like. It helps to have assembled an apple pie under someone else’s tutelage. The same is—of course—true of painting and drawing. Yes, one can learn a great deal about technique from books, videos, and visits to art galleries, but a good teacher really does help.

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Monday Morning Art School: Painting the ocean

Breaking storm, 48X30, oil on canvas, $5,579 framed includes shipping in continental US

“How do you paint water?” is probably the most common question I’m asked. It reminds me of that old joke:

“Where does an elephant sleep?” 
“Anywhere he wants.”

Water is so immense, slippery, and mercurial, that it is impossible to nail it down into a schtick. And thank God for that.

Instead, the painter of water must rely on observation. 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.

Camden Harbor, Midsummer, oil on canvas, 24X36 $3,985 framed includes shipping in continental US.

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.

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.

Drying Sails, 9X12, oil on canvasboard, $869 framed.

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.

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.

Fogbank, oil on archival canvasboard, 14X18, $1594 framed includes shipping in continental US

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.

It’s always best to paint the reflections at the same time you’re doing the rest of the painting, rather than adding them as an afterthought. They’re a fundamental part of the design.

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.

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Monday Morning Art School: the color of fall

Autumn farm, oil on canvasboard, $1449 framed.

According to the USDA, “a warm wet spring, favorable summer weather, and warm sunny fall days with cool nights should produce the most brilliant autumn colors.” We’re well on our way, having had plenty of moisture (and therefore new growth), along with balmy temperatures.

In the northeast, we’ve been seeing the first intimations of autumn for a few weeks: staghorn sumac sporting red velvety fruit, soft maples turning along the edges of ponds, and goldenrod and asters in unmowed fields.

As I look out my window, I see that the young maple across the road is turning gold on its top. It’s the perfect ombre coloring job, and Mother Nature’s been doing it for eons.

Beauchamp Point, Autumn Leaves, 12X16, oil on archival canvasboard, $1449.

This is my favorite season for painting and for sailing. The days are warm, the nights are cool, and the colors are glorious. It’s no surprise that my October immersive workshop has only two seats left.

Green matrix. The blue and black circles are much smaller because they have a higher tinting strength than yellows.

My students are familiar with the exercises I give them to mix greens, because the green matrix helps them avoid the ‘wall of green’ that’s the death of so much landscape painting. I tell them to leave out the top left mixes (yellow ochre/black and Indian yellow/black) in midsummer because they’re only appropriate for autumn. Now’s the time to add those back in, because autumn is as much about bronzes as it is about reds and yellows.

There are three pigments involved in autumn color:

Carotenoids: They give us the yellow, orange, and brown colors in things like corn, carrots, and daffodils.

Anthocyanin: That’s the pigment in apples, grapes, blueberries, strawberries and plums. It’s pH sensitive, which is why it appears to be red in some places, blue in others, and even violet or black.

Chlorophyll: That’s our basic green pigment in leaves. It’s responsible for photosynthesis, so it’s a fundamental building block for life.

Chlorophyll and carotenoids are in leaves all through the growing season but anthocyanins are produced in autumn. As chlorophyll production slows down, the reds and golds and violets in leaves are unmasked.

It’s a slow roll out

None of this happens instantaneously. It starts about the second week in August and continues until just the beech and oak leaves are rattling in the wind in November.

I like high chroma as much as the next painter, but what sets the florid coloring of the maples off are the browns and russets of the beeches and oaks, the violets of dogwoods, and the yellows of birches. Furthermore, about half the trees in the Maine forest are conifers. They’re not the same green as they were in spring; they’ll get deeper and duller as they too slip into dormancy. Convincing autumn color requires all of these.

A little exercise for you

Remember the green matrix I mentioned above? It’s still the basis of autumn color. If you’ve made one up (or in watercolor, made up a mixing chart of the same), try modifying each green with tints of the following colors:

  • Quinacridone violet
  • Ultramarine blue
  • Raw sienna

(A tint is a pigment plus white. In watercolor, you’re not going to add white, of course, but just a dash of the modifying color.)

Jennifer Johnson’s green chart. Modify the green matrix above with the addition of tints as shown.

The chart above, made by Jennifer Johnson, shows how it’s done. And when you’re finished, you’ll have a solid blueprint to paint your way through every subtle shade Mother Nature throws at you this fall. Furthermore, you have another hint as to why I paint with premixed tints on my oil palette.

Another little exercise

Quin violet and cadmium orange, surprisingly enough, make red.

Try mixing cadmium orange and quinacridone violet. Have you ever seen a natural red that’s more vibrant than this? I doubt it. Red can easily be too strong in a landscape painting, so in most field work, I just mix it.

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Monday Morning Art School: easels to avoid, and ones to love

Sadly, neither the Prius nor this easel are still with me. The easel snapped in a windstorm with one too many weights hanging from it. The Prius died of old age after 300,000 miles.

“I have been painting for two years now, primarily plein air and in acrylic,” a reader wrote. “While I’ve gotten by with a makeshift DIY easel, do you have any suggestion for a great beginner’s easel that can handle larger formats (up to 20×10)?”

I’ve written about how Google drove me toward inexpensive and fatally-flawed Meeden pochade boxes. Cheap boxes that don’t work are a false economy.

When you’re working very big, there’s no substitute for a Gloucester-style easel.

For years, I used Jerry’s knock-off of the Gloucester easel. Mine finally snapped in a high wind. The replacement was so warped that I can’t recommend it, unless you’re willing to do the work to remake the wooden parts. If you want this style easel, you need the Take-It Easel.

The Gloucester-style easel is invaluable for large work or windy days, but it’s too heavy for me to carry very far. Weight is the big reason so many artists use the Park-n-Paint approach to plein air. It’s easy, but it’s limiting.

Double-demoing with my Mabef easel to the left, my Easy-L box to the right.

Many people have been given a French box easel by loving friends or relatives. If you have one, by all means use it, but don’t voluntarily inflict one on yourself. They’re heavy and difficult to set up. Pochade boxes are lighter and nimbler.

Guerrilla Painter boxes are beautifully made, with rock-solid hardware and a heavy plywood shell, but they weigh a lot for their mixing area. I have a 12X16 Guerrilla box that is so tough I could drive over it with my truck without denting it. I never use it; it weighs too darn much.

For most fieldwork I use an Easy L box, which I have in two sizes. I’ve used them for several years, and the hardware is as tight as it was when they were new.

Terrie Perrine working in pastels on her Leder easel.

I also have the Leder easel, which at $159 (not including the tripod) is reasonably priced for a solid, stable, painting system. It can hold a canvas up to 24″ tall, which is large enough for most plein air work. You must buy your own tripod and paint box, but that has some advantages. You’re not hauling around a heavy wooden box, because you can pair it with a Masterson Sta-Wet palette box, which is far lighter . It’s also a great system for pastels, because it allows you to use your existing pastel box. In fact, you can flip between media quickly. (Ed reminds me that if you use the code Carol10, you’ll get a 10% discount.)

For watercolors, I love the Mabef M-27 field easel.  It can hold a very large board and the angle adjusts very quickly. It’s usable for oils and acrylics, but balancing a palette on its arms is sometimes an exercise in frustration. I’m on my second one; the first one died after decades of abuse.

I’m tough on my gear. This was an accident, I swear.

The New Wave u.go pochade is a simple, elegant design, although it’s really only suitable for smaller work. Its mixing area is very shallow; that’s a problem if you use lots of paint. However, the palette does lift out so you can freeze it, and it’s lightweight.

Strada makes the only aluminum pochade boxes that I know of. That’s a pity, because aluminum is less prone to moisture damage than wood. It doesn’t result in much weight savings, however.

En Plein Air Pro is well known for their watercolor system, which is lightweight and durable. Their newer oil-and-acrylic easel is equally nice.  It can take a canvas up to 22″ high. I have had one of their tripod trays for years.

The Meeden watercolor field easel is a lightweight easel at a very low price. The tripod has a narrower stance than a photo tripod, but it does fold down into a backpackable kit. I don’t think it would stand up to long-term regular use, but it’s sufficient for the occasional painter. The drawing board can hold a sheet up to 12″ high.

Rebecca Bowes won Best in Show in the 10X10 show at the Red Barn Gallery in Port Clyde. Although I’m a member of the gallery, I had nothing to do with the jurying.

Like many of my students, she’s loath to admit just how accomplished she is. Next time I tell one of you, “That’s really good,” I hope you recognize that I’m not just blowing hot air.

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