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Year: 2017

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The perfect size painting class

Bigger art classes are easier for the instructor, but not necessarily good for the students. Neither are very small classes.

A delightful day at Owls Head.
“Do you ever offer private lessons and if so, what advice can you offer me on what I should charge?” a painting instructor asked.
There are very few things I won’t do for money, but private painting instruction heads that list. Learning to paint is all about repetition. I show you a technique, and you repeat it until you’ve got it. The best balance for plein air painting, I’ve found, is a class of 6-9 people. Fewer, and I am crowding my students with too much information. More, and I can’t pay enough attention to their needs.
The wilder the terrain, the fewer students I can teach. That’s why I often use a monitor at my Acadia National Parkworkshop. He or she handles problems of logistics, freeing me to concentrate on painting questions.
The rockier the terrain, the fewer students you can teach.
“How many people are in the class?” a person wrote me this summer. That was one smart cookie. We’ve all taken workshops where the instructor tries to manage a group that’s much too large. Teachers cope by doing long demos, but that’s unfair to the students. They might as well watch a video.
Rushing around on rocks can lead to injury, as we discovered a few years ago.
It’s easier indoors. Classes at the Art Students League were very large, but I wasn’t neglected. I benefitted from the instruction happening around me as much as from what my teachers told me.
A big group is easier to teach than one or two people. Teachers are only human, and humans are essentially proprietary. The longer we spend at a students’ easel, the more we want to take over.
Demos have their place, but they’re no substitute for one-on-one attention.

When I’m first looking at a student’s work, my mind is fresh. One or two things immediately jump out at me for correction or praise. I can articulate them and move on without meddling. That keeps the focus clear and directed.

Give me a enough time there, however, and I start deconstructing the painter’s vision. Students tell horror stories of teachers who have repainted whole sections of their work. That’s hard to avoid when you’re spending too much time with a single painting. You get proprietary.
The right size class makes for lots of attention but no hovering.
Handicapping conditions don’t necessarily require private lessons. They can often be accommodated surprisingly well in a class. Several years ago, I taught a mobility-impaired student in an outdoor workshop. We made sure there was a safe, flat, level site available at every painting location. She brought an assistant with her.
If you choose to teach private lessons, you should charge based on your hourly earnings for teaching a class. Tot up the number of students you usually teach, multiply by the class fee, and divide by the number of hours you spend on that session. Add travel time if you’re expected to go to the students. $50-75 an hour is not an unreasonable fee for your undivided attention.
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I’m working, and other falsifications

In which our heroine blows off painting for a walk in the Maine woods.

Breaking Storm, by Carol L. Douglas, 48X30. It’s finished, so perhaps I deserved a day off.

I had every intention of working on the Fourth of July. It’s one of the best business days at Camden harbor. At such times plein air painting becomes performance art. It drives some painters mad to be interrupted constantly. I don’t mind.

Still, something Poppy Balser told me has been resonating. She’s taken the summer off from events to spend time with her kids. My youngest is twenty and has a summer job. However, this may be the last summer he comes home from college.
Rock hound with his dad.
This child is a rock hound. He loves picking the stuff up and turning it in his hands, puzzling out its story. He goes to school in the Genesee Valley of New York. Its red Medina sandstone is great for building gloomy Gothic insane asylums, but not so good for mineral or gem inclusions.
Mt. Apatite pit mine.
Van Reid is the author of a series of witty historical novels about coastal Maine. Last winter he told me about an abandoned feldspar quarry near his house. On Saturday, we hiked up to see it. It sits alone and silent in a vast empty wood, rimmed with ancient rock.
Yesterday was simply too glorious to work. Instead, I asked my son if he was interested in driving west to Mt. Apatite, near Auburn, ME. This public park contains a series of abandoned pit mines. Mined until the 1930s, they continue to attract rock hounds today.
Pegmatites are igneous rocks with exceptionally large crystals. They often contain minerals. In Maine that means beryl, tourmaline, zircon, garnet, mica and quartz, not that I’d recognize most of those things. But pegmatites are beautiful in themselves. One can trace the folding and cooling of the earth’s crust in them.
On Mt. Apatite.
There are rock hounds who search old mines for marketable gemstones. We were just interested in looking.
Mica may have little economic value, but it made the woods seem as if it had been sprinkled with fairy dust. It glinted on the path and between the blueberry bushes. There were enough garnets in the rocks that even I could find them. But don’t bother going there to find your fortune in gemstone; these garnets won’t survive being pried loose from their stony prisons.
Mica in the wild.
Minerals are apparently endlessly mutable. There are over 5,300 known mineral species. Their chemical composition is often very complex. For the human mind, with its desire to classify and categorize things, they are irresistible. Plus, they’re often beautiful.
We were poking around along a cliff when an older gentleman loped easily down the rock face toward us. He introduced himself as Dan. He was clearly knowledgeable about minerals and the history of the place. He told my son how to tap the Cleavelanditeto split it, and gave him some hints about proper gear, locations, and the history of the mines in the region.
“It’s gotten really busy here ever since Mindat,” he lamented (referring to a massive online database of minerals). It’s all relative, I guess: on this busiest holiday of the summer, there was nobody there but the four of us.
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Happy Independence Day!

I’m all for the Tenth Amendment, but there are times when States Rights are a pain.
Fox Island Thoroughfare Light, by Carol L. Douglas. Painted plein air from the deck of American Eagle.

While we’ve been legal residents of Maine for more than two years, we still pay income tax primarily to New York. It is one of a handful of states that tax telecommuters reporting to an office within its state.

Periodically, bills are proposed in Congress to standardize the rules for taxing telecommuters. These are quickly batted down. Powerful states, New York in particular, stand to lose a lot of money. Compared to poor Maine, New York is an 800-lb gorilla in national politics.
This is nothing new. By 1750, New Hampshire and New York were tussling over the Grants, the territory we now call Vermont. It wasn’t sovereignty that drove them, but money. They were each selling land grants to speculators and settlers, not particularly caring if the grants overlapped.
Replica Green Mountain Boys flag from the Battle of Bennington, 1777.
In 1764, King George III settled the debate in favor of New York. New York promptly demanded a topping-up fee to validate the grants issued by New Hampshire. This fee was almost equal to the original purchase price. For settlers scrabbling to live on a hard, unforgiving and cold frontier, it was impossibly high. By 1769, surveyors and law enforcement were being physically threatened and driven out.
Some of these settlers appealed for help from a bumptious fellow from Connecticut named Ethan Allen. Allen had left school after his father died. His only involvement with the court system was from the wrong side. Still, he was fiery, and he was willing to find the lawyers he needed.
Schooner Mercantile, by Carol L. Douglas. 
The case pitted small landowners against powerful New Yorkers, including the Lieutenant Governor and the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, which was hearing the case. As is customary in such cases, the little guys lost.
That transformed Allen into a Vermonter. He returned to Bennington and met with the grantholders at the Catamount Tavern. From their grievances, the Green Mountain Boys were born. They intended to stop New York from exercising any authority in the Grants. Allen himself sold off his Connecticut property and moved north.
In October, 1771, Allen and his Boys drove off a group of settlers, telling them, “Go your way now, and complain to that damned scoundrel your Governor, God damn your Governor, Laws, King, Council, and Assembly.” That’s an idea I’ve often endorsed, although never so poetically.
In response, Governor William Tryon put a £20 bounty on the heads of the rebels. By 1774, he was exasperated enough to raise that to £100. He passed legislation to suppress the “Bennington Mob”, as he called them. It imposed the death penalty for interfering with a magistrate and criminalized all public assembly in the Grants.
If this unattributed portrait is any indication, Ethan Allen was a character.
On March 13, 1775, the conflict spilled into outright bloodshed.  A small riot in the town of Westminster resulted in the death of two men at the hands of Colonial officials. This might have resulted in an early War Between the States, but the fracas was overtaken by events.
On April 18, 1775, 700 British troops were sent to confiscate militia ordnance stored at Concord. Local militia resisted this early effort at gun control. The colonies united in force against the British. Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys passed down through history as patriots* and heroes, not as tax rebels from New York.
*The reality was a bit more complex, but I only have 600 words here.
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It’s all relative

Money can’t buy happiness but the lack of it seems to annoy just about everyone.
Waiting, by Carol L. Douglas. I no longer remember what bureaucratic inefficiency prompted this so many years ago, but I can still feel the frustration.

Last week, a line squall took down a branch from the maple in our front yard. Going out to inspect the damage, I saw that woodpeckers had hammered neat holes into much of it. The tree is mortally ill and there is no solution other than to have it taken down. It’s not a job I want to tackle because it overhangs power lines, Route 1, and my roof.

It’s going to cost about $1250, but that comes on the heels of $2000 in car repairs and $1400 for a washer and dryer this month (replacing a pair that died at the ripe old age of four years). I was having a small fit about cash flow when I got a text message from my pal Helen. I’ve written about her before: she’s a poor woman from North Braddock, PA who works part-time as a residential advisor for mentally ill adults. She has sarcoidosis along with an insatiable yearning for learning.
Helen was cheesed off. “I lost my nail clipper,” she fumed, “and I don’t have $1 to go to the Dollar Store to buy a replacement one right now.”
The Gleaners, 1857, by Jean-François Millet, was never meant to be romantic. It was initially viewed with deep suspicion for its sympathetic portrayal of the poor.
For some reason, that totally cracked me up. Here we are in vastly different places in the American economy, suffering from the same darn problem: lack of ready capital. It makes me wonder whether anyone, ever, has enough money.
There are 442 billionaires in the United States. If a billionaire spends $100,000 a day and never makes another dime, he will run out of cash in 25 years. That seems very secure to me, but I really don’t know how billionaires live, any more than I truly understand how Helen lives or she me.
I imagine that when someone is that focused on acquiring wealth it’s either aggression or a mental aberration related to hoarding. Perhaps being down to their last million could make them feel as nervous as I do when I’m down to my last centime.
Ruth, by Carol L. Douglas, was painted to demonstrate indirect painting, but it’s also a portrait of someone short of ready cash. It’s another very old painting from the mists of time.
Helen was homeless last year at Christmas. It was a terrible concatenation of circumstances that ended up with her, her daughter and her granddaughter losing all their personal possessions and being stashed by Social Services in a motel. She had nothing, not even her winter boots.
Being involved with the social welfare network means you get advice from social workers, whether you want or need it. One of them told Helen, completely seriously, that she needed help with her ‘hoarding problem.’ Apparently, standards for hoarding are very low when all your possessions will fit in the trunk of a Ford Fiesta.
Les Foins (Haymaking), 1877, by Jules Bastien-Lepage, who keenly felt the plight of the French peasant.
All of this is just a reminder of the wisdom of M. Micawber’s famous recipe for happiness, from David Copperfield:
“Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pound ought and six, result misery.”
We live in a credit-driven economy that would be quite unrecognizable to our ancestors. Everyone does it—families, businesses, government. I try not to play, but I also know there’s only so much worrying one can do about money. After all, we’re bound to make more tomorrow.
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Niggling

The things that fizz at the corners of our consciousness are distracting. That’s why I share them with you.

Historic Fort Point, by Carol L. Douglas, painted for Wet Paint on the Weskeag.

Earlier this week, I pondered why artists embrace so much hard work for so little return. This question has niggled at me. As I was careening up the twisting streets of Boothbay Harbor to this week’s destination, I decided that artists are like movie starlets. We need to be at the soda fountain if we’re going to be discovered.

I know one actual starlet, Keren Coghill. As far as I can see, Keren doesn’t spend much time sitting, at the soda fountain or anywhere else. She’s either working, working out or answering audition calls. That’s of course true of successful visual artists as well.
There are no guarantees. We apply to shows or galleries that ought to be slam-dunks, but are rejected. Others are impossibly beyond our reach; inexplicably, they accept us. This isn’t fate. It’s a numbers game. The more places you apply, the more you’ll be accepted. The more shows you do, the more you’ll be seen. The more you’re seen, the more people will buy your work.
Rachel Carson sunset, by Carol L. Douglas, painted for Ocean Park Plein Air.
My relationship with the Kelpie Gallery started with an event I decided to do at the last minute, Wet Paint on the Weskeag. I had 48 hours between the end of my Sea & Sky workshopand a flight to Scotland. Why not plug one more event into that already absurd schedule? Tired and with no expectation of success, I painted well and won the Juror’s Choice Award.
The Kelpie Galleryis holding an artist reception tonight for Summertide at The Kelpie, from 5-7 PM. If you haven’t visited this gallery, it’s a treasure. Owner Susan Baineskeeps her stable of artists to a manageable number. The space is light, airy, and well-utilized. It’s at 81 Elm Street in South Thomaston, just down the road from the Owls Head Transportation Museum. Since I’m now one of Sue’s artists, I’ll be there.
Jonathan Submarining, by Carol L. Douglas, painted for Castine Plein Air.
Until then, I’ll be in my studio, trying to figure out if a painting is finished. Some artists love these last brush strokes; I do not. An engineer friend once told me that in most projects, 90% of the effort goes into 10% of the results.
Or, as Tom Cargill of Bell Labs said, “The first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 percent of the development time. The remaining 10 percent of the code accounts for the other 90 percent of the development time.”
I generally like to buy self-help books and put them on my shelf unread, the idea being that I’ll get the message through my credit card statement. It’s better when someone else reads them and tells me the precis.
Boston Post Road Bridge, Mamaroneck, by Carol L. Douglas, painted for Rye Painters on Location.
Bobbi Heath is reading Growing Gills by Jessica Abel. She posits that undone creative ideas are corrosive. They sit in the back of your mind and niggle at you, making you anxious and unproductive.
That is what I think about undone housework and unpaid bills. Are unfinished paintings the same? My studio is full of them. Like most artists, I find finishing work to be the hardest part of painting.
I used to be a font of crackpot ideas, but I’ve noticed that the harder I work, the less I experience off-task mental fizzing. That’s partly because my brain isn’t bored. It’s partly because working at set times trains our minds to concentrate. Whatever the mechanism, it’s a blessed relief.
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Slightly sloshy artist gets soaked

The only thing you can predict with certainty about this summer’s weather is that it will rain.

Just slightly soaked, I try again. Photo courtesy of Annette Koziel
Fishermen’s Memorial Park sits above the lobster fleet in Boothbay Harbor. It’s a sobering memorial; the list of lives lost at sea is long and a fresh wreath hangs on its bronze dory.  Behind the park rises the uncompromising white frame spire of Our Lady Queen of Peace Catholic Church, celebrating its centenary this year. Its vaulted ceiling is reminiscent of the ribs of the Ernestina-Morrisey, currently laid open in Boothbay’s shipyard. On the hour, Our Lady’s carillon peals earnest hymns across the water.

Our Lady of Peace Catholic Church.
Bobbi Heath, Ed Buonvecchio and I were meeting to demo for Windjammer Days. We’d planned to grab lunch in town and then paint at the Fire Hall, where a tent was set up for our convenience. However, we’re landscape painters. The best view of all was from the park and the church.
Clearly, everyone else thought so too. The place was mobbed. Late in the morning, one of my students, Jennifer Johnson, stopped by. We were just coming to grips with the idea that we couldn’t leave to get something to eat. Jennifer kindly volunteered to fetch our lunches. The restaurant was closed, so she brought us fresh vegetarian chili made with her own two hands. That, friends, is ‘supporting the arts.’
American Eagle, a tug, and an antique launch… clearly the best view in town.
“It’s going to be a great day,” Jennifer promised me. “No rain on the forecast.” Radar agreed with her. Large fluffy clouds marched in from the west. Our displays of work were set up, we were surrounded by interested people asking intelligent questions, and below us paraded a motley collection of fantastic winged angels, the windjammers for which the festival is named.
A young lad named Ben positioned himself next to me, trying to name the boats as they came in. “It’s just like identifying cars,” I told him. “You figure out the model from its shape and its details. Does it have a topsail? A bowsprit? A racing stripe?”
My sketch. The tide was on the turn, so the boats were swinging.
He was fascinated by the privateer Lynx. It’s an interpretation of an historic privateer built in 1812 to run British naval blockades. Its masts are severely raked, meaning they tilt. This term gives us the modern word rakish.
The boats and their adoring fans moved on. Ropy fingers of moisture started to spill down from the friendly cumulus clouds. “It’s raining there, there, and there,” I said to Ed and Bobbi. We’d barely repacked our gallery when the skies let loose.
Rain, again.
Annette Koziel, a friend and fan from Brunswick, arrived with the rain. She had a tarp in her car. We tossed it over my easel and ran for Bobbi’s car. Artists know that if Nature throws a passing shower, you use the break to find a bathroom.
At the Lobster Dock.
It stopped as quickly as it started. I mopped up and tried again. I picked up my brush and a second shower poured down. I can take a hint, I thought.
Lobster boats at Boothbay (unfinished) by Carol L. Douglas
I had an errand to run in Brunswick, so I headed south, taking me across the giant parking lot that is the Wiscasset bridge. Generally, I do sums in my head when I need to stay alert while driving, but Annette gave me a great tip. A small radio station broadcasts quirky, mid-century standards from an old tidal mill in West Bath. If you’re traveling up Route 1, try tuning your radio to 98.3.
Later, I heard from Jennifer. She was so sure it wouldn’t rain that she left her windows open while she ran in the grocery store. Now, that’s adventurous.
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Everyone should make art

Why spend money teaching kids arts and music when we can drug them into submission?

Not only did yesterday’s painting class develop their brains, they watched an osprey family on that nest on the pole.

 As a parent, I skirmished with my kids’ school about doodling. I agreed to an Individualized Education Program (IEP) for my youngest just so they would let him doodle in class. To me it was obvious that doodling helps kids who are stressed from sitting in one place for too long.

A few years ago, I wrote about a teenager arrested for doodling. Sadly, it wasn’t the only time it happened.

I tell my students to carry a sketchbook at all times, mostly to help them improve their drawing chops. I draw whenever I’m waiting or listening. I’ve drawn through twenty years of church sermons, and I don’t think it’s damaged my ability to hear what my pastors have said.
Sadly, my kids’ school didn’t agree. Even with an IEP, drawing in class was eventually banned for my son. (The good news is, as an autonomous college student, his grades are great.)
Gwendolyn Linn taught a class within one of my painting classes. Her audience was rapt.
Science tells us that doodling-repression is flat-out wrong. A recently study at Drexel University used fNIRS (functional near-infrared spectroscopy) technology to measure blood flow in the so-called ‘reward pathway’ of the brain while subjects drew.
They were tested while doing three different short activities: coloring in a mandala, doodled within or around a pre-marked circle, and free drawing. All three activities caused an increase in activity in the medial prefrontal cortex.
Of course, the medial prefrontal cortex is not just the ‘happy button’ that gets turned on when you do something enjoyable or misuse drugs. It’s also involved in planning, personality, decision-making and moderating social behavior. Among its more important processes is the development of a sense of self and that Holy Grail of educators, executive function.
Nancy Woogen working on her pre-frontal cortex in my Sea & Sky Workshop a few years ago.
Doodling in or around the circle had the greatest neural impact, followed by free drawing and coloring. Mostly, the differences weren’t significant. The exception was for subjects who self-identified as artists. For them, coloring inside the lines turned out to be a negative experience.
There have been many studies with similar results. Training in drawing is associated with an increase in brain gray matter and changes in the prefrontal cortex. Making art improves the functional connectivity between cortices. Even passive engagement with art helps brain function.
Studies have shown similar positive results on the brain from making and listening to music.
Still, the arts are the orphan stepchildren of our educational system. They’re the first thing cut. But why spend money teaching our kids arts and music when we can drug them into submission?
Corinne Avery rearranging dinghies at another workshop, this time at Camden harbor.
Note: I’m demoing painting today at Windjammer Days in Boothbay Harbor from 1-4 PM. My pals Ed Buonvecchio and Bobbi Heath will also be there, along with my two favorite schooners, American Eagle and Heritage. If you’re free, come see us. You may discover a whole new way of lighting up the neural pathways in your brain.
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Why do you do what you do?

It is possible to be a successful woman artist and mother, if one has an exceptional husband, good time-management skills, and an iron will.
Daddy’s little helper, 2015, Carol L. Douglas
Yesterday I was reveling in the simplicity of my job. I had planned no deep thinking; it would be a day alone with my brushes.
That never works. “Why do you do what you do?” asked a regular reader.
The easy answer is that it’s the only thing I know how to do. A little honesty compels me to admit that this isn’t entirely true. I can write. I could retire if I want. Clearly, something besides necessity drives me.
In fact, my reader sensed that. “Why do you teach, travel all over the place, produce as much work as you do?” she continued. “Is working at that pace a habit, or something deeper?”
Maternité, 1890, Mary Cassatt. Cassatt, the greatest painter of the mother-child bond, had no children of her own.
Yes, I was raised to work hard, and it’s an ingrained habit. Still, I do take time off. A chance conversation with a Mennonite contractor years ago turned me into a Sabbatarian. He explained what a tremendous gift a regularly-scheduled Sabbath day was. There are a few weekends a year I can’t take off, but in general, you’ll find me working six days and resting on the seventh.
I like painting and I like being on the road. I like the challenge of sizing up new places and trying to reformat them to a 12X16 canvas.
But mostly, I work like this because I can. It’s a pleasure and a shock to be free of day-to-day responsibility for others. Yesterday, I mentioned a Tracey Eminquote about parenting. Here it is in full:
I would have been either 100% mother or 100% artist. I’m not flaky and I don’t compromise. Having children and being a mother… It would be a compromise to be an artist at the same time. I know some women can. But that’s not the kind of artist I aspire to be. There are good artists that have children. Of course there are. They are called men. It’s hard for women. It’s really difficult, they are emotionally torn. It’s hard enough for me with my cat.
When I first started painting full time, another woman artist told me much the same thing. The evidence supported her statement. Most artists (of either gender) in our circle were childless. Those with children also had wives who supported both their family and their art careers.
Mutter mit Jungen, 1933, Käthe Kollwitz. Kollwitz is an exception to rule that says mothers can’t make good artists.
That realization came close to derailing me. I was struggling to make enough time for my kids and art, but the historical reality seemed to be that women with children would always be second-rate painters.
I’m glad I didn’t learn that before the kids were irrevocable. They’re certainly the best work I’ve ever done.
Now that I’m beyond child-care, I think it’s a case where history is not necessarily destiny. Gender roles have changed tremendously in the last century. It is possible for a woman to combine competent child-rearing and any career, provided she has an exceptional husband, good time-management skills, and an iron will.
But the question my reader asked is an important one. There are many easier ways to live. Why do we do what we do?
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OC, forget about the D

Neat people get a bad rap in the arts. Still, I think it’s the best way to work.

Bathtime, by Carol L. Douglas
“What my mother would love the most for her birthday,” my daughter once announced, “is for me to go to her house and throw something away.” Immediately, my in-box lit up with suggestions for help with my hoarding problem.
That wasn’t what Mary was saying. In fact, I’m ruthless about order. Buying me something would be a waste of time and money.
I came home from Nova Scotia to ants. There were three different sizes, all darting around the kitchen. “There’s no food lying out,” protested my husband when I suggested that scrubbing might help.
Still life, by Carol L. Douglas
A concatenation of events led to the breakdown of our household standards. I was traveling. Our washing machine is broken, and the new one has been on back-order for weeks. Kids flitted home for the summer. The elderly dog’s incontinence is now the norm.
My husband is also what we currently call a ‘creative’ (he writes software). He purports to be unaffected by disorder. I’m skeptical. Popular wisdom tells us that creatives are messier than average. That doesn’t mean they ought to be.
I can paint without vacuuming the pillbugs in the basement, even though I know they’re there. But if there’s unopened mail or laundry that needs to be folded; I need to deal with it immediately, before I go in my studio.
Still life, by Carol L. Douglas
I haven’t always been this way. The public rooms in my childhood home were neat; the upstairs was a mess. My mother worked full time, had a big house, and raised a slew of kids. I did the same thing, with the same results.
My siblings and I were diagnosed as ‘hyperactive’. Teachers said my kids were ADHD. Too late, I realized that they should really be tagged “children of an over-committed mother.” I started being more tyrannical about cleaning.
Tracey Emin may not be my favorite artist, but she was right when she pointed out that “there are good artists that have children. Of course there are. They are called men.” The amount of work needed to raise children and pursue a career as an artist is overwhelming. It’s even more complicated when your work and living space are jumbled together.
Still life, by Carol L. Douglas
Our ancestors had to be neater than we are. They didn’t live in a throwaway culture. Tools were treasured, so they were oiled and put back as soon as they were used. Spending on food and clothing went from consuming half the family budget in 1900 to less than a fifth in 2000. When something took so much work and effort to acquire, one didn’t treat it lightly.
Today we all wallow in stuff. Many young people have told me they think they’re OCD. That’s just something they say when experiencing the strange compulsion to clean for the first time. “No,” I reply, “you’re anxious because neat is your normal state, but you haven’t embraced it yet. Go clean your room.” Many of those kids haven’t internalized that ‘perfect is the enemy of good,’ nor have they learned how to be organized.
The downside of having a studio in your house is that you can’t just go to the office to escape your home. I struggled through last week, tired and barely meeting my obligations. Finally, on Saturday, we gave the place a thorough cleaning. Suddenly, my energy and the urge to be creative are back again. Fancy that.
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The world’s friendliest people

In anticipation of Canada Day, let me tell you a story about our kind-hearted, open-handed neighbors.

Wreck of the SS Ethie (Newfoundland), by Carol L. Douglas

Newfoundland was the greatest surprise of my Trans-Canada trip. It looks like the Scottish Highlands. That isn’t too surprising, since John Cabot reportedly sailed just 1800 miles west of Ireland to discover it. In geographical terms, that’s next-door-neighborly.

It’s a massive island, and it’s empty; fewer than a half-million people call it home. Other than St. John’s, there’s not a single municipality with more than 25,000 people. Most Newfoundlanders live in small fishing villages strung along the coastlines.
About 300 KM west of St. John’s is the small town of Gander. It’s mainly notable for having gas and a Tim Hortons right on the Trans-Canada. Considering the fantastic landscape all around it, it’s not a place a painter would tarry.
Fog flowing down the mountains near Port-aux-Basques, Newfoundland
Gander exists because of the grandiosely-named Gander International Airport. This was built in 1936, when trans-Atlantic flight was first developing. It’s the easternmost flat point on the North American continent, so it became the fueling point for planes traveling to and from Europe. 
On January 11, 1938, Captain Douglas Fraser made the first recorded landing in a single-engine biplane, a de Havilland Fox Moth VO-ADE.
The town reached its peak during the Second World War, when about 10,000 Allied airmen were billeted there. It was a refueling post for the Royal Air Force’s Air Ferry, which brought American- and Canadian-built planes from North America to Britain. In 1940, it was the largest airport on the planet.
Airman and Infantrymen at RCAF Station, Gander, 1943, Courtesy of Library and Archives Canada 
Eventually jets got big enough to leave from New York or Toronto without refueling, and Gander became just another boom town gone bust.
Until September 11, 2001. Less than an hour after the planes hit the Twin Towers, North American airspace was closed. That left flights in limbo over the North Atlantic. 38 civilian and 4 military flights were ordered to land at Gander. They held more than 6,600 people—two thirds of the population of Gander—and they wouldn’t be going anywhere for a week.
There was only one Customs Officer assigned to Gander. All he knew was that planes had attacked New York and the Pentagon, and we might be at war. He had to vet all those people before letting them loose in Canada. He drafted a planeload of American soldiers to help.
Under a milky sky (Hare Bay, Newfoundland), by Carol L. Douglas
Some passengers were on their planes for 30 hours waiting to be processed. Their only source of news was cell phones. When they finally disembarked, they were not allowed to carry any personal luggage; they left with the clothes on their backs.
Gander has 500 hotel rooms. These were allotted to plane personnel, with the idea that they needed to be rested and ready. That still left more than 6,000 people with no place to go.
Newfoundland and Labrador is the poorest province in Canada, but Gander’s churches, schools, shelters and private homes took in people. The remainder were transported to surrounding towns. Local bus drivers had been on strike, but they put down their picket signs and drove passengers to their destinations.
Cape Spear Road (Newfoundland), by Carol L. Douglas
There wasn’t enough food, bedding, diapers, or formula available for purchase. Citizens opened their own pantries instead. They supplied meals, deodorant, soap, blankets, spare underwear, hot showers and washing machines. The phone company set up phone banks and temporary cable and internet. Citizens even provided entertainment, including whale-watching tours.
Six days later, when airspace was finally opened up, all 6,600 passengers were delivered to the airport on time. Not one person missed a flight.
Canada Day is July 1. This year they are celebrating their Sesquicentennial. We couldn’t ask for better neighbors.

POSTSCRIPT: Michael Fuller of Parrsboro Creative just told me there’s a Broadway musical about these events, called Come from Away. New York readers should check it out!