Reappraisal

Reed beds at the Irondequoit Inn didn't thrill me that much when I painted it, but it turns out to have been predictive of where I'm going as a painter.

Recently, I was listening to some fellow painters talking about how to reuse canvas-boards on which they'd done unsuccessful paintings. I remarked that I almost never reuse boards, because I almost never throw things away. My studio and workshop are full of field sketches and paintings that aren’t going to be shown but aren’t going to be painted over, either. As long as I have the luxury of space, I’m going to continue this practice.

Hayfield in Paradise (private collection) was painted about a decade ago. Yes, it's obviously by me, but my color sense, my brushwork, and my composition are all much different today.

I think most artists are poor judges of whether something they’re working on is a success. We usually think it works when it flows off the brush without too much pain. However, often the most important work we’re doing isn’t easy. Trailblazing involves hacking out a path with an ax, after all.

I had most of my inventory off my own walls this summer because it was in galleries. To fill the nailholes, I put up some small works from my slush pile. One of these pieces is hanging on the wall opposite my bed, where I see it when I wake up. I didn’t like it that much when I painted it, but after a week back home, I realize that it’s actually very good. It was jarring several years ago; it seems a lot more like me today.

I loathed this painting of the mouth of the Genesee River when I did it, and almost wiped it out. It has really grown on me over the years, and now I think it's a really cool painting.

Another small painting—a sketch for a larger work—accidentally traveled with me to Maine this summer. Since it had nothing to do with the Maine works I was delivering, I used it to decorate my cabin. When I painted it, I thought it was both elegant and loose. However, the subdued palette has little in common with my work today.

Keuka Vineyard accidentally traveled to Maine with me. I realized after looking at it for several weeks that it's not that connected with my work today. Nevertheless, I still like it.

You can’t really make these judgments if you obliterate everything you paint that makes you uncomfortable. That's analogous to ruthlessly weeding out all new seedlings under the mistaken notion that they are weeds. You really can't tell what's in your garden until it has a chance to grow.

Message me if you want information about next year’s classes or workshops.

Getting it right

Landscape Remembered, 2010, James Morrison, oil on board

James Morrison, at age 82, seems to break most of the conventional rules for plein airpainting. His work is huge, painted on paper boards, and the paint is so thin that I had to check to be certain it was, indeed, painted in oil.

Having never been to Scotland, I am no judge of whether he is true to the landscape, but his work is romantic and monumental and it speaks to me. In some passages it soars with almost negligent disregard for the paint, in others, the detail is overwhelming. It reminds me most of calligraphy in that the open space is as important as the line itself. And of course his draftsmanship and perspective in the glowering clouds is superb.

Half Demolished Tenements, 1964, James Morrison, oil on canvas

My friend Martha Vail recently sent me a book of his work, Land and Landscape: the Painting of James Morrison. I find his perambulations through the decades of his career to be most heartening. He did monochromatic studies of a blackened Glasgow; he did exquisite studies of beeches in the style of Andrew Wyeth; he experimented with op-art and abstract-expressionism.

Perhaps if I live to 82, I’ll get it right, too.

“For any serious artist it is the next work which is the most important and complacency is the negation of creativity,” wrote Guy Peploe, the Scottish Gallery’s director. “So it is for Jim Morrison at eighty. He is lucky, even blessed, with the energy, vitality and curiosity that are creativity's handmaidens and in this new body of work we can see new departures as he looks again at his favourite landscapes in all seasons and moods.”

Summer Fields, Balgove, 1987, James Morrison, oil on gesso board

Born in Glasgow in 1932, James Morrison studied at the Glasgow School of Art. In 1957, he founded the Glasgow Group of artists with Anda Paterson and James Spence. He is an Academician of the Royal Scottish Academy and a member of the Royal Scottish Society of Painters in Watercolour. He taught at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art in Dundee for 22 years before retiring in 1987 to paint full-time.

I have two openings left for my 2014 workshop in Belfast, ME. Information is available here.

You can paint anything if you can paint greens

View from Catherine's gazebo, by Anna McDermott. (The color of these paintings is somewhat overblown because it was almost dark when I snapped these shots.)

There are places with gazebos in Rochester, but when there’s electrical activity on the horizon it helps if they’re not too far from a parking lot. Yesterday was a humid, dark day with thunderstorms forecasted for 5 PM. I went over my list of options with my student and pal, Catherine, ending up with the Fairport Library gazebo.

The actual scene she was painting. The greens of summer can be acidic and unvaried in New York.

“No, not that again!” she responded, and I had to agree. Although it overlooks the canal, it’s got boring sightlines.

View from Catherine's gazebo, by Sandy Quang.

So we met in her gazebo, which overlooks a 10-acre pond. The trouble is, there’s a rain forest between the gazebo and the pond and no amount of chopping seems to keep the sightlines open.

The actual scene she was painting. 

All of which I knew before I got there, but I still love the view, since you’re looking across a thicket of sumacs to a far hillside. Of course, it’s all green, but greens are an excellent challenge. If you can sort out a painting from a thicket of scrubby trees, you can paint anything.

In the Forest of Fontainebleau took Camille Corot five years to complete (1860-65). I gave my students three hours.

I have three openings left for my 2014 workshop in Belfast, ME. Information is available here.

What you do when nobody’s looking

Ellwanger Berry Garden, 12X16, $650, by Carol L. Douglas.

Sure, I get to drive around and visit with fascinating people and go to interesting shows and occasionally pick up a brush and paint something, but I spend more time than I’d like on bookkeeping and that bugaboo of all sales: inventory control.

Stu Chait and I are putting the final details together for our upcoming show at RIT-NTID’s Dyer Arts Center, which opens July 11 from 4-7 PM. If you’re in town, you should really find a way to get there, since this is a sprawling show.

Manipulation in Red by Stu Chait.

Stu and I met at the Ellwanger Garden here in Rochester. We were the only painters there, so we stood at opposite ends of the garden and painted facing each other. I’ve long since sold that painting, but I painted another painting with him at the same place, which will be in this show.

It’s been years since I pulled out all my work to organize a show, but since the passage of time is part of our theme, I inventoried every piece of work I have in play right now. That is nearly a hundred pieces, which is less absurd when you consider that I have three separate bodies of work: landscape, figure, and faith-based. (Even with all those paintings, I am actually scant on work to meet specific summer commitments.)

The Servant, 36X40, $3000, oil on canvas, by Carol L. Douglas.

What surprised me even more is how many paintings are no longer in my inventory.  Next winter I’m going to go through my photo archives and sales records and try to piece together a comprehensive catalogue. I loathe that kind of task, but if I don’t do it soon, I’ll never get it done.

I have three openings left for my 2014 workshop in Belfast, ME. Information is available here.

Freaky coincidence or what?

Jingwei Yang's painting from Anna's garden.

I’ve known Anna since she was a mere slip of a girl. She’s married now and two months ago she and her husband bought a lovely home in the city. Anna has always been musical but never, to my knowledge, interested in making visual art. I was most surprised when she called me about a month ago to ask about painting lessons. Most people ease into painting gradually, but she went out to Hyatt’s and got all the necessary tools and has been practicing at home.

Sandy Quang's painting from Anna's garden.

Last week I took my class to Anna’s new home to paint her small backyard pocket garden. It is clearly the garden of an artist. She told us the former owner was an art teacher at Rochester’s School of the Arts and her late husband was also an artist.

Nina Koski's painting of Anna's garden.

After class, Anna gave me a tour of her house. About halfway through, I realized the late husband in question was Peter Berg, who was a well-known Rochester painter around the time Anna was born. I never knew him, not living here at the time, but I knew of him from my friend Sari Gaby.

I do believe houses can have a spiritual temperament, and I wonder if Anna’s house has a painter’s temperament. Perhaps those old pantiles and oak pocket doors gave her a gentle nudge toward painting.

Nate Tomlinson's painting from a different garden day.

Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in Maine in 2014 or Rochester at any time. My Belfast, ME, workshop is almost sold out. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops!

Heart of the Andes

The Heart of the Andes, 1859, Frederic Edwin Church

Next month I’ll be down at Olana (the home of Frederic Edwin Church) to paint with friends from New York Plein Air Painters. To prepare myself, I stopped by the Metropolitan Museum to visit his most famous painting, The Heart of the Andes.

This is an enormous canvas—ten feet wide and five feet high—that depicts the whole panoply of earthly conditions, from the peak of Mount Chimborazo in Ecuador in the far distance to the lush jungle landscape lying at our feet.

The Heart of the Andes, 1859, (detail) Frederic Edwin Church, showing the focal tree at the lower left.

Church visited Ecuador and Columbia twice. He was retracing the journeys of a famous 19th century naturalist, Alexander von Humboldt. The Heart of the Andes is a composite view, including topography from many places.  The enormity of the canvas allows him to use more than one focal light. There is human activity, most noticeably on the path that leads us in to the cross, but we are cut off from most of it.

The Heart of the Andes, 1859, (detail) Frederic Edwin Church, showing the remarkably intricate foliage running along the right.

In the month of its first showing (in 1859) more than 12,000 people paid a quarter each to see it, waiting for hours in line.

“Nobody would pay a quarter to see a painting today,” Brad Marshall said as we looked at it. “They’d just look at it online.” But no photograph can capture this painting, particularly the intricate work running through the foreground.

The Heart of the Andes, 1859, (detail) Frederic Edwin Church, showing the church and village in the middle distance. There are worlds within worlds in this painting and the mind boggles at the idea of how he sketched it out.

Church eventually sold the work for $10,000, which at the time was the highest price ever paid for a work by a living American artist.

Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in Belfast, Maine in August, 2014 or in Rochester at any time. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops!

Gone but not forgotten

Beauty Instead of Ashes, 48X36, oil on linen, 2014, by Carol L. Douglas

Last summer my friend Loren and I went for a hike along the Goose River in Rockport, ME, and discovered vast piles of lime tailings. Rockport is one of America’s beauty spots, but it was once a center of quicklime manufacture. Nature slowly attempts to cover this wound, but it is a slow process.

Midcoast Maine is full of limestone deposits. When limestone is burned, the carbon dioxide burns off and quicklime is left. This is used to make plaster, paper, mortar, concrete, fertilizer, leather, glue, paint, and glass. By the Civil War, midcoast Maine was producing more than a million casks of lime a year.

Eventually God will cover our sins, but it takes a long, long time. Sin can endure through generations, but ultimately, the spirit of the Lord will be with us, “to appoint unto them that mourn in Zion, to give unto them beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness, that they might be called trees of righteousness, the planting of the Lord, that He might be glorified.” (Isaiah 61:3-4)

Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in Maine in 2014 or Rochester at any time. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops!

Limping toward the finish line

The Harvest is Plenty, 36X48, oil on linen, 2014, by Carol L. Douglas

Today I put the finishing touches on the above painting and tipped it into its frame.

Jesus sent out disciples two by two, telling them, “The harvest truly is great, but the laborers are few; therefore pray the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into His harvest.” Those of us who spend time in the agricultural world understand this metaphor: we sow seeds, we tend plants, and when the harvest comes in, it’s a lot of work and we’re generally short-handed.

But what if the order of things is interrupted? What if a line squall off Lake Ontario flattens the entire field right before the combine arrives?

When wheat ripens, it has heavy, nodding heads on delicate stems. As summer deepens the wheat assumes a color that has no equal in the artificial world—it has a shimmering beauty that’s impossible to capture in paint or photographs—much, in fact, like human souls. Looking at the field from the angle of the threatening storm, we should stand convicted of our need to get busy.

Ack! I have to teach in this space on Saturday!

Speaking of “tip,” my studio is quickly becoming one. I’m generally pretty neat but framing and painting in the same space is difficult. (I have a wood shop in our garage but it isn’t heated and it’s still painfully cold outside.)

I’m running three fans in the hope that these paintings will be dry enough to transport on Thursday, which is my promised delivery date.

Last painting, detail. I'll finish it tomorrow and tip it in its frame and then deliver on Thursday. Talk about cutting it fine.

I’m finishing my last canvas—hardly where I expected to be when I started this in November, before unexpected surgery and recovery trashed my schedule. On the other hand, the one passage I’ve finished makes me pretty darn happy.

Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in Maine in 2014 or Rochester at any time. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops!