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Tag: plein air painting

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Intimations of spring

Spring Greens, 8X10, oil on archival canvasboard, $652 framed includes shipping and handling in continental US.

Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays me from the swift completion of my hike up Beech Hill (to paraphrase Herodotus and the US Postal Service). Here in Maine, we dropped into the teens last week. However, the worst hiking was through bucketing rain on Monday. I arrived home soaked to the bone and shivering uncontrollably. My student and friend Amy Sirianni stopped by; I met her at my door in a flannel nightgown and robe because I couldn’t get warm.

What’s a poor New Englander to do when both days and nights turn bitter? My mother used to book a flight to Florida for March or April; it gave her something to look forward to. She didn’t want to come home until winter’s back was broken.

Coincidentally, I’ve ended up doing something similar. At the end of March, I’ll again be teaching in Sedona, AZ and Austin, Texas. Instead of shivering in sleet storms, I’ll be in shirtsleeves under clear blue skies. Alleluia.

Most of my workshops are on the east coast, which is my home turf. These are the only two workshops I’m teaching in the west (although I dream of reviving Pecos). Western painting is different from New England in atmosphere, color, and vista. I’m grateful for the opportunity to work in both.

Sedona is a small city of 10,000 people located within the Coconino National Forest. The town is encircled by red sandstone massifs in various stages of erosion. They glow brilliant orange and red in the rising or setting sun.

Peace, 8X16, $903 framed includes shipping and handling in continental US.

“This color looks exaggerated to me,” I told Julie Richard of Sedona Arts Center when I finished Peace, above.

“It’s not,” she answered, most definitely.

Much of what we paint there are long vistas and those incredible red rocks set against junipers, piñons, and prickly pear cactus. We often paint from isolated trailheads, from which we can sometimes watch vast cumulus clouds form over the buttes and mesas and just as quickly blow away.

Avenue B. Market and Deli at night. We had a riot painting nocturnes here.

Austin, on the other hand, is the tenth most populous city in the United States (and grown out of all recognition from the first time I saw it). Our painting sites are urban, including the delightful Avenue B. Grocery and Market, where we painted nocturnes and ate fabulous sandwiches last year. Then there’s McKinney Falls State Park with its huge cypresses and turquoise spill basin. That’s where we painted bluebonnets in their thousands. On that magical day, hundreds of birds flew overhead in long, winding skeins.

“Canada geese?” I asked, confused.

“Pelicans,” someone answered.

I find gift-giving challenging, especially for those people on my list who don’t want or need more stuff. I could look at all the catalogs in the world and still not find the right thing for that person who has everything.

Pensive 8X10, oil on archival canvasboard, $522 includes shipping and handling in continental US.

For him or her, experiences are a better bet. If you’re looking for a truly unique gift this holiday season that feels extra thoughtful, try a workshop. (And if you want a workshop for Christmas, print this out and leave it someplace subtle, like under your spouse’s coffee-cup. He or she can use the code EARLYBIRD to get $25 off any workshop except Sedona, which is already a discounted price).

Also, if you’re thinking of buying a painting as a Christmas gift (another great idea for the person who no longer needs stuff), let me know soon. I’m my own shipping and handling department and I want to be sure your painting is delivered by Christmas. Until the first of the year, you can use the discount code THANKYOUPAINTING10 to get 10% off any painting on my website.

Reserve your spot now for a workshop in 2025:

If you missed my North to Southwest virtual opening and have a high tolerance for listening to me drone on, you can watch it here.

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Beauchamp Point in Autumn

Beauchamp Point, Autumn Leaves, 12X16, framed, oil on archival canvasboard, $1449 includes shipping in continental US

Each week until the end of the year I’ll be giving you a behind-the-scenes look at one of my favorite paintings. These are paintings that are available for you to purchase unless otherwise noted.

Ken DeWaard, Eric Jacobsen and Björn Runquist all live near me. In a normal year (unlike this one, where I’m tied to the studio making Seven Protocols for Successful Oil Painters), we paint together a lot. Not only are they very funny, they’re also quite tall, so I have artists to look up to.

Beauchamp Point (Autumn Leaves) was painted on a sunny fall day with Ken, on the dirt road that circles Beauchamp Point. It’s very much a local watering hole-I mean that literally, since there’s a protected swimming area with great smooth granite rocks on which you can sun yourself after your salt water dip. At the very tip of the point, there’s a land preserve that you can only access by paddling.

Spite House, located on Beauchamp Point in Rockport. Built around 1806 in Phippsburg, Maine by Thomas McCobb, this lovely colonial mansion was loaded onto a barge in 1925 and towed up the coast by tugboat. It was bought by Donald Dodge of Philadelphia who wanted it moved to Beauchamp Point in Rockport, where he planned to reside in the summers. Even the foundation was taken down and marked for re-setting on the new site. (Courtesy Digital Maine)

However, Ken is a disciple of a method he calls Park-N-Paint, which means that we never stray from our cars. I appreciate that, since my painting pack weighs about 40 lbs.

On this sparkling autumn day, the shadows were long and the sun was brilliant and warm. Ken painted the shadows on the rising forest slope. I looked down the road itself. There was almost no traffic, because very few tourists realize how lovely Maine is in October.

Rockport harbor is little changed from the time this postcard was made, as it’s home to many wonderful wooden boats even today.

The colors were brilliant, with every leaf picked out in jewel tones. As ever, I was reminded that we artists only produce a poor approximation of God’s handiwork. However, there’s something to be said for the way we interpret it. Plein air painting is truly a cooperative venture between nature and man.

You can buy this painting by clicking through here. I might even throw in directions to our secret swimming hole.

Reserve your spot now for a workshop in 2025:

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The Radnor Hunt

Each week until the end of the year I’ll be giving you a behind-the-scenes look at one of my favorite paintings. These are paintings that are available for you to purchase unless otherwise noted.

Autumn Farm, Evening Blues, oil on canvasboard, $1449 framed, includes shipping in continental US.

I had horses as a kid, and I rode, but the kind of riding I did was generally country lanes or along the Erie Canal. My mare, Bess, had been trained to an English saddle and bit, so I rode her on an old hunt saddle. My gelding, Oscar, was trained to a Western saddle, so I rode him Western with a curb bit. Our third horse, Capricious, was too much for me, so I rode him as little as I could. I did do my first jump on him. It was inadvertent. I didn’t see the ditch, he did, and he flew over it beautifully.

I took enough riding lessons that my parents were pretty sure I wouldn’t fall off. After that they left me to get on with it. There was little style to my riding. I had no special clothes or boots. Our horses weren’t shod because we never rode on the road. In fact, much of their lives were spent turned out in our old orchard, where they’d get drunk every fall on rotting fruit.

I do love drawing and painting horses. This is Scout, my friend Roger’s horse. No sense fussing; he doesn’t know how to hold a pose.

As an avid reader of British literature, I always loved the idea of the hunt. However, the closest I ever got to it were the hunter-jumper classes at the Niagara County Fair. In field hunting, the riders are dressed with formal elegance, there’s a pack of baying hounds, and the horses are beautiful, muscular and brave. I always imagined them streaming along tree-lines and taking fences at a full gallop.

So when I had the chance to paint near the historic Radnor Hunt in Malvern, PA, I was thrilled. I would paint the landscape and when the horses appeared I would somehow limn them into my composition.

Few things have been more of a let-down. It was a weekday, so the riders were in ratcatcher, which is a nice enough combination of tweed and tan, but hardly the pinks (which are actually scarlet coats) or black-and-white of a formal hunt. I first spotted the riders as they picked their way slowly down a far hillside and crossed the road towards me. You can see them in my painting as little marks, if you look carefully.

The hounds didn’t seem particularly motivated to start with, and they promptly lost the scent (if they’d ever had it in the first place). Riders and horses trotted around aimlessly, a few taking soft jumps over a drainage ditch, while the huntsman tried his darndest to get the dogs organized. As the false starts dragged on, most riders pulled up in groups of two or three and chatted. Their horses cropped grass. Eventually it was apparent even to me that the subject of the hunt had outfoxed the dogs. They turned and headed back up the hill from whence they had come.

It’s easy to do a gesture drawing of a horse. You go at it just the same way you do with people.

It was hardly a scene from one of Anthony Trollope‘s novels, but I did get a cracking good painting out of it.

Yes, I romanticize horses.

Autumn Farm, Evening Blues is 12X16. $1449 includes shipping and handling in continental US. It’s a bargain compared to what a good hunter will cost you, and you won’t have feed, vet or farrier bills. Click here to purchase online.

Reserve your spot now for a workshop in 2025:

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Quantity vs. quality

Home Farm, oil on canvas, 20X24, in an elegant copper frame with white fillet, $2898 includes shipping in continental US.

“I realize that my goals as an artist conflict with what I like and what I’ve learned,” a thoughtful reader wrote (in an actual letter, with a first-class stamp). “While I like to call them plein air ‘festivals’, I know they’re competitions designed to provide income to the host of the festival.” They’re promoted to artists as a way to sell paintings, but not all of them deliver equally.

I’ve been corrected when I’ve called these events ‘competitions’, but that’s exactly what they are. If artists aren’t competing directly for prize money, they’re competing for sales.

Main Street, Owls Head, 16X20, oil on gessoboard, $1,623 unframed.

My correspondent is learning to integrate value sketching and grisaille before going to color. “Taking time to sketch and check values on what I will paint goes against the idea of finishing five or six paintings in five or six days. As it is, I generally finish just three or four paintings in a one-week plein air event!

“Oh, well, I have six to eight months before I apply to one again. That’s plenty of opportunity to speed up my process.”

There’s no doubt that the more you do something, the faster it goes. I am quite capable of doing a value sketch, grisaille and good moderate-size oil painting within a three-hour window, but I’ve been at this a long time.

Another reader visited a large regional festival earlier this year and wrote, “I don’t get why people in the competition bang out crappy paintings in two or three hours instead of spending a day or more doing one good one. You could do four good ones versus six or more crappy ones.

“The current plein air frenzy misses the point of why artists painted outside, historically, and what they really achieved.”

“I think plein air competitions have lowered the quality of plein air painting,” a professional artist told me. He is not talking through his hat; he’s been a prize-winner at top-notch national shows. “That relentless push for quantity floods the market with frankly-mediocre work.”

Blown off my feet, 16×20, $2029, includes shipping in continental US.

What’s ironic is that this friend is, himself, a very fast painter, easily capable of hammering out an excellent painting in three hours. But he’s also very tough on himself, and doesn’t submit work that he doesn’t think is up to his own standard. Painting one fast painting is not the same as pounding out half a dozen or more paintings in a week under pressure. That has a way of dulling your compositional and color sensibilities.

No matter how you go about executing your work for a plein air event, quality, not quantity, ought to be the overriding concern.

“Apple Tree with Swing,” oil on canvas, $2029 framed.

My personal preference is the event in which each artist can submit only one work. These affairs usually give the artist a few days to execute one painting, and the selling prices are, generally, commensurate. I’m able to relax and think carefully about my approach. Furthermore, 35 painters producing 35 works means sales are more consistent than in a show where forty artists each knock out half a dozen works. Many of the resulting 240 paintings are never sold.

Yesterday I quoted a student complaining about mundane landscape paintings. However, that doesn’t answer the greater question, which is: if it’s not any good, what’s the point in painting it?

I like plein air festivals, and I’m sorry that my current schedule doesn’t allow me to participate in more of them. But I also recognize their potential to be corrosive to the very spirit of plein air painting.

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Does the world need one more landscape painting?

Seafoam, 9X12, oil on archival canvasboard, $869 framed includes shipping in continental US.

“While standing dumbstruck (again), gazing at the Tetons, I was wondering how one could ever paint them and do them justice,” a student emailed me. “Values and composition could be perfect and not capture the clouds swirling around the peaks or the fleeting rays of sun highlighting the face of a cliff.

“Day after day, I see mundane paintings of places like this. I see painters resorting to garish colors or blocky shapes. They don’t seem driven by the quest to capture the magical essence of these places. They just want to do something ‘different’.”

The Hudson River School painters, Thomas Moran, and even the Group of Seven were partly explorers, partly documentary painters, and partly evangelists for national identity. Today, exploration and documentation are dead pursuits. As for forging a national ethos, that seems hopeless in an age of ever-fracturing social values.

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

What, then, is the role of landscape painting?

There are times when I ask myself, “does the world need one more landscape painting?” Landscape painting is the unloved child of the contemporary art world, looked down on by its mandarins. It’s so traditional, and so beloved by middle-class people, that it just can’t be good, right?

Sea Fog, 9X12, oil on archival canvasboard, $696 unframed includes shipping in continental US.

Looking in vs. looking outward

We live in an age of omphaloskepsis. Our ancestors would never have imagined that our solutions, our meaning, or indeed even our troubles originated within ourselves. That’s what gave us expressionism, an art movement that presents ideas subjectively, distorting them based on our emotional state. That could never have flown prior to the 20th century (although the term is sometimes erroneously used for earlier passion/mystical painting).

Abstraction and expressionism have greatly influenced landscape painting, with painters interpreting the outside world through their internal lens, such as with distorted color or extreme simplification. The first people to do this, such as Georgia O’Keeffe or Charles E. Burchfield, were very innovative indeed. However, it’s been done to death. It is only applauded today because artists and art critics are-despite what you think-very much herd animals. They’re no more courageous than any other discipline.

So, do we all have to paint like Albert Bierstadt?

Albert Bierstadt was a great painter, but he was born nearly two hundred years ago. Even the Group of Seven were painting a century ago. Their realities are not our reality, their concerns are not our concerns.

Landscape painting became significantly less important after World War I.  Many of its major practitioners, including O’Keeffe and Burchfield, along with Alex Katz, Milton Avery, and David Hockney, were chiefly concerned with applying abstraction and/or expressionism to landscape. That meant that great landscape painters like Edgar Payne were never marquee names.

That’s both a problem and an opportunity. Landscape painters have the same kind of academic barriers to break through that their Impressionist ancestors did. But we also have an opportunity to develop a whole new vocabulary of landscape painting without tradition tying us down.

Stone Wall, Salt Marshes, 14×18, $1594 framed includes shipping in continental US.

Does anyone ever need to paint another wave?

I’m glad nobody ever asked Frederick Judd Waugh or Winslow Homer that question, for the art world would be immensely poorer without their surf paintings. The same can be said of Frederic Remington‘s nocturnes, John Carlson’s snow paintings, or all those haystacks Claude Monet painted. None of them painted those subjects as a schtick; they were working their tootsies off to develop as painters. And the legacy they’ve left us is priceless.

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Painting Massachusetts’ wilderness

Cassie Sano’s painting of Undermountain Farm’s Victorian barns.

My father was from the west side of Buffalo and my mother was born in the first ward of Lackawanna, NY. Although they were both thoroughly urban, they bought a farm in Niagara County, NY in 1965. We had cattle, horses, ducks, and a hundred feeder chickens every spring. It was a well-ordered farm when it was established in 1861, and it’s maintained its good bones right up until the present.

Although I couldn’t wait to get away, I realize now that the countryside was a great place to grow up. Most of my practical skills came from growing up on a farm.

Yes, that’s a sheep keeping my painters company.

On Monday, I taught at Undermountain Farm in Lenox, MA. It’s got 23 horses, two sheep and two goats. The sights, the smells, and even the clatter of my shoes on the wooden barn floors were a powerful nostalgic kick.

Undermountain Farm’s horse barn has restrooms, a real step up from my childhood, where we had an external well with a pump that froze every winter. There are two horses at Undermountain Farm who are free to wander. As horses will, they really just want to scarf food the easy way. They found a broken bale directly under the hay chute, which happened to be directly in front of the restroom doors.

What? You want us to move?

Their need was not greater than my need, but they outweighed me. I pushed their noses; they pushed back. Docile they might be, but they were blocking my way. Finally, I thought, ‘just move the hay.’ Problem solved.

One of the students in this workshop is the wonderful painter Cassie Sano, who hails from Augusta, ME. That’s not nearly as sophisticated as you might think; really, she lives in the woods. She’s camping here in western Massachusetts and on the first day, she was dragging.

“I was up all night worrying about bears,” she told me.

“But you live in bear country!” I remonstrated.

“But at home I’m sleeping in my house!”

I told her all the comforting bear facts I could think of. When I got back to my daughter’s house in nearby Rensselaer County, NY, my son-in-law was cleaning up trash from a bear visit. We know they’re there; earlier this year we saw a sow and three cubs on the trail cam just behind the house.

Beth Carr’s lovely painting of Waconah Falls.

My daughter inadvertently acquired a rooster this year. Besides chasing pullets around the yard, he starts crowing just before first light. That’s another sound with a powerful nostalgic kick, as is the outraged ‘no thanks!’ from a disinterested hen.

If you’ve been to Boston and New York, you know something about the northeast. Yes, it’s urban and industrialized. However, get out of the major cities and our region is rural. In many places, it’s wilderness. If you really want to know New England and the Mid-Atlantic states, you have to get out of town.

Wow

If you got an email from me yesterday, you know I’m doing an immersive workshop in Rockport in October. I wasn’t prepared for it to be so popular; as of this moment, more than half the seats are gone. I’m looking forward to sharing my beautiful town with you.

Michael Anne Lynn perfectly demonstrated the successful phases of a good watercolor: value sketch, grisaille, color tests, and a finished painting. Now that you’ve seen this, you don’t need me.

Artists, housing and one of my students.

Creative types sometimes struggle with affordable housing just like many others. A student of mine in Austin (Mark Gale) along with a colleague of his in St. Louis, are involved in finding and supporting solutions.

They are developing a panel discussion for the 2024 South by Southwest Conference (SXSW) that showcases three success. (SXSW gets national attention.) To bring this discussion to the public, though, they need votes via a simple thumbs up on the SXSW panel picker.

Here’s a bit more info.

Or follow a direct link to vote.

The Austin program where Mark volunteers and one of those highlighted on the panel is Art from the Streets: 

Voting closes 8/20, so please do it now.

Reserve your spot now for a workshop in 2025:

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The bones of painting, and a cute story

Watercolor grisaille by Rebecca Bense

Because I’ve been eating, drinking, sleeping and thinking nothing but grisaille recently, I decided to invert my usual lesson plan and start my Sea & Sky workshop at Schoodic Institute with a lesson on monochromatic underpainting.

We started with a soft blue sky that gradually resolved to a lovely milkiness and then to glumness as evening drew in. (It’s forecast to get downright surly before it clears.) But my students had strong value structures, which carried them over the rough passages.

Oil grisaille by Ann Haskell

Simplify, baby

Plein air painting can be challenging even without constantly changing light. By concentrating on value, my painters were able to focus on the bones of their painting without getting wrapped around the dual axles of hue and chroma. (A review of those terms can be found here.) As I wrote on Monday, value is king.

Oil grisaille by Linda Delorey

Let’s hustle

I’m writing this at 0:dark:30 on Tuesday morning as we try to figure out if and when the threatening storm will hit us. Don’t worry; I have a backup plan; in this case, it’s fervent prayer.

I normally write my posts the night before they’re published, but my students Karen and Diane have planned a cocktail party for Tuesday evening. We’re going for a short hike on the Sundew Trail before class, so I got up especially early to write.

I like speed and efficiency in painting too. I want to attack my color passages au premier coup, or at the first shot, instead of dithering about mixing and laying colors repeatedly on the same small section of canvas. That’s a surefire recipe for mud, whether you’re painting in oils or watercolor.

Demonstrating in watercolor to my intrepid band of students. (Photo courtesy of Jennifer Johnson)

And then there’s the brain

Grisaille is an excellent way for artists to train their eyes and minds to observe value and see underlying composition. It helps us to become more sensitive to the nuances of light and shadow, which are crucial for plein air (and indeed, all) painting.

Remember when I said ‘value is king’? Its co-regent is composition. Every other element of painting is subservient to this pair.

Linda Smiley had just started to add color information when we snapped this photo of her grisaille.

Let’s just screw around

I do my best experimentation with either a pencil or a brush in the grisaille phase. That’s where I can figure out the texture of a blueberry barren or the shape of clouds. It’s infinitely easier and faster than trying to do it in full color.

A wee anecdote from Monday’s class

A young girl, a member of a religious sect, stopped to observe us painting. She is interested in art, so Karen explained the value of a drawing practice. “Carol draws everywhere,” she said. “She even draws in church.” She told her the kind of things I draw in church, which you can find on my Instagram feed. “You could draw in church, too,” Karen added.

“I could never do that!” the young lass exclaimed.

I’m the poster child for hyperactive inattention. I believe drawing calms me down enough to open my ears. I’m not much of a believer in multitasking, but that’s one place where I think it works.

My new class, The Essential Grisaille, is available now.

Reserve your spot now for a workshop in 2025:

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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:

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Wildfire!

Eastern Manitoba Forest, Sandilands National Forest, Manitoba, 8X10, Carol L. Douglas, available.

Alex Schaefer paints banks in flames. I was thinking of him this week as I read about hundreds of wildfires burning across Canada. I’ve painted across both Alaska and Canada. There’s lots of evidence that the Great White North is no stranger to wildfire. You see the signs and remnants everywhere. We Americans only notice when the wind shifts and smoke is on our tongues, as it has been this week.

Last week, we got a light backwash from Nova Scotian fires here in Maine. Now it’s New York’s turn. The smell and smoke are overwhelming, according to my friends and family. My son sent me a photo of the weird brown light around his apartment. Down in Greene County where his sister works, Public Safety sent out a robocall warning people to not go outside.

Confluence, Athabasca River, Alberta, 9X12, Carol L. Douglas, available.

It’s supposed to be worse today, leading some in Greater Rochester Plein Air Painters to cancel their midweek paint-outs. I’m watching carefully, because I plan to paint with them at 1 PM on Sunday, at Bushnell’s Basin in Perinton. This will be nostalgic, for I lived most of my life within rock-skipping distance of the Erie Canal. I’m looking forward to watching its stately green flow, drawing an old metal bridge, and perhaps striking lucky with a gaily-caparisoned canal boat at rest. Mostly, though, I’m looking forward to seeing my friends.

But it won’t happen if they’re still sitting under a cloud of ash. It’s just not safe.

If you’ve ever been downwind of a wildfire, you know it isn’t pleasant. It smells more like burning trash than a bonfire; it’s acrid and sticks in your nose. It’s worth remembering that this was typical air quality for 19th century cities, It probably still is in some fast-growing Asian cities.

Wildfire damage along the Transcanada Highway, painted en plein air in 2016.

Scientists speculate that this bad air led to some of the spectacular atmospherics in the paintings of Turner, Whistler, Monet and others. That was good for art, but it was bad for the vulnerable-the elderly, infants, or people with compromised hearts or lungs. London’s pea soupers were so common that they were called London particulars. These fogs were comprised of soot and sulfur dioxide and came from the widespread burning of soft coal for both homes and industries.

From as early as the 13th century, the English understood that coal had a harmful effect on health, and observed smog over their towns and cities. The mists and fogs of the Thames valley contributed to its concentration over London. London particulars must have been particularly unpleasant before the city built a modern sewer system in the mid-19th century. By then, the relationship between coal smoke and respiratory disease was clear. One prolonged London particular, in January-February 1880, was estimated to have choked 2000 Londoners to death.

Clouds over Teslin Lake, Teslin, Yukon Territory, 9X12, Carol L. Douglas, available.

But still England lumbered along with soft coal fuel, until conditions in December, 1952 created the perfect storm. Extreme cold combined with an anticyclone and windless conditions formed a thick layer of smog over the city. At the time, the Great Smog of London was credited with 4,000 deaths; today we think it killed 10,000-12,000 people. The Clean Air Acts that it provoked created the modern British cities we love today, where a coating of coal tar is just an historical memory.

We assume that wildfire is less toxic, and it probably is-providing it’s burning the woods and not homes or factories. It’s still a danger to people at risk: those with cardiovascular or pulmonary disease, or infants and the elderly. So, if you’re in the way of the great plumes of smoke coming down from Canada this week, stay in your studio. There will be plenty of fine weather in the months ahead.

Reserve your spot now for a workshop in 2025:

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That sweet spot between art and nature

We’ve been hiking Beech Hill for so many years that you’d think our feet could navigate on their own. Apparently, that’s not true. On a glorious day in mid-April, my husband stepped wrong and wrenched his back. That has meant pain for him and small inconveniences for me. For one thing, he keeps our pace. Without him, I’m just ambling along listening to birdsong.

Doug also carries paintings down from their second-story storage unit. I’m no good at lifting. But eventually I got it done, and I’m happy with the results.

As I unwrapped the work, I found myself saying over and over, “this is my favorite painting.” That’s a great thing, because it means that, right now, I like my own work. Serious painters know that this isn’t always the case. We can get very angsty about our painting at times.

Wreck of the SS Ethie, oil on canvas, 18X24, $2318 framed. This is one of the few non-plein air pieces in this show.

Plein air is where my heart is

Most of the work in this show is plein air. That’s no surprise, since plein air immerses both the artist and viewer into the spirit of the place it was painted.

“My clients don’t care whether I painted it en plein air or not,” a friend once observed. I’m not sure that’s true. Plein air feels different than studio painting, since it involves fast analysis of light, shadows, texture and color. I’m not dissing the studio painting; I’ve done plenty of them. But for the client who loves the outdoors, who wants to sit in that sweet spot between art and nature, plein air is going to resonate more strongly.

The best of plein air should carry a whiff of the painting experience. There is a vast difference between painting ferns at Paul Smith’s College, NY, and painting shadows in Sedona, AZ.

The Logging Truck, 16X20, oil on canvas, was painted en plein air on the side of a precipitous incline, with, yes, logging trucks barreling past at regular intervals. This is one of my favorite favorites.

This year’s show is almost completely Maine. The exceptions are a seascape from Parrsboro, NS and a harbor scene from Iona in Scotland. There are no paintings from Patagonia, Alaska, Texas, New Mexico, or Arizona, as much fun as I’ve loved painting in those places. I’ll get back to them later.

Place and painting have a complicated relationship. You don’t need to go far to find a beautiful subject. For most of us, there’s a painting waiting right outside the back door. (If you live where there’s not, I’d suggest you move for your mental health.) On the other hand, painting in other places changes your perception. If you’re any good, the light, shapes, rocks, trees, and houses will all be different.

For years I’ve pondered the relationship between God and man as expressed in the environment. (I once did a whole body of work on the subject, in fact.) There’s an old foundation in Erickson Field Preserve. It was a very small farmhouse; its barn foundation is on the other side. At this point the trail is the old farm track, and there are three small meadows strung along it like tiny pearls. In them are a few old domesticated apple trees and their wild descendants in the woods. There are lilacs, lily-of-the-valley, goutweed, narcissus, daylilies and more still thriving long after their humans have departed. I need to paint this story eventually.

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

But for now, I’m a gallerist. This weekend is also the first annual Rockport Donut Festival. Stop by on your way past.

Next weekend, unfortunately, I’ll be closed on Saturday and Tuesday. I’m traveling to Rochester for a memorial service and stopping on my way back to nail down the sites for my Berkshires workshop in August.

Carol L. Douglas Studio and Gallery
394 Commercial Street
Rockport, ME 04856
585-201-1558 Sunday: closed
Monday: closed
Tuesday: Noon-5
Wednesday: Noon-5
Thursday: Noon-5
Friday: Noon-5
Saturday: Noon-5
Or by appointment.

Reserve your spot now for a workshop in 2025: