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Year: 2017

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What a difference a day makes!

The first glorious plein air painting day was our last class of the spring session.  It was grand.
Camden and Mt. Battie, by Carol L. Douglas
Nobody understands spring like a Northerner. We long for that giddy day when the temperature first climbs above 50° F., the rain stops, and the sky clears. Our joints cease their muttering, our backs straighten, and our steps grow firmer and quick. It is a privilege to watch ice and snow roll back from the tomb of winter.
I used to teach every week. I travel too much for that now, so I break my classes into six-week sessions. This one has been shut indoors too much of the time by frankly lousy weather. It’s frustrated me. I think of myself as an apostle of plein airpainting. How am I going to spread the good word, caged in my studio like that? Yesterday was expected to be cool with possible showers. It ended up being wonderful.
Great clouds and a rolling river.
The Megunticook is still raging down its chute into Camden harbor. A sky of sublime beauty sailed around us. Cumulus clouds formed above Mt. Battie and to the east over Penobscot Bay. Cirrus clouds striped the high altitudes. The wooden boats for which Camden is justly famous rocked gently at their moorings, their owners hard at work preparing for the season. The deep blue of the sky reflected midnight in the harbor waters. There were great paintings everywhere, and we were present.
I like most of my students, but this group has been special. Two absolute beginners drove in every week from near Jay. That may be only a distance of sixty miles or so, but, for you flatlanders, it takes the better part of two hours. That’s commitment.
Dinghy, Camden Harbor, by Carol L. Douglas
Only one student has been with me before. The other three are pretty advanced painters. All of them have great potential.
“That froth is not white,” I pontificated. Then I suggested they use pale tints of lavender and yellow ochre to model it.
“I believe you, but I don’t see it,” Jennifer answered. That comes with time, I told her.
A spectacular pileup of clouds to the east.
They may be done with this session, but still I gave them one last homework assignment: to look at Joaquin Sorolla’shandling of white. They are a myriad of tints, but I’ve noticed no absolute white anywhere.
I think commercially-bottled water is a lousy deal, environmentally and personally. Still, my house (like yours) always seems to collect the darn stuff. I’ve been toying with a bottle in my studio recently. It’s multifaceted and infinitely reflective. That led to my students’ second assignment: to draw a water bottle, in all its whirling complexity. If the drawing conveys meaning or mood, that’s even better. These students have until the end of the month to finish. You, dear reader, can email yoursto me any time you want.
Your homework assignment, should you choose to accept it. Draw this, but do it from life, not from a photo.
Alas, the morning sped by, and we parted. By teatime, Mt. Battie and Camden were again shrouded in rain. We’d had a brief window of perfect weather and we had gloried in it.

Our new session starts Tuesday, May 30 and runs for six classes, skipping merrily over Independence Day. I’ll give you more information soon, but you can read about it or register here. 
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The greatest painter of rain

The greatest landscape artist of the 19th century wasn’t a Frenchman. He was Hiroshige, or so his western contemporaries thought.

Sudden Shower Over Shin-Ohashi Bridge At Atake, 1856, Hiroshige.
As I was walking to the post office yesterday, a miniscule rain shower spattered in the woods next to me.  It lasted no more than a second. Being modern, I didn’t recognize it as an omen. Despite the forecast, by midafternoon it was misting heavily enough that no outdoor painting was possible.
We’ve had a lot of rain this spring in the northeast. The St. Lawrence River is full, so they’re holding water back in Lake Ontario, which is in turn flooding parts of Toronto and Rochester. Here in Maine the creeks and rivers patter loudly and joyfully down to the sea. And still it continues to rain; it’s on the forecast for the rest of this week.
Night Rain On Karasaki, Hiroshige
The 19th century Japanese artist Utagawa Hiroshige often used mist and rain as motifs in his compositions. He worked in a genre called ukiyo-e, which translates as “pictures of the floating world.” After Commodore Perry forced Japan opento Westerners in 1854, ukiyo-e was exported to the west. It had a profound influence on Western painting.
Hiroshige was the last master of ukiyo-e. Born in 1797 in Edo (Tokyo), he was left orphaned at the age of 12. His father was the samurai fire fighter of Edo Castle, and this responsibility passed to the son. Although he went on to study and work full time as an artist,he never shirked his duty, eventually passing it along through his family.
Two Men On A Sloping Road In The Rain, Hiroshige
Shortly after his parents’ deaths, he began studying art with the master Utagawa Toyohiroof the Utagawa school. This exposed him to western ideas of perspective, which had been imported in books carried to Japan by Dutch traders. The Utagawa school pioneered landscape painting as an independent genre.
Hiroshage worked with a sketchbook, traveling to other locations to assemble ideas and motifs for his woodcuts. Although he was prolific and famous, he was never wealthy; at one point his wife had to sell clothing and ornamental combs to support his work.
White Rain, Shono, 1833-34, Hiroshige
Hiroshage worked within the narrow genre of meisho-e, or “pictures of famous places.” In a sense, these were the predecessors of picture postcards.
Japonisme took the 19th century world by storm after the International Exposition of 1867 in Paris. Oriental bric-a-brac poured into western Europe. James Whistler reportedly discovered Japanese prints in a tea room near London Bridge. Claude Monet saw them used as wrapping paper. James Tissot and Edgar Degas collected ukiyo-e. Mary Cassatt was an open and avid admirer and imitator of the style. Vincent van Gogh famously copied two of the One Hundred Famous Views of Edo, which were among his collection of ukiyo-e prints.
And it wasn’t just the visual arts. Gilbert and Sullivan produced their comic masterpiece, The Mikado, in 1885. Japanese gardens became the rage. By the end of the century, Hiroshige was being referred to as the greatest painter of landscapes of the 19th century.
Evening Shower At Nihonbashi Bridge, 1832, Hiroshige
Hiroshige died at the age of 62 during a cholera epidemic in Edo. Just before his death, he wrote:
I leave my brush in the East
And set forth on my journey.
I shall see the famous places in the Western Land.

Sadly, the same cultural exchange that sparked so much artistic development in Europe also spelled the end of ukiyo-e. The rapid Westernization following the Meiji Restoration found photography vying with traditional woodblock printing. By the 1890s the tradition was, more or less, dead.

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Blast from the past

Graphic design in the Fifties and Sixties was the playbill version of Googie: exuberant, absurd, energetic, Atomic Age America.
A tab at the top or bottom was left blank so local information could be added. That’s why the type looks different.

I was looking for Howard Gallagher, owner of Camden Falls Gallery. Coincidently, he was looking for me. Curiously, we were both thinking about music, not painting.

In our youth, my husband was a bass player with Buffalobluesman, Shakin’ Smith. We drew straws to see who had to get a real job, and he lost. He still plays, and he’d like to play more. The trouble is that his contacts are few up here in midcoast Maine. There doesn’t seem to be as much of a live music scene here as in Buffalo. That’s odd, considering this is a tourist destination.
Buffalo’s last bar call was at 4 AM. This created a world of its own for musicians, who generally had to wait until the last drunk stumbled out before the owner would unfist his cash. Often, musicians wouldn’t even start playing until 11 PM. One fine summer morning, Doug and I returned home after a gig to find his father up painting the garage door. He seemed inexpressibly old, but he was younger then than we are now.
This schedule was a remnant of an era when the mills roared 24-7. Bars stayed open to accommodate shiftworkers. That world is documented in Verlyn Klinkenborg’s elegiac The Last Fine Time.
Neither of us want to stay up all night drinking in seedy dives, but Doug does want to play. Howard likes music, so I called to see if he had any ideas.
No, but he needed a poster designed for a series of swing shows he’s organizing in Northport this summer. Back when Doug was playing the bass, I was doing graphic design using paper, an X-Acto knife, waxer, rapidograph pens, and other obsolete tools of the trade. I quit long after the transition to computers—almost exactly twenty years ago, in fact—but I still remember the basics.
Most of those mid-century type treatments were hand-drawn with pen and ink. Nobody was particularly fettered by so-called good taste or rules about the number and kinds of display fonts that were tossed together. Graphic design was the playbill version of Googie: exuberant, absurd, energetic, Atomic Age America.
I didn’t have enough time to hand-letter a poster. I made a passable imitation using Adobe Illustrator. It was great nostalgic fun, but no, I don’t want to design your logo. I’m way too busy painting. (If you need a designer, contact Victoria Brzustowicz.)
Meanwhile, I’m off to see The Zombies in Northhampton, Massachusetts this week. Colin Blunstone is approximately at the age my father was when he died after a long, pottering retirement. Blunstone’s on tour. Even old people aren’t what they used to be. 
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Mysterious stone balls

Math, engineering and art are never very far apart. They’re all creative processes.

Stone balls in the Terraba Plain, the Boruca region, Costa Rica. Smithsonian Institution. Bureau of American Ethnology, 1948. (Courtesy Doris Stone) *
A petrosphereis a round stone artifact shaped by human hands. Since no practical purpose has ever been assigned to them, they should properly be considered art.
Among known examples are the stone spheres of Costa Rica, painted pebbles from Scotland, plain sandstone balls from Traprain Law in Scotland, and the Carved Stone Balls of Scotland.

There’s definitely a Scottish bias in the distribution. Clearly, our Caledonian ancestors had a thing for stone balls.

Roman dodecahedron.*
Petrospheres shouldn’t be confused with Roman dodecahedra. These have no known purpose or meaning either. They are small, hollow bronze devices with twelve flat faces and knobs at the corners.  They are beautiful artifacts, but compared to carving a stone sphere from igneous rock, casting a brass shape was easy.
There are roughly 300 known stone spheres in Costa Rica. They range from pebble-size up to two meters in diameter. They were carved from granodiorite, which is a common, coarse-grained, hard, igneous rock. Since most of them have been removed from their original locations, scientists are guessing about their age. (It’s impossible to radiocarbon-date a rock.) But they’re generally thought to be “pre-Columbian,” which means they were there when Europeans arrived.
Pre-Columbian stone balls at Palmar Sur, Costa Rica.*
There’s no easy way to measure the rotundity of a large object, especially when it’s partly sunk into the ground. Photographs tell us that the Costa Rican stones are very spherical. The mystery to me isn’t why, but how. There was metallurgy in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, but it would have been useless for carving rocks. All they had for tools were other, harder rocks. Even with that limited technology, they carved shapes that rival those we can make today. And, of course, they are pure abstractions.
Six-knob Scottish stone ball, Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow.*
The Scottish Carved Stone Balls are less abstract. They are usually knobby and sized to be comfortably carried in the hand. Many of them have six concentric circles incised on them. They are mostly made of igneous greenstone, but there are sandstone versions as well. There are almost 400 known examples. Their distribution suggests that they originated in Aberdeenshire, in the northeast corner of Scotland.
They are much older than the Costa Rican spheres, being generally ascribed to Neolithicor Bronze Age people. Their decorative, incised surfaces hint at meaning and purpose, but these hints vanish under hard scrutiny. Were they fishing weights? Ball bearings to move stones for Neolithic stone circles? The Scots are, after all, famous engineers. Weapons? Or, that last refuge of an unimaginative archaeologist, religious symbols? There isn’t enough context for us to know.
Six-knob Scottish stone ball, Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow.*
But what there is in both the Costa Rican and Scottish examples is a kind of mathematical perfection. We make modern stone spheres with machines; they did them with eye and hand, and they’ve lasted for thousands of years. They are a reminder that math, engineering and art are very closely intertwined.
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Soggy spring

What should you think about when setting up to paint? Tide, time of day, and the light are key, but there are other factors as well.

Ladona, (unfinished) by Carol L. Douglas

We’ve had so many dark, gloomy days recently that I was startled awake at the first gloaming. By 6 AM the sun was streaming through my bedroom windows, warming the air, promising great things.

My plan was to paint Ladona in drydock. She is the former Nathaniel Bowditch, completely rebuilt for the 2016 season. Her owners also operate the Stephen Taber, which I painted in Pulpit Harbor last summer.
Stephen Taber raising her sails, by Carol L. Douglas
Unlike most of the schooners in mid-coast Maine, Ladona was built as a private yacht, in Boothbay Harbor in 1922. She has the sleek, lean lines of a pleasure boat. After a brief stint as a patrol boat in New York Harbor during World War II, she was used for commercial fishing. In 1971, she was rebuilt as a commercial schooner.
Power-washing made a world of difference.
I know the North End Shipyard well. Yesterday, I thought, would be an excellent opportunity to make a short video talking about where to set up for a plein air painting. On the coast of Maine, we have to consider:
  • ·         Tide
  • ·         Time of day
  • ·         Angle of sun
  • ·         Ergonomics
  • ·         Courtesy
  • ·         Transience.

The Gulf of Maine has the largest tidal range on the planet. In the Bay of Fundy the tidal range is a staggering 50 feet. Here in Maine, the difference is only about half that, but that’s still imposing, considering that the average tide in most places is just a few feet.
I wasn’t the only person painting in the rain.
The best solution is to work from a floating dock, which keeps you on the same plane as your subject. When that’s not possible, you can break up your picture over several days.
If you don’t own a compass, invest in one (or an app on your phone).  You need to know where the sun is headed. That changes with the seasons. In the winter, the sun never makes it to the top of the sky, which means the light stays golden. In the summer, the light is clearer and cooler.
Many of the places we find quaint and picturesque are actually people’s workshops. As a matter of courtesy, never go on private property without asking. Stay out of the way of heavy equipment and trucks. For your own comfort, bring earplugs if there are air compressors or other equipment nearby. And avoid traps for yourself, like a painting location exposed to a brutal wind or the harsh sun.
A smarter person would have gotten this canvas under cover before it got wet. Once this happens, you have to let the painting dry naturally.
A deep understanding of the subject doesn’t just inform your paintings; it sets your schedule. I am concentrating on the boats in the cradle right now, because they’re transient. I can paint the sheds, the lobster boats, or the boats at anchor all summer.
Wooden boats require a lot of wood to keep them healthy, and that material is always stacked around the boatyard in interesting ways. (It’s also heavy, as Captain Noah Barnes noted as he dropped a timber onto a workbench with a resounding clatter.)
I wanted to focus on the foreground detritus of lumber, tools, and equipment. I experimented with a number of cute compositions, but Ladona resolutely refused to be cropped.
The sky grew steadily cloudier as the afternoon progressed. “It’s not going to rain until after 5,” Captain Doug Lee told me. That may be what the National Weather Service said, but the Maine coast is unpredictable. A quick shower around 3 PM washed me out.
Once the canvas has water droplets on it, your best bet is to let the surface dry naturally. Luckily, I live just down the road, so it’s no big deal. I’ll go back this morning and put the rigging in.
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How to write a successful blog (about art or anything else)

Be brief, be consistent, know your stuff, and manage your own content.

Bicycles on Water Street, by Carol L. Douglas

That little logo to the right of this post that reads “Top 75 Painting Blog” is not based on someone’s opinion. It’s based on social metrics, and I’m very flattered to be number seven on the list.
I’m frequently asked how to blog; after all, I’ve been doing it, on and off, for more than a decade. However, until a few years ago, I wasn’t getting much traction. My friend Brad VanAuken was taking my painting class. I asked him for advice. Brad is successful author, consultant and blogger, and an expert in his field, which is brand strategy.
Brad told me that random and irregular efforts are ignored in the blogosphere; I had to post on a regular schedule if I expected anyone to pay attention. Since then I have written five days a week. I keep this schedule up whether I’m in my studio or above the Arctic Circle.
That’s the same advice I give about painting. Inspiration is less important than consistent work habits. The more you practice any discipline, the better and easier it gets.
They say “write what you know.” I know painting, and not a lot else. Photo courtesy of Margaret Burdine.
The internet reacts to pot-stirring. The more you post, the more attention you get. That’s why Instagram, Pinterest, and other social media sites matter. The good news is, you really can do them all and still have time to paint. The secret is to develop a posting protocol and follow it.
Only you can determine what social media sites works for your following. That comes from trial and error. But give them a fair shake. I regularly post on Tumblr, even though it is not my target audience. Someday, those kids will grow up.
The process takes me 90 minutes each day. If it took longer, I wouldn’t do it, because it would cut into my painting time too much.
The craft of telling a story in 400-600 words is a very specific one. It doesn’t allow for much research or for fully-realized concepts. But within it, one can convey a lot of information.
I also got excellent advice from Bob Bahr of Outdoor Painter. He said that, all other things being equal, it was best to host my own blog. That would give me control of my brand. Until then, I hadn’t realized how constrained I was writing under the flag of a daily newspaper. Since I left, my readership has risen markedly and I’m much happier.
These are the top affinity categories for my readers. I don’t tailor my writing to them.
Art is a niche market. I write about art-specific topics, so it surprises me that visual arts and design aren’t even in the top ten affinity categories for my readers. I have never been able to predict what blog posts will capture my readers’ fancy. I generally just write about what interests me.
If you only write once a month, and your writing is strictly limited to your paintings, then perhaps it is best to send newsletters directly to your client base rather than trying to maintain a blog. Instead, use online-selling websites like Fine Art America or Saatchi Art to find new buyers.
I do not send my blog to my email marketing list. Most people read it through social media. I think the email subscription list is going the same way as the postcard. Use it, but rely more on social media.
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The polygamy wars

I was called to jury duty yesterday. I can’t tell you about that, but I can tell you about a different case.

14-year-old Elissa Wall in her wedding dress.
I flunked voir dire. I always do, darn it, and I take it personally. Still, I’ve answered the summons and met my civic responsibilities in time to paint Ladona. She was expected to haul yesterday.
Jurors are not permitted to discuss cases outside of the courtroom. I won’t even tell you what court I was in, except to mention that it’s a long drive from my house.
Instead, I’ll tell you about a trial from the last decade, and how I came to be hooked up with a bunch of Texas hell-raisers. Texas women are not like women from the Northeast. They’re pretty blunt, Sugar.
For me it started with a devastating house fire in the Bronx in 2007, where nine children and one woman were killed. Apparently, few other New Yorkers were troubled by the open practice of polygamy in our state.  One was Dr. Susan Stickevers from Downstate Medical Center, who had professional experience with the damage to women that polygamy causes. We became friends.
Like his father, Warren Steed Jeffs liked ’em young.
Polygamy is antithetical to feminism because it denies women property rights. It’s miserable for men and boys, too. But the worst part is that, because a small number of men monopolize the available women, it inevitably ends up involving child brides.
In 2008, the state of Texas raided the Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints (FLDS) Yearning for Zion Ranch. The initial response was a naive plea for religious tolerance. Oprah Winfrey, National Geographic, the New York Times, and other media heavyweights painted portraits of simple, gentle, homeschooling people who were being persecuted for their faith. Blonde, dressed in pastel prairie dresses or homespun cotton work clothes, the FLDS were nothing if not photogenic.
If you want to point a finger back to the advent of “truthiness”, that’s as good a place as any to start. 
One of Jeffs’ ‘wedding pictures,’ with a pubescent child.
The best coverage was in the Salt Lake (Utah) Tribune, which is probably the only major American newspaper to have a section on polygamy. Inevitably, in those pre-Facebook days, battles raged in the comments. There was a pitched war between the supporters of polygamy and its foes. It included experts and it often spilled over into the news pages themselves. I ‘met’ many outspoken antipolygamy activists, including Carolyn Jessop, Flora Jessop, Elissa Wall, Sam Brower and many others.
One intrepid lawyer—I won’t share her name—anonymously published the court documents online. It was a wonderful corrective to all those rose-tinted reports from the mainstream press.
In April, 2009, Laura Turner invited a bunch of us—total strangers—to her cabin in Texas hill country. We spent a long weekend talking and drinking whiskey left over from the last session of the Texas legislature. Internet alliances became real-world friendships.
The turning point in public opinion came with the courtroom evidence brought by then-Attorney General Greg Abbott and his team. An audiotape of Warren Jeffs raping a 12-year-old girl resulted in the conviction of twelve men. Yearning For Zion Ranch was abandoned.

Texas had succeeded where several other states and the Federal government had failed. They exposed a child sex-trafficking ring that ran from Mexico to Canada. Sadly, only Canada acted on the information, and then only imperfectly.

Jeffs raped his victims in this cell in YFZ Ranch.
Meanwhile, in Utah, nothing much has changed. Just this month, the courts slapped the hands of nine defendants for misdirecting SNAP benefits to their FLDS bishop. I shudder to imagine the penalties had the perpetrators been a black, inner city church.
Last week I learned that one of my pals from the Polygamy Wars has died. She lived a good life, and she fought the good fight. I hope that she—and we—turned the tide of public opinion, at least just a bit. 
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Painting the coming storm

When you start to feel the patterns of nature in your bones, painting becomes less like science and more like dancing.
The colors in a good rain cloud are close in value. It’s mostly color temperature that will create shape.
Last week we did “suffer a sea-change/into something rich and strange.” This was Spring, which was ushered in on great banks of fog and rain. Coincidentally, I have been painting a moody, changeable sky in my studio, since it’s been too wet to paint out-of-doors.
I’ve written about painting clouds here, and about great painters of clouds here. Right now, I am painting a great pile of dark cumulonimbusclouds. This is part of a larger canvas of the schooner American Eagle rounding Owl’s Head.
No, I’m not ready to unveil the finished work. Captain says I need more air in the sails.
It makes sense to test color modulations before you commit to them. I’m not trying to match here, but to see how the two colors interact.
Since there is no sun in my painting, the clouds are very low in tonal contrast.  This means there is little difference in value between the lightest tones and the darkest tones. That suits my purpose artistically, because the heaving sea is already busy enough.
Even on sunny days the tonal contrast in clouds is less than you might think. A brightly lit cumulus cloud contrasts starkly against a deep blue sky. Within itself, however, it doesn’t have particularly big jumps in value. Instead of relying on tonal contrast, use color temperature.
Readers will send me photos to disprove this, but there are differences between photos and what the naked eye sees. This is especially true for photos taken with devices designed to optimize digital images. In general, polarizing lenses increase contrast in clouds and skies.
Clouds usually have extremely soft edges. I’ve added a short video showing the use of a flat badger brush to make those soft edges. I’m generally a pretty direct painter. Blending clouds is almost the only time I apply a soft brush to canvas.
Last week, one of my students asked me why the band of ocean at the horizon was darker than the water closer to us. “If you can figure out a consistent pattern to the light in the sea, you’re doing better than me,” I told him. The sea is infinitely changeable. So too is the sky.
Fresh brushwork is the final step, over blended surfaces.
You learn about different skies by being out in them and drawing and painting them. At some point, you internalize your understanding. After that, you can start playing lyrically with their structure.
There is no one form that clouds must take, any more than there are specific forms that waves take, or uniformly matching snowflakes, or patterns in which petals will cascade down in an orchard on a spring breeze. Nature reveals herself in infinitely varied, controlled chaos. You must watch and learn, but when you start to feel those patterns in your bones, painting becomes more akin to dancing than to science.
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Mixing greens

There are many paths to the final destination, grasshopper. This is just one fast, easy route to mixing summer greens.
Mixed greens, in oils.
Here in mid-coast Maine, the fog and rain are finally releasing the leaves from their winter sheathes. Hints of green show in my lawn, and the hardiest perennials poke their noses through last year’s leaf litter. We are very close to painting greens again, in all their light, airy delicacy.
By June, we will be wrapped in a blanket of immature, emerald foliage. By August, the color will have settled into a deeper, more uniform tone. The only way to navigate this is to avoid greens out of a tube. A system of paired primaries gives you more options, avoiding the acidity of phthalo green, the weight of chromium oxide green, or the soul-sucking darkness of sap green.
Jennifer’s exercise in mixing and modulating greens.
Michael Wilcox published a watercolor pigment guide called Blue and Yellow Don’t Make Green. Well, of course they do, but his point was that there are many routes to the same destination. One of the most useful landscape greens is black and cadmium lemon or Hansa yellow. Of all the greens I mix, this and ultramarine with yellow ochre are the two I use the most.
In my experience, bad paint mixing causes paintings to go wrong faster than anything else. Constantly over-daubing to modulate the paint color distorts the original drawing and makes a grey mush. If you’re confident of the color, you can apply it fast and accurately.
Loren’s exercise in mixing and modulating greens.
For the past two weeks, I’ve drilled my students on mixing color. These are simple exercises you can do at home.
I make my greens on a matrix, which I’ve shown you both mixed (at top) and on a chart (below). The two swatch charts were done in acrylics by students. I asked them to first mix greens according to the chart, and then mix the resulting greens with tints (meaning a mix of white and a color) of ultramarine, raw sienna, and quinacridone violet. What the specific tints were was unimportant; what mattered was how differently tints mix from white out of a tube.
Cadmium lemon can be substituted for Hansa yellow
The range of results is infinite. It depends on both the proportions you choose and the brand of paint you use. However, note that blue/black pigments are much stronger than the yellows. You need about half the amount of blue or black as you do yellow.
These are Benjamin Moore swatches but you can find similar colors in other brands.
The second exercise involves stopping at your local hardware store for a few paint swatches. These are Benjamin Moore brand, but you should be able to find similar ones elsewhere. There are two off-whites: one cool and one warm. There’s yellow, green, and two soft blues. Your assignment is to mix until you think you’ve hit the exact color. Then put a dot of it on the card to see how close you got. (If you’re working in watercolor, the dot goes on paper instead.)
Jennifer’s neutral swatches.
I also had my students make neutrals using combinations of ultramarine blue with burnt sienna and raw sienna. I use ultramarine blue and burnt sienna as my standard dark neutral, because it can go to the warm or cool side depending on how it is mixed. These are also my go-to mixes for rocks and sands.
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A light in the darkness of heroin

A program that works to help heroin addicts. Even if I didn’t believe in God, I’d still support them.

Shenandoah Valley sunrise, pastel, Carol L. Douglas
In December I wrote about going back to my hometown for a funeral for the victim of a heroin overdose. I was both grief-stricken for the family and shaken by the evidence that the iron grip of heroin now reaches everywhere in our culture.
Relapse rates for heroin and opiate addiction are around 90%. The rate for alcoholics and meth users are about the same. Even with drug treatment programs many users will relapse, and there just aren’t enough treatment programs to fill the need.
There were about one million heroin users in the U.S. as of 2014. That’s almost three times the number as in 2003. Heroin deaths have quintupled since 2000. Today, more Americans die from drug overdoses than car crashes or guns: 47,000 people in the US in 2014. In New England, the problem is compounded by heroin’s synthetic cousin, Fentanyl.
The Raising of Lazarus, Carol L. Douglas
Law enforcement officials have long pointed out the relationship between legal and illegal drugs, and how oxycodone addiction leads people to heroin, which is cheaper and easier to get. But even without making the leap to illegal drugs, opiods can and do kill. A 2013 CDC study pointed out the “epidemic levels” of prescription pain medication overdoses among women. The older you get, the easier it is to off yourself with prescription drugs, which might be why we frequently read about middle-aged celebrity overdoses.
I was familiar with Teen Challenge from Rochester, because my husband would occasionally play music for them. This is the group founded by David Wilkerson of The Cross and the Switchblade fame. I knew that Teen Challenge wasn’t for teenagers anymore; in fact you have to be 18 to enter the program.
I didn’t realize that they are focused on the heroin epidemic until this past Sunday. A dozen men from Teen Challenge New England visited our church. Some were functioning addicts before catastrophe forced them into treatment. Some were in jail. All have committed to finishing the 15-month program and rejoining the world.
After church, we had lunch with a few of the guys. One of them was about the same age as my kids. “I came from a good family,” he told me. “It wasn’t like my parents had done anything wrong.” That’s a scary thought. Parents believe that if they do everything right they can inoculate their children against bad choices. It’s true to a degree, but it’s not universally true.
End of the storm, pastel, Carol L. Douglas
Teen Challenge has a demonstrated track record, with a 70 to 86% success rate. Of course, it does this by insisting on personal responsibility. That is not a universally-popular strategy for our times. As one of the guys said on Sunday, “We get no government funding. They would make us remove Jesus from our program. Jesus isour program.”
That reminds me of something my thug pal recently told me: “Everyone finds God in jail.” Since ours is the God of extremis, that makes a certain kind of cynical sense. And, yes, I’d like to see more programs for women addicts.
But before you criticize Teen Challenge, ask yourself if you have a better plan. Even if I didn’t believe in God, I’d still send money to them. Their program works, and we’re running out of ideas.