May 2018 | Page 2 of 3 | Carol L. Douglas

May 16, 2018

$2 billion in art distributed for free

The Corcoran’s demise is a sad reminder that many cultural institutions in America skitter on the brink of insolvency.

Simplon Pass, 1911, John Singer Sargent, has gone to the National Gallery.

In 2014, the board of trustees for the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, announced that they were closing that venerable institution and offering its assets—for free—to other agencies to manage. That meant its school, its Beaux Arts building, and its collection would all be given away. The assets were staggering, somewhere around $2 billion, and somehow the money machine would be kept out of the process.

This week the deal became final, with the Corcoran board announcingthe dispensation of the final 11,000 artworks. (The National Gallery had first dibs and took about 40% of the collection.) The art school, the building, and about 800 works go to George Washington University. Much of the rest of the collection is headed to the American University Museum, with the Smithsonian American Art Museum and other institutions rounding out the list. The art will stay in Washington, in the public view.

Niagara, 1857, by Frederic Edwin Church, has gone to the National Gallery.

The Corcoran was one of America’s oldest art museums, founded to house the private collection of a 19th century financier, William Wilson Corcoran. Doing nothing by half-measures, Corcoran hired James Renwick, designer of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York and the Smithsonian ‘Castle’ in Washington, to build his museum.

Corcoran made his fortune on war bonds and retired to a life of philanthropy by 1854. His good works were legion. They included the land and chapel for Oak Hill Cemetery, a benevolent fund for the poor of Georgetown, innumerable gifts to universities, and securing Mount Vernonfor the nation. He was also a southern sympathizer who left for Paris at the outbreak of war.

Forty-two Kids, 1907, George Bellows, has gone to the National Gallery.

Corcoran was also an early patron of American art. He counted painters Albert Bierstadt, Frederic Edwin Church, Thomas Doughty, and George Innessamong his friends. The Corcoran was established in 1869. Its School of Art was founded in 1878.

Fast forward a century and Corcoran’s vision was showing signs of financial strain. “When news broke that Board was considering selling the building, it felt like every conversation I had placed the beginning of the Museum’s decline to an earlier and earlier point,” wrote Blair Murphy. “One D.C. artist I spoke with argued that the Museum had never recovered from declining to purchase the collection of the shuttered Washington Gallery of Modern Art. That was in 1968.”

Ground swell, 1939, Edward Hopper, has gone to the National Gallery.

In 1989, the gallery agreed to host Robert Mapplethorpe’s The Perfect Moment. Worse, it cancelled the show when trustees and supporters voiced opposition. A change in leadership staved off bankruptcy temporarily. But history conspired against the institution. Rerouted traffic after 9/11 made it harder to get to. In 2005, the museum was unable to raise funds for a highly-touted addition by Frank Gehry. The financial crisis of 2008 hit cultural institutions hard. Giving to the Corcoran fell off sharply.

The Last of the Buffalo, 1888, Albert Bierstadt, has gone to the National Gallery.

Washington is a city of free, government-subsidized museums. The Corcoran was neither. By the end, in 2014, the admission fee was $10. Why pay that when there are so many other options that cost nothing?

The Corcoran’s demise is a sad reminder that many cultural institutions in America skitter on the brink of insolvency. What do we do about that?

May 15, 2018

Meanwhile my paints are languishing in the van

The forest primeval, ticks, and open-toed sandals.

My granddaughter demonstrates the importance of wearing Wellies to tick avoidance.

I’m in Rensselaer County, NY, at the home of my oldest child. This lies in that strip of New York that’s on the east bank of the Hudson, in the eastern Berkshires. It is often mistaken by non-New Yorkers for Massachusetts. I’m here because there is a large, open kitchen and all three of my daughters are present. That means plenty of hands to help me with last-minute rote work for Saturday’s wedding.

Julia has an ant problem. Ants are creatures of habit, and the mere presence of a new house sitting on their ancient pathway won’t deter them. When we built our first house in the woods, we had ants and snakes in abundance. Did our frontier ancestors constantly battle ants in the kitchen along with the more palpable dangers of wildcats and bears?

Ants are famous for their work ethic, a subject of some discussion as I slump into exhaustion. “More Mary, less Martha,” my kids tell me. The bride is a line cook at Olive Garden. She and I compared our capacity for repetitive, boring work by spending hours assembling favors. She’s faster than me.

My sons-in-law made me 24 maple tree cookies for the centerpieces.

I’m pretty tired, but my task list is steadily shrinking. That means I drive into Albany later to get glamorous, although my favorite activity with my daughters—a pedicure—is out due to my incisions.

Rensselaer County is in Ground Zero for ticks. The disease that made them famous was first identified in Old Lyme, CT, just about a hundred miles from here. Ticks are everywhere here and more numerous than anywhere else I visit. To give you an idea of the scale of the problem, almost every artist I know who works in the Hudson Valley has had Lyme Disease or one of its hideous cousins.

Part of a huge dog pack waiting to be spraypainted.

My grandchildren spend a lot of time outside in the woods. They’re assiduously checked for ticks every time they come inside. It’s sweet to watch their father hose them off in the shower, carefully checking them for parasites.

Wellies are the best protection against ticks, but I’m stuck in sandals until the incisions on my feet heal. That means no walking in the spring woods and careful tick checks.

Scottish shortbread wrapped in the groom’s family tartan. It’s a meeting of the clans.

I’ve heard that the explosion in Lyme is based partly on our “slicing and dicing of the forest,” but if you actually live in New York or Maine, that’s laughable. The forest is back in the northeast with a vengeance as agriculture becomes less economically feasible. Rebounding also are the white-footed mice, deer and other animals who host ticks.

In many ways, New York and New England are reverting to the forest primeval. We don’t know if our frontier ancestors had the deer tick problem that we do, but combined with a lack of indoor plumbing it would have been downright exasperating.

Tomorrow, I collect the flower order and deliver the tchotchkes (and the check) to the wedding venue. Meanwhile, my watercolor kit is sitting in the van untouched. Oh, well. There’s a season for everything, and this week’s season is for wedding prep.

It’s about time for you to consider your summer workshop plans. Join me on the American Eagle, at Acadia National Park, or at Genesee Valley this summer.

May 14, 2018

Monday Morning Art School: How to throw a party for 200

The artist’s job is to give linear thinkers a respite from their own minds. That starts with your opening.

The artist dancing with her eldest child.

Great gallerists also know how to throw great parties. Regular openings and developing a circle of fans is part of their job. There’s no value in having all that work assembled in one place if nobody ever stops by to see it. Selling—whether it’s art or cars—requires a person to be likeable.

That’s true for the artist too. Art-making may be a solitary job, but the artist needs to be convivial to sell his or her own work. I’ve thrown more brawls for a hundred or more people than I can count. Actually, I’d far prefer to do that than to have you over for dinner, which terrifies me.

An opening done by gallerist Sue Leo at Davison Gallery, for my show God + Man. Photo courtesy
Iván Ramos .

The invitation is the key

Whether you call it an ‘invitation’ or an ‘advertisement’, the way you announce your event is key. It tells your intended guests the tone of the event, and hints at what kind of good time they’ll have. Graphic design is ruthlessly trend-driven. Spend time on Pinterest and Etsy and pay particular attention to fonts. They’re as fashion-sensitive as shoes.

Hound your guests

You’ll find yourself repeating, “Are you coming to my party?” over and over for weeks. This is a good thing. They won’t be excited if you’re not excited. Scarcity marketing—as perfected by the old Studio 54 in New York—is a great way to pack the house, but it only works if you’ve already demonstrated that your parties are worth attending.

Sue Baines’ hors d’œuvres are not like those in any other gallery.

Play to your strengths

Sue Lewis Baines of the Kelpie Gallery is a wonderful cook, and the hors d’œuvre at her openings could make me rise from my deathbed. Howard Gallagher of Camden Falls Gallery knows how to assemble great bands for a dance party. I can bake. Know your strengths and capitalize on them.

Make a budget and stick to it

I saw the most wonderful fairyland floral arrangements at the Renaissance Minneapolis Hotel three weeks ago. I whipped out my phone and snapped several shots, and then set them aside. To change my decorating scheme at this late date would cost a small fortune. A budget set in stone is the only way to survive to throw another party.

A beer-themed opening of my students’ work at VB Brewery in Fairport, NY.

Work way in advance

Procrastination is the worst possible habit for the host or hostess of a party. I have been working on this upcoming one for months.

Be surprising

Good taste is so highly overrated. What’s important is that people laugh and have a good time. If they can’t figure out how ceramic dogs, moose, and woodland animals go together, they might be overthinking this. The artist’s job, after all, is to give linear thinkers a respite from their own minds.

Ask for help

Nobody can throw a party for 200 without help, so when someone offers to help, smile and accept gracefully. Hire out what you can.

And on that note, I’m shuffling off to Buffalo for my third daughter’s wedding. It’s about time for you to consider your summer workshop plans. Join me on the American Eagle, at Acadia National Park, or at Genesee Valley this summer.

May 11, 2018

Sea Captains Carousing

It’s an iconic New England painting, and it’s fun to imagine with your friends in it.

Sea Captains Carousing in Surinam, oil on bed ticking, 1755, John Greenwood, courtesy St. Louis Art Museum. Greenwood painted himself in the doorway, leaving with a candle.

Last night I had a glass of wine with my pal Cathy. She doesn’t want to learn to paint, but she likes to sail, so she asked me about my Age of Sail workshop aboard the schooner American Eagle. In the way of small towns, her husband knows Captain John Foss, and remarked about what a great story-teller he is. That’s true of sailors in general, but he’s a wry master of the art form.

I got home to this essay about iconic New England paintings. It includes the wonderful Sea Captains Carousing in Surinam, 1755, by John Greenwood. Since moving to Maine I’ve gotten to know a number of sea captains, and even more lobstermen, and it’s wonderful to imagine them in their tricornes, dancing around in this painting.

Sea Captains Carousing is what art historians call a genre painting. These are scenes from everyday life: markets, homes, inns, brothels, churches, streets. Often, they’re moralizing, as in the work of English painter William Hogarth. Those fantastic Flemish and Dutch food paintings? They’re genre paintings, and they instruct us on the transience of luxury and the perils of gluttony.

Portrait of Richard Waldron, oil on wood, 1751, John Greenwood, courtesy New England Historical Society

Just to be confusing, the word genre also means in painting what it means in other arts—a type of subject matter. In fact, classical art had a hierarchy of genres, formulated by the Italians. It persisted right up to the modern era:

History, religious and allegorical painting
Portraits
Genre paintings
Landscapes
Animals
Still life

Greenwood was raised and trained in the hinterlands of the British Empire (Boston), so he didn’t have the advantages of such classical ideas. Still, he knew there was money in portraits, and he executed hundreds of the things.

Unless they emigrated from England as adults, most of our earliest painters were self-taught. They emulated British styles of painting, which they knew through prints and the works of émigré artists. This was true of both primitive painters like William Jennys or sophisticated artists like John Singleton Copley.

John Richard Comyns of Hylands, Essex, with His Daughters, 1775, John Greenwood, courtesy Yale Center for British Art

Greenwood had the advantage of an apprenticeship with self-taught engraver Thomas Johnston. In addition to portraits, Greenwood painted many satirical works. Sea Captains Carousing in Surinam is the best known of them. Surinam was a Dutch colony in South America, now the Republic of Suriname. Greenwood lived there for five years, during which time he painted 115 portraits. He never returned to North America, traveling east to Amsterdam, Paris, and London, where he eventually settled.

Portrait of the painter Tako Jajo Jelgersma, c. 1750-58, John Greenwood, courtesy Rijksmuseum.

The beauty of Sea Captains Carousing is in what its subjects would later become in the history of Rhode Island. In addition to many prominent merchants, it includes Declaration of Independence signatory Stephen Hopkins, Governor Joseph Wanton, Admiral Esek Hopkins, and Governor Nicholas Cooke.

It’s about time for you to consider your summer workshop plans. Join me on the American Eagle, at Acadia National Park, or at Genesee Valley this summer.

May 10, 2018

Suffering from a loose wig?

No problem, you’re just a creative.

Creation, by Carol L. Douglas

Intelligence is a complex subject. I doubt we’re measuring it correctly, let alone that we understand how it forms. Still, I love reading studies on the subject. For example, this one said that people in cold states have higher IQs. It may not be true, but it seems like a good justification for freezing so much of the year.

Researchers recently went looking for a correlation between cortical thickness and intelligence. That makes sense, right? A V-8 engine is more powerful than my four-cylinder Prius, after all. Therefore, the more grey matter we have, the smarter we ought to be. Except that brain mass doesn’t really correlate very well with intelligence, something scientists have known for a long time.

This is your brain in the cold.

In a recent neuroimaging study by US and Canadian scientists, participants were given questionnaires that assessed their intellect and openness. ‘Openness’ is an even more amorphous quality than intelligence, defined by researchers as “engagement with fantasy, perception, and aesthetics.”

Researchers then correlated the results of those tests with MRI images measuring the thickness of the cerebral cortex. This part of your brain is responsible for memory and cognitive control.

But the bigger-is-better model failed once again to deliver. There was no relationship at all between cortical thickness and intelligence. There was a negative relationship between cortical thickness and ‘openness’. In other words, the less cortical thickness, the more likely you are to make creative associations.

Untitled, by Carol L. Douglas. There might be a face in there. I might have a loose wig.

Since the cortex plays a role in memory and structuring thought, the researchers thought it made sense that reduced thickness would be associated with openness. “It’s almost like a reduced filter mechanism that, in some cases, can be beneficial,” said researcher Oshin Vartanian.

This all just supports the old canard that creatives are eccentric. The fancy name for that is cognitive disinhibition, and it means that we artists have less control over our thoughts than ‘normal’ people, whatever they are.

Scientists—those poor unfortunate linear thinkers—posit that creatives suffer from schizotypal personality, a mild form of being nuts.

You are more than the contents of your brain case, kiddo, by Carol L. Douglas.

“In my research at Harvard, done in part with my colleague Cynthia A. Meyersburg, I have found that study participants who score high in a measure of creative achievement in the arts are more likely to endorse magical thinking — such as belief in telepathic communication, dreams that portend the future, and memories of past lives. These participants are also more likely to attest to unusual perceptual experiences, such as having frequent déjà vu and hearing voices whispering in the wind,” wrote Shelley Carson.

Sound like any successful artist you know? Me neither, and I know a lot of successful artists. This kind of ‘analysis’ is in itself the worst kind of magical thinking. Since science’s chief claim is rationality, that’s kind of funny.

The human animal is more than the sum of his or her parts. That’s worth remembering.

May 9, 2018

Party dogs

What is art? That’s something nobody can agree on.

Great Danes and Doberman Pinschers talk about what they plan to wear to my daughter’s wedding.

Last night I assembled an august panel of artists to help me with a project. Barb is a printmaker with an art degree from University of Maine. Sandy is a gallerist with degrees from Pratt and Hunter College. Together, we dressed 42 dogs in wedding finery. (As so often happens in sweatshops, I ‘forgot’ to pay them.)

“Is this art?” I asked two other artist friends.

“It’s like asking if a soy product in the shape of a chicken leg is food,” said one. “Technically, yes, but it’s bad food.”

“I guess the individual sculptures are art,” hedged the other, who then raised the question of whether they’re craft or even, just possibly, crap.

Two coats of silver and three of glitter… good taste, by the way, is repressive at times.

‘Artistry’ is easier to define than art itself. That means the skill necessary to produce a work of the imagination. But what defines the product of the imagination as art rather than engineering or craft?

Ars longa, vita brevis, wrote Hippocrates. He probably meant that it takes a long time to acquire and perfect artistry, but that the practitioner has only a short lifespan in which to practice. We repeat it, instead, to mean, “art lasts forever, but life is short.” That is, of course, a modern conceit. The ancients understood that “what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.” (2 Cor. 4:18)

Barb felt that a DeWalt glue gun was not the tool for the job.

Platosaid that art is always a copy of a copy, an imitation of reality. This leads us from the truth and to illusion, making art inherently dangerous. (Rich words from a philosopher!) Elsewhere, he hinted that the artist, by divine inspiration, makes a better copy of truth than may be found in everyday experience. This makes artists prophets of sorts.

A lot of artists have had a go at defining art. Many are coy, like Marc Chagall, who said that “Art is the unceasing effort to compete with the beauty of flowers–and never succeeding.”

Even in non-traditional art, imitation is a recurring theme. “Art is either a plagiarist or a revolutionary,” said Paul Gauguin. What makes an Andy Warhol painting of soup cans different from the soup cans themselves? Intent and meaning. Pablo Picasso said that art is a lie that makes us see the truth.

In some way, art is the taking of an idea and making it manifest. Otherwise, it’s just a fleeting thought.

Sandy and I sewed their garments, Barb dressed them.

People frequently debate the line between art and craft. Art is useless in practical terms; it exists solely to drive emotion and thought. Fine craft does that and more. It must serve a practical purpose along with being beautiful. Since I didn’t drill their noses out to hold flowers, my party dogs fall on the side of art.

Neither fine art nor fine craft are mass-produced, however. That is manufacturing. Those brass birds from Home Goods, as inscrutable as their meaning and purpose might be, qualify as neither art nor craft.

“The craftsman knows what he wants to make before he makes it. The making of a work of art… is a strange and risky business in which the maker never knows quite what he is making until he makes it, wrote R.G. Collingwood in The Principles of Art. That sounds very nice, until I think of dye-master Jane Bartlett throwing pots of color into the snow to see what shows up. Her textiles end up as clothing, but her process is wildly unpredictable.

May 8, 2018

Where do the dogs go?

Failed paintings are less common than you think. You just have to look at them the right way.

This is an example of an unfinished painting that pointed the way forward. It took years for me to understand where I was going with it.

Last week, as I dithered about which paintings to submit to Santa Fe Plein Air Fiesta, a reader wrote, “Can you write a post sometime about what you do with the second-tier paintings you make? Do you just scrape them? Give away to unsuspecting strangers? Donate, unsigned, to charity thrift shops? Let them accumulate and breed in a dark basement?”

First of all, let me be clear that I don’t think any of last week’s five (or the one I didn’t finish on Friday) are ‘second tier’ paintings. I’m happy with them all, and I think they’re sellable. They’re not sellable in either of the galleries that represent me on the Maine coast, however. I have two options: I will market them through my own studio, or sell them online through Chrissy Pahucki’s pleinair.store.

Spring, by Carol L. Douglas. I hated this when I painted it. Now I’ve almost caught up with it.

I’ve done plein airevents where I’ve sold exactly nothing, and other events where I’ve sold everything. It’s unpredictable. At the end of the summer, I usually have more work left over than I’ve sold. Usually these works end up selling in future years. Occasionally, they end up donated to fundraisers, but only for organizations I care about, who can get a fair-market price for their work.

But let’s talk about paintings that aren’t good enough to sell. It happens, although the artist in his or her post-creative exhaustion is the usually the last person to be a good judge of whether a painting has merit or not. Some artists are quick to scrape out everything they don’t like. After all, professional-grade painting panels are expensive.

Hollyhocks, by Carol L. Douglas. Sometimes you have to paint something a number of times to realize you aren’t interested in the subject. I thought I should be, since I’d planted this garden.

I don’t think scraping out is a good idea. It means new and difficult ideas are stillborn. How do you find a path forward without contemplating each tangled byway to see if this is the way forward?

These paintings—the edgy, difficult ones that don’t seem to have much value—go on racks to dry, and then into into bins in my studio, where they’re available at a reduced price. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve looked through those bins and suddenly seen something wonderful that I’ve never noticed before. My brain likes the status quo. Often it takes a few years for it to catch up with the intelligence of my hands. Those bins are part of the process of dragging it forward.

59th Street Bridge Approach, by Carol L. Douglas. There are subjects I used to love, but love no more.

I have a few customers who love the bins, and they root through them every time they visit. They can definitely get a good bargain there, because the binned paintings are available for a fraction of the cost of framed paintings.

Sometimes, these binned paintings live on as reference for larger works—I’d much rather scale up a field sketch in the studio than a photograph. Sometimes, I revise and finish in the studio. For example, the seasonal lag between New Mexico and Rockport, ME, means that I can comfortably find an apple tree here to use to finish Friday’s painting.

But, yes, sometimes I paint total dogs that aren’t useful for reference, for overpainting, or for any purpose known to mankind. These I destroy. Although that doesn’t happen very often, I reserve the right to edit my own legacy.

May 7, 2018

Monday Morning Art School: how to paint a quickie

Only got an hour? If you’re set up right, you can still do a credible field painting.

The bones of a painting.

I mentioned last week that I didn’t have time to get back to paint the apple tree at the abuelitos’ house in the tiny pueblo above Pecos, NM. That tree is what initially drew me to the place, and I didn’t want to leave without painting it. On Friday morning I went back to the little village to make a quick sketch. I was carrying only 12X16 canvases, so I had to work very fast.

I had two hours before I needed to get back to the ranch and pack for my flight. It turns out I had less time than that, because it spattered rain. But I was still able to get a field sketch done.

You’d hardly want to paint from this photograph, unless you knew what a magical place it was in real life.

I seldom paint from photos without a good field sketch alongside. One glance at my photograph will tell you why. Camera lenses distort shapes and flatten color and light. I know how to use my camera to make more interesting photos, but I eschew that artistry in reference pictures. Photographic artistry comes at the expense of details and architecture I want to preserve for the expression of the painting.

A good photograph is not necessarily a good reference photograph for painting. For example, too tight a crop often leaves out details you need later. Artists constantly move things around when painting, and you can’t do that if you’ve cut those items out.

The paint array never changes, no matter how fast I’m painting. (The bottle cap is there for medium.)

Start by putting out your typical array of colors, including a dark mix with which you will draw. In the northeast, I typically use a dark mix of ultramarine and burnt sienna. In New Mexico, I made a mix of ultramarine and quinacridone red. I thought I was pushing the purples excessively, but in comparison with other paintings at the opening, my work felt low-key. That’s less a question of the light than of regional tastes.

Note the line of white just below my pure pigments. I always make tints of my colors when I start. That too speeds up my painting.

I do not clean my palette except for before a flight or at the end of the season. It goes in the freezer in a waterproof stuff-sack. That means I don’t have to mess around putting out paints at the start of each painting session. That’s important, since setting them out and cleaning them up can use up a half hour of precious time.

A very sophisticated drawing, the work of about two minutes.

Fast painting is where the habit of always setting out your paint in the same order helps. It would be disconcerting for a musician to find the keys of the piano in different places each time he played, or for a surgeon to have to hunt for the proper scalpel. The same is true in paints. You can read about my color organization here, but the important thing is consistency.

I did not do a value study for this super-fast painting. I simply outlined my drawing with large strokes. Then I filled in the drawing with blotches of color. Mix and splat, with a fairly heavy dilution with mineral spirits.

From there, it was just a question of revising and dividing shapes. I was starting to break the apple tree into a pattern when the rain kicked up.

Right before scraping back and packing up.

My last step, which I forgot to photograph, was to scrape back slightly—not to bare canvas, but so I have a level surface on which to proceed. It’s important to not leave impasto in a half-finished alla prima painting, especially when you don’t know when you’ll get back to it. Scraping back often reveals the true lines, since it creates a shadow average of all your guesses in different layers.

And then I ran for the car. No, I didn’t win any prizes, but I don’t think my choices of paintings had anything to do with that. There was some terrifically strong work in this show. Onwards and upwards!

May 4, 2018

Friends helping friends

We’ve all done our best. Now we sit back and wait.

Not what you like to see an hour before you’re handing in.

I opened my box of frames when I arrived last weekend, but I didn’t take out the items and unpack them; they were still in the manufacturer’s packaging. Anyway, I like the US post office as a shipper, so I wasn’t worried.

That meant I was blindsided on Thursday morning when all three frames turned out to have cracked corners. I called Jane Chapin to ask her if there was a Michaels in Santa Fe. Instead, she directed me to a shelf to the left of the door in her own studio. It was such a smooth solution that I barely had time to worry. It will save me money on the return shipping, since she can just pop out any unsold work and mail it back to me in a padded envelope.

Occasionally someone will challenge my characterization of these events as ‘competitions.’ They prefer to think of them as sales events. But whenever there are prizes, there is competition. Unlike ice-skating, however, there’s very little knee-capping in the plein air world. For one thing, it’s a small community. Even if we’re not friends yet, we have friends in common.

Apple tree swing, by Carol L. Douglas, courtesy Kelpie Gallery. I’m gonna try the Pecos apple tree again today.

One of the painters at this event has Parkinson’s. (How she paints as beautifully as she does is beyond me.) She is a tiny thing, and she has been helping me up and down steps all week. She’s appointed herself my keeper. We were at a party in town Wednesday when she realized that she’d forgotten her meds. If you know Parkinson’s, you know that missing a dose is like falling off a cliff. Now I’ve appointed myself to remind her about her meds. We just met on Friday night, but now we’re friends helping friends.

Yesterday I intended to spend my spare time painting an apple tree down the road. However, I spent it unsuccessfully trying to file the claim for my damaged frames. This morning my husband, back in Rockport, managed to file it online.

This view from my studio window has gone to live in New Mexico.

As for which paintings I submitted, it ended up being El camino hacia el pueblo, La casa de los abuelitos,and Castigando del caballo muerto. I probably received twenty messages about the choices after my post, with a heavy contingent favoring Dry Wash, but I’d already filled out the paperwork.

Every one of these messages were from professional painters and gallerists. The takeaway message is that even at a high level of expertise, ‘good,’ ‘great,’ etc. are subjective. That’s true for the juror as well as for anyone else. We’ve all done our best. Now we sit back and wait.

May 3, 2018

The excruciating pain of choosing

What paintings make the final cut? How about choosing by committee?

El camino hacia el pueblo, by Carol L. Douglas

Keith Linwood Stover once asked me why artists seek criticism in the first place. “We’re not the best judges of our own work,” I told him. (This is why gallerists and curators are such important players in the art process.) That’s especially true when you’ve just painted for a week in an alien environment. Whatever judgment you have goes to pieces.

I’m not alone in finding this difficult. Last night I sat around the table at Jane Chapin’s house with a group of artists, debating what we’ll submit. Richard Abraham and I are in the same position: our strongest works are in a sense, redundant. They’re each of the same subject. This makes us both a little nervous.

Dry wash, by Carol L. Douglas

I looked at his three top contenders and gave an opinion; he looked at my three and gave an opinion, and it was unsettling, because he counted back in a painting (Dry Wash) that I’d already eliminated. Men and women approach paintings differently, and understanding how the male mind works might be helpful in jurying.

My opinion is that any of Richard’s three contenders will win him a prize. His options are all good. That makes me wonder if I’m dithering over equally inconsequential differences. Still, the choice of submissions is the most difficult job of the week, and it behooves us to take it seriously.

La casa de los abuelitos, by Carol L. Douglas

A painting should be—as the old saw goes—compelling at 300 feet, 30 feet, and three feet. The first question, then, is what will draw someone from the other side of the room. To answer that definitively, I’d have to be inside the head of the juror (Stephen Day) and I’m not. Looking at his work only tells me so much. I can’t know what his goals are, how his day is going, or any of the other myriad thoughts that go into his decision.

Hoodoos in training, by Carol L. Douglas

Why do I distrust my judgment? I’m always most intrigued by the paintings that are terrifically difficult to master. That’s why I love Jonathan Submarining, from Castine 2016. The viewer may just see a Castine Class sailing school bobbing around on the waves, but I see a tough painting done knee deep in the surf and executed well.

This is true too with Dry Wash. The only reason I might change my mind at the last minute is that the dappled light and rocks are well-executed. But the other two better meet the 300-feet challenge.

Castigando del caballo muerto, by Carol L. Douglas

That puts me in a quandary. I’ve written before about who I trust to critique my work. I messaged images to two people yesterday: my husband and Bobbi Heath. Their opinion was consistent (and it matched, for the record, Jane Chapin’s).

But in the end the decision rests with me, and it’s no fun.