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Sunset over Cadillac Mountain

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

I’m not certain who among my students at Sea & Sky at Schoodic first suggested the twenty-strokes challenge, but it was so much fun that I asked my students at my Berkshires workshop to do the same thing. If you’ve never done it, it’s a great exercise for controlling the noodling that sometimes ruins a promising start. The only rule is that you do a painting in twenty strokes or less.

We all concentrated on making every shape count, including using a larger, well-loaded brush and filling in all the continuous areas in one shot. I was able to lay out the painting below in four carefully-considered strokes. The rest was just details. (Sadly, I didn’t photograph it before I added some extra emphasis brush strokes.)

Baby pine tree, 8X10, oil on archival canvasboard, private collection. While this final painting has a few more than the designated twenty strokes (I’m terrible at taking process photos) it’s not by a lot.

This was also an exercise to demonstrate that a centered composition is not inherently bad; it’s what you do with the rest of the space that counts. Centered compositions in themselves are imposing and serene. For proof that they work, see King Tut’s funerary mask or Arkhip Kuindzhi’s imposing Russian landscapes.

Before we did that fast-painting exercise, we went out to Schoodic Point to paint the sunset. None of us were counting strokes, but the sun dropping behind a mountain moves very fast. I doubt there are many more strokes in this than the prescribed twenty.

I took it home to my studio intending to finish it, but there is nothing I can do to improve on what’s there. It says everything one needs to say about the sun setting over Cadillac Mountain without a single extraneous brushstroke. Anything I add would diminish it.

How much is that painting worth, anyway?

Sometimes I am asked why a Cy Twombly scribble is worth $70 million. The high-end art market is complicated, being composed of talent, money laundering, speculation, rarity and social cache (and I have no opinion about the value of each).

The same question might be asked about why this painting is worth the same amount as Lacecap Hydrangea and Daylilies, which is the same size and a lot more complex. It’s not about how much I struggled to paint it (and the flower one was a terrific struggle), but about all the knowledge I brought into the painting.

Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket, 1874, James McNeil Whistler, courtesy Detroit Institute of Arts. This is the painting which so peeved John Ruskin.

James McNeil Whistler was panned by the legendary art critic John Ruskin, who by 1877 was no longer up to the challenge of modernity. Ruskin wrote, “I have seen and heard much of cockney impudence before now, but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face.”

Whistler sued. He did not ask 200 guineas for two days’ work, he argued; he asked it for the knowledge he had gained in the work of a lifetime. He won, although he received only a pitiable farthing in damages. The case bankrupted Whistler and probably accelerated Ruskin’s mental decline. However, time has vindicated Whistler.

Art is not judged by the effort that goes into a particular piece, but by whether it ploughs new ground, challenges ideas, is technically skilled and provokes a response.

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Sunset sail

Sunset sail, 14X18, oil on linen, $1594 framed includes shipping and handling in the continental US.

My husband is under the sweet illusion that I can identify any boat in the Maine windjammer fleet from the top of Beech Hill. From that distance, lobster boats are specks on the water, sloops are brilliant white triangles, and schooners are a blurred sawtooth pattern.

Closer, I find it hard to identify them by their sail plans alone. Some have topsails and some don’t, and the mast heights and rakes are different. The trouble is, I can never remember which are which. I’m much better on hull color and shape, but they are often not visible when a boat is far away.

When painting a boat, the details of rigging matter. Before I moved to Maine, I had a commission to paint one of the schooners in Camden Harbor. I wrestled with it for two days and was happy with the results. Two wharf rats stopped to look at it as I packed up.

“Should we tell her?” said one.

“Nah,” said the other.

I couldn’t figure it out then, and to this day I still don’t know what I’d done wrong. But I console myself with the knowledge that the buyers probably knew even less than I did.

A completely different evening on the water, from this fall’s watercolor workshop.

Sunset Sail is not intended to be any specific boat. She’s meant to be sort of an Everyman of schooners.

You can watch a thousand sunsets across the ocean and none of them will be the same. That’s also true of schooners-by the time they’ve bobbed along the coast for a century or more, they’ve developed their own character. Of course I have my favorites-American Eagle, obviously, because she’s the most beautiful of boats and I get to sail on her every year. Then there’s the ketch Angelique with her sweet red sails and plumb bow, Heritage for its beautiful hull colors… oh, who am I kidding? I love them all.

I have the great fortune to be able to watch the sun rise or set on the ocean any time I want. In this painting, sunset is an explosive kaleidoscope of color. Tomorrow’s sunset will be completely different. In fact, I could paint a sunset every day for the rest of my life and never repeat myself.

Sunrise from Beech Hill, earlier this month.

CODA: I spent some time yesterday perusing Black Friday deals on my phone. Here are my observations:

  • The deals I saw were heavily slanted towards electronics. How many of these does a person need?
  • Nothing seemed like a great deal to me; I compared Black Friday prices with commonly-available discount prices on products I know. I was underwhelmed.
  • Black Friday shopping is boring, whether in person or online.

That leads me to remind you about one of my current anti-Black-Friday deals: you can get 10% off this or any other painting on this website until the end of the year by using the code THANKYOUPAINTING10.

Reserve your spot now for a workshop in 2025: