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Tag: Schoodic

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Looking at summer in my rear-view mirror

Mature white pine at the Olson House, Cushing, ME, one of three things I painted on Thursday. Being contrarian, I refused to paint either the iconic view or the iconic house.

In past years, painting with Ken DeWaard, Eric Jacobsen and Björn Runquist wouldn’t have been worth a mention. This year I didn’t manage it until last Thursday. My summer has been terribly overbooked, something I’ve been complaining about for decades. That’s a pity when one lives in the northeast, where summer and fall are the best seasons.

I recently suggested to my daughter that we make a pact to not work more than 45 hours a week on non-family things. “I can’t possibly!” she responded. She’s a third-generation over-scheduler; my mother was the same way. When I was 35, my mother tried to get me to stop it, with about the same success. At 65 I begin to see what she was talking about. You don’t do anything well if you’re trying to do everything.

Having unsuccessfully laid down the gauntlet to my daughter, I spent the Labor Day weekend wrestling with myself about where I’ll cut down.

Brigantine Swift in Camden Harbor, 24X30, oil on canvas, framed, $3478 includes shipping and handling in continental US. Yes, this was painted en plein air, and if you want to see it in real life, it’s at Lone Pine Real Estate, 19 Elm Street, Camden, ME

What good is a teacher who doesn’t paint?

I sometimes feel as if I’m potting along in a Chevy Aveo while my friends pass me left and right in their Corvettes. I love teaching and I’m good at it. But that makes it too easy to sacrifice painting for teaching time. Painting should be constant revelation, change and discovery, and you can’t do that without a brush in your hand.

This, of course, is nobody’s fault but my own.

As I always tell my students, painting in the studio is good, but painting outdoors in natural light is the best possible training for an artist. In Maine, summer and fall are the best seasons, but, dang, they’re short!

Athabasca River Confluence, 9X12, $696 includes shipping and handling in continental US. I might crank about travel right now, but this is a place I’d go back to in a nanosecond.

I’m limiting my 2025 workshops.

I’m only going to teach four workshops in 2025, and none of them will involve flying.

Advanced Plein Air Painting (Rockport, ME), July 7-11, 2025

This is an opportunity for more advanced painters to work on the complex concepts in painting, like directing the viewer’s eye, narrative flow, serious drawing, etc. If you’ve already studied with me, email me to ask if you should take this workshop. If not, send me some sample work as per the course description.

That’s the only workshop that’s only for advanced painters. The rest are open to students of all levels (and I like a mixture of experience; it makes it livelier for everyone).

Sunset over Cadillac Mountain, oil on archival canvasboard, $869 includes shipping and handling. There’s a reason this is my longest-running workshop.

Sea and Sky at Acadia National Park, August 3-8, 2025

This is an opportunity to spend time at America’s first national park. I’d encourage you to live in if possible; it becomes a bonding and immersive experience. However, I always have commuters and they seem to benefit as well. I’ve been teaching this workshop longer than any other, because it’s a personal favorite.

Find Your Authentic Voice in Plein Air, Berkshires, August 11-15, 2025

This is centered in historic Lenox, MA. I chose this location because it’s in easy driving distance of NYC (3 hours) and Boston (2.5 hours). The Berkshires are relaxed, agricultural, historic and scenic. Plus, you can get good cider doughnuts. It’s the only workshop I teach where I also have been known to go shopping.

Immersive In-Person Fall Workshop, Rockport ME, October 6-10, 2025.

This is the height of fall color, for which of course New England is famous. Add the tang of the ocean and the peculiar reds of blueberry barrens and it’s downright otherworldly. I throw in a few curveballs, like a model in the landscape and a visit to the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland.

(By the way, if you want to do this in 2024, I still have a few openings.)

What does that mean for you?

It means that only 59 people will have the opportunity to study with me in person in 2025. (I’ll still be teaching on Zoom, of course.) I’ll be promoting these workshops all fall, but if you know you want to take one, you might as well register and make your deposit now.

Reserve your spot now for a workshop in 2025:

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Why does anyone paint plein air?

Painting the fog at Blueberry Hill
Painting the fog at Blueberry Hill

I’m in Acadia teaching my annual Sea & Sky workshop, and yesterday was a fog-bound day. We were at Blueberry Hill. The great granite slope, the spruces, and Schoodic Island drifted in and out of their wrap of soft wool. Not only do I love painting in this atmosphere, but it is a wonderful sensory experience. Fog can be grey or greenish or blue or even pink. It’s cool on the skin, sound is deadened and distorted, and one feels a sense of peace and solitude (assuming one isn’t attempting to navigate a tricky channel without satnav or radar).

“There is no extra charge for the facial,” I told my students.

Talking color theory with my homies. All photos courtesy Jennifer Johnson.

At around 11, the fog started to burn off. The sea glowed blue against the pink rocks. Offshore, every spruce on the island was picked out in relief. A regular observer of the coast would have bet that it was clearing for the day—and would have lost the bet. In as much time as it would take to redraft a painting to reflect these new optics, the fog settled back in.

It was ebb tide when we arrived. Blueberry Hill has wonderful irregular tidal pools rimmed with seaweed. Long fingers of granite reach down into the sea, and a spit of surf-worn cobbles stretches out into East Pond Cove. They’re a design delight, but you have to work fast. By the time we finished for the day, the sea had come in, covered every rock, and was receding again.

“Why does anyone paint plein air?” asked a student in exasperation. “It’s always changing!”

The world's best classroom.

That is, of course, the point. There is dynamism in these changes, whereas reference photos are never more than a vague approximation of what happens in nature. Yes, I sometimes paint from photos—we all do—but it’s never as informative or energizing as painting outdoors.

I see Dennis during my Sea & Sky workshop. He’s accompanied his wife Paula for the past few years. While we’re painting, Dennis goes birding and hiking. “I saw a family of sharp-shinned hawks,” he told me yesterday. I was curious about how he identified them, and he told me about the app Merlin Bird ID. Last night I put it on my phone.

When you spend a lot of time standing in one spot outdoors, you hear lots of birds, and you meet a lot of birders. Hikers, bicyclists and kayakers amble through your field of vision. Our disciplines are united by a common reverence for nature, so we always have something to talk about.

Shelly paints a nocturne.

Radical changes in weather can be disconcerting. I won’t paint outdoors in a snowstorm or an electrical storm, for example. Extreme heat can be just as dangerous, but luckily, it’s not part of my everyday experience.

Last night, we met to paint a nocturne. On the way over, Cassie saw a black bear cub. That’s an experience you’d never have in your studio.

We set up at 8 PM outside Rockefeller Hall. It’s elegant and old, and we could turn on interior lights. We distributed headlamps and easel lights. I settled down in a corner, excited to spend time with my watercolors after a day teaching. Nocturnes in watercolor are challenging in their own right, and even more so in the damp of a foggy night. It can be like painting into a wet paper towel.

Forty-five minutes later, the skies dumped on us. Our gear, our paintings, and our composure were all soaked to the bone. We scrambled to pack up, laughing and chattering in the cold rain. Yes, we could have been in our rooms painting from photos, but instead we had a convivial adventure, and a new story to tell.

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Common sense isn’t that common

The Schoodic Peninsula has some wild and wooly scenery.
The Schoodic Peninsula has some wild and wooly scenery.

Jennifer Johnson has been my monitor for Sea & Sky at Acadia National Park for six years. In all matters other than painting, she knows more about the workshop than I do. I’m not impractical, but my focus is on the instruction. Plus, to be perfectly honest, I’ve never really learned how to keep a sensible calendar.

Every year, I send students a supply list and a copy of my own personal packing list. Every year, I get the same question back: “Do I really need dress clothes?”

Jennifer takes the photos while I get to paint, which is why I don't have any pictures of her.

In Maine, dress clothes can mean your best flannel shirt, not to be confused with the everyday flannel shirt in which you go fishing or change the oil. That’s not mere reverse-snobbery; a good flannel shirt can be an investment. Also, there’s no telling when it might suddenly be necessary—the most clement summer wedding can suddenly be swept by a cold wind from the north that will set your bunions aching. That, by the way, is one reason mass transit will never really catch on here—we need cars to stash our spare gear in the event of a sudden turn in the weather.

At any rate, this packing list has taken me around the world. I modify it for the places I’m heading and the situations I expect. No, I don’t wear jewelry in Yukon Territory. I’m unlikely to need my Grundens waterproofs in Delaware. Unlikely, but not impossible. I once painted an event in the dregs of a hurricane in Rye, NY with my buddy Brad Marshall, and I’ve never been wetter.

I spend a lot of time traversing rough terrain to get from painter to painter. It's a good thing I'm so dang young and fit!

Things have changed over time. For example, there’s no call now for reading material when we all carry the universe on our phones. When I first wrote this list, nobody wore watches that needed charging; you either replaced a battery or wound them up.

This is a universal list, from which the painter can pick or choose as appropriate. However, it would never have occurred to me to do something as simple as add a heading to explain that. This year, Jennifer, in exasperation, wrote her own, revised copy of the list. From now on, I’m sending both to my students.

Over the years, my monitors have had to deal with some odd problems, like broken easels, interpersonal conflict (it happens occasionally), and lost students. Jennifer is pretty unflappable, so I haven’t yet met the circumstances where she’ll lose her cool. A bear might do it, but that hasn’t happened yet.

But I like nothing more than sitting at Schoodic Point discussing watercolor with my old pal Becky, who has come back year after year for more of my malarkey.

This is an unusual workshop in that residents are supplied their meals. That’s sensible, because Schoodic is isolated; you can buy a sandwich at the local gas station, and there’s a small grocery store in Winter Harbor. However, the macadamia pancakes and freeze-dried fruit smoothie crowd is SOL, as they say. That’s the price we pay for a real wilderness experience.

But it does put food service in some ways into our hands. Left to my own devices, I’d eat Slim Jims for a week. It’s really helpful to have someone working with me who remembers to handle the lunches.

Yesterday, Jennifer pointed out to me that I have an impossible scheduling conflict at the beginning of the workshop. I’m supposed to be at the auction for Camden on Canvas on Sunday from 4-6, and welcoming students to Schoodic at the same time. They’re two hours apart.

Oops. Such is my faith in her that I can just plan to get there as soon as I can. I could never do that if I didn’t trust her absolutely. A good monitor is worth her weight in gold.

By the way, this week a humpback whale was visiting the Rockland breakwater and Camden harbor. Here’s a video off the deck of schooner American Eagle, and one from Curtis Island Light. Between that and a seal kill by a Great White Shark off Owls Head last week, it’s been an awfully exciting week for marine spotters.