Equipment troubles

Itā€™s time to make some hard choices about my two wooden easels.
The last cutting, v. 2, by Carol L. Douglas. Watercolor, same subject as yesterday, but turned the other way. This is one of those times where a square canvas would be appropriate.

 On Wednesday, I realized Iā€™d lost my watercolor palette on Clary Hill. The paletteā€”$14.79 at Jerryā€™sā€”is no big deal. It was, however, fully loaded with paint. Thatā€™s an expensive nick in the wallet.

I use an old Mabef tripod swing easel for watercolor. Iā€™ve had it forever. It has been replaced by a larger version in most catalogues, but this old friend has been a reliable, versatile workmate for several decades. A few years ago, the head cracked on one side. I compressed and glued it so it worked again. The thumbscrew no longer tightens enough to hold the arm perfectly stable, so I prop it up with my knee when painting. For big boards, Iā€™ve been taping the support to the easelā€™s head rather than trying to hold it mechanically. I seem to end up using this easel in preference to newer, snazzier ones.
On Tuesday in the dripping rain, that original crack opened back up again. I duct-taped it tightly and hoped for the best. Yesterday, the other side of the head cracked. Again, I taped it together. However, with no tension in the head, the arm is free to bounce around willy-nilly on its pivot. Iā€™m afraid my old friend may be headed for the woodstove.
With both sides of the head cracked, there is nothing to keep tension on the pivot head, and the arm can swing willy-nilly.
There are many reasons to love wooden easelsā€”theyā€™re relatively cheap, theyā€™re stable in high winds, and, properly cared for, they can last for years. However, they have two shortcomings. The first is that wood is heavy. Few modern-day plein air painters have donkeys or servants to carry our equipment up steep hillsides. When I was forty, this wasnā€™t a big issue. As I approach sixty, it has become a limiting factor. An aluminum pochade box and a lightweight tripod weigh a fraction of what a decent wood easel does.
Wood is hygroscopic. That means the moisture content changes depending on the relative humidity. Thatā€™s the killer for all unfinished wood used outdoors, and easels are no exception. My Gloucester easelā€”also old, purchased used many years agoā€”requires a rock to hammer the pins into place, because theyā€™ve swollen over time.
Painting earlier this year with a Gloucester easel. It’s the only easel tough enough for on-shore winds. Photo courtesy of Karen Lybrand.
Thatā€™s an easel with an interesting history. It is a traditional European design that was brought to Gloucester, MA, at the turn of the last century by painter Oscar Anderson. He made and sold them to fellow artists; old ones bear his name-plate.  The Anderson easel became known generically as a ā€œGloucester easel.ā€ Today there are two versions availableā€”a beautifully milled, expensive one called the Take-It Easel, and a mass-produced one called the Beauport Easel. They work exactly the same, although I imagine the better-made one will last longer.
Itā€™s a very stable design, and it has the great advantage of allowing work to tilt forward toward a sitting painter. Still, I donā€™t like to carry it any farther than I can trundle it in a wagon. Not only is it big and cumbersome, it is held in the folded position by only a canvas strap. (Mine rotted away years ago.) And itā€™s useless for watercolor, because the head doesnā€™t pivot.
Meanwhile, the unsettled Atlantic is giving us some very interesting sunrises. This was yesterday’s; this morning we were socked in with fog.
I have a spare pivot-head easel in my studio in Rockport, and Iā€™ll collect it on Saturday. Itā€™s a Guerilla painter head that I adapted to hold a larger board. With its tripod, it weighs a ton, but that wonā€™t matter for this residency. After that, Iā€™ll take apart both my wooden easels and make some hard choices. Can they be rehabbed, or must they be replaced?

The road home

How much of what we know is truth and how much is the convention of our times?

After the final cutting, Carol L. Douglas

In the 21st century, we are being driven inexorably toward higher and higher chroma (color intensity). This isnā€™t just happening in painting, but also in photography, home furnishings, and hair coloring. Occasionally an artist will take refuge in monochrome, but the delicately modeled colors of our predecessors are out of vogue. We live and die at 1280 x 720 pixels, and delicacy just doesnā€™t cut it on a computer monitor.
Yesterday, David Dewey spent a few hours with Clif Travers and me, going through a wealth of Joseph Fiore paintings. These are in storage and represent his entire career, from his studies at Black Mountain College until shortly before his death. Unlike most painters, Fiore didnā€™t run through clearly defined stylistic periods. He operated on parallel tracks of abstraction and realism, each informing the other.
Guardian of the Falls, 1983, Joseph Fiore, oil on canvas, 52 x 44, courtesy of the Falcon Foundation.
His folios are full of small studies in watercolor, oil, and pastel, now chemically stabilized. The majority are formal color exercises, many based on a mathematical grid of his own devising. David identified these as Bauhaus in character, which in turn takes us back to Paul Klee, Josef Albersand Wassily Kandinsky.
Klee closely connected color and music, making the connection between harmony and complementary colors, and dissidence and clashing colors (whatever they may be). Albers was a hands-on scientific colorist who taught at Black Mountain College when Fiore was there.
Field sketch forGuardian of the Falls (above), courtesy of the Falcon Foundation. Itā€™s watercolor and about 12×16.
Fioreā€™s color studies are a balm to the eye starved for subtlety. There are grids of closely analogous greens and browns; grids punctuated with black. In addition to being beautiful, they fly in the face of our current color model. 
That just shows how much of what we think we know is the convention of our time, not eternal truths of painting. Take, for example, all of Kandinsky’s twaddle in Concerning the Spiritual in Art.  For much of the twentieth century, people took that seriously.
The artistā€™s job is to get through all that to the nut of the matter. The only way I know to do that is to paintā€”a lot.
David mentioned that he uses Arches 500 in his studio work, but mixes it up in the field. The accidents that ensue help him avoid staleness. This is exactly my goal in alternating between watercolor and oil in this residency, and in painting so big and fast. I am trying to shake up my oil painting.
I was able to maintain the truth of the landscape in my sketch.
Nature has a certain awkwardness. We landscape painters are taught to edit that away into a ā€˜betterā€™ composition. After examining so many paintings, I wondered how much of that is also a fashion issue. I resolved to not do it in my afternoon painting, but to be completely faithful to what God and man had laid down in that field. I donā€™t think I succeeded. The personal impulse is just too strong to ignore.
But when I started painting, I succumbed to the urge to prettify.
With all that fizzing in our heads, Clif and I went back to the farm and returned to work. The lake was still unsettled from this weekā€™s storm, so I painted the small private cemetery and its lane. The lake beyond made this very much a painting of the intersection between land, water and man.
Having spent the morning in study, I didnā€™t finish the painting to any high surface. Itā€™s slightly easier to do that with watercolor, since it goes faster. But in either case, the pace is starting to tell on me. Iā€™m getting tired.

Rachelā€™s garden

One of the great virtues of old age is knowing that small problems are transient. So is bad painting.
Rachel’s Garden, by Carol L. Douglas. Watercolor on Yupo, full sheet.
Plein air events require that you churn out paintings despite the weather. The caterers, the hall, the advertising and the auctioneer cannot be easily rescheduled. The wet, whipping show must go on. Iā€™m not doing an event, but my goal for this residency is to paint outdoors despite the weather.
September can be the worst month for this, because itā€™s hurricane season along the Atlantic coast. We arenā€™t in as much danger here in Maine, but we often get the sloppy dregs of other peopleā€™s storms.
Neither Monday nor Tuesday were good painting days. On Monday, there were cutting winds, compensated in part by a dull pink sky that hung around all morning. Tuesday, it simply poured.
Yesterday (9/11) was a national day of mourning that I was determined to avoid. Itā€™s also the anniversary of my motherā€™s death four years ago. Here at Rolling Acres Farm, Iā€™m surrounded by young people and creative ferment. I was grateful for that.
Painting with Rachel Alexandrou in the rain. Photo courtesy Rachel Alexandrou and Maine Farmland Trust.
The barn here is built on the standard New England plan: hayloft above and animals below. My parents owned such a barn for fifty years, so I am as familiar with this model as I am with the lines in my own face. Perhaps there was a painting of gentle remembrance in the undercroftā€™s murky light. No luck; it is filled with the timbers from the original loft.
Rachel Alexandrou is the resident gardener here. Her garden is very different from the ordered rows of my youth. Itā€™s beautiful and productive, but also very unstructured. It would have been easier to paint a slice of it up close, but that wasnā€™t possible in a pouring rain. Besides, I was in no mood to ā€œkeep it simple,ā€ as a sensible painter would.
My childhood home, from History of Niagara County, N.Y.,1878, by Sanford & Company.
The garden is bracketed by a dead sapling and a Black Walnut. This tree is common in Americaā€™s heartland; a massive one was already middle-aged in my parentsā€™ lawn when their house was drawn in 1878. It was still there when the house was sold three years ago. While Black Walnuts are valuable timber trees, theyā€™re also allelopathic; meaning they kill any young plants trying to get a footing near them. The one at Rolling Acres Farm is the first Iā€™ve seen in Maine, but I didnā€™t want to paint it. I find them threatening.
That same black walnut in 2010.
I set up under a porte-cochĆØrethat connects the house and barn. Rachel has been experimenting with making Black Walnut ink, so she joined me.
The mist and rain came close to defeating us. I was further hampered by not being able to find my palette. The Maine Farmland Trust is dedicated to environmental stewardship, so there are no plastic plates. I used a paper one for a palette, not too successfully.
Rolling Acres Farm (unfinished) by Carol L. Douglas, was painted Monday.
I quit as dusk neared. It was then that I noticed I had a very soft tire. My car just isnā€™t up to the rocky tracks Iā€™ve been subjecting it to. A slow drive into Damariscotta and an air compressor, and I could head back to Clary Hill to see if Iā€™d dropped my palette there. I scouted along the lane to no avail. Walking back, I realized I have a marker light out in my car.
My temporary palette. Ouch.
One of the great virtues of old age is knowing that small problems are transient. So is bad painting. Today or tomorrow, it will all be fine again.

Clary Hill

Stone walls are a subtle reminder of the vast human labor that has gone into these fields.
Clary Hill #2, by Carol L. Douglas. Watercolor on Yupo, full sheet.

I ran into Kevin Beers in Damariscotta, and asked him if heā€™d ever been to Clary Hill, site of a painting by that name by Joseph Fiore. He had, and offered directions. However, knowing where Iā€™m going violates one of my cardinal rules of shunpiking. Instead, Clif Travers and I headed north and up until we found the hill and its blueberry barrens. We did not, however, find the scene that Fiore painted.

I dropped Clif off at Rolling Acres Farm and collected my oil-painting kit. If I hurried, there was just enough time to finish a painting in the waning light. Itā€™s perfectly serviceable, but the composition doesnā€™t begin to express the skewed perspective on this hilltop.
Blueberries, by Carol L. Douglas. By late September, the red of the blueberry barrens is an impossible color.
In early September, the groundcover is orange-red and the small outcroppings of trees are green. Farther along in the season, the plants will be an impossible, deep, uniform red. There are open patches where nothing grows. In a more conventional landscape, these would be small ponds, but here they are granite, rising to the surface in long fingers.
The farther north you travel on the Atlantic seaboard, the more blueberry barrens you see. They and their close relatives, cranberries, are the only crops that we harvest from wild plants. But blueberries arenā€™t planted and cultivated in purpose-built bogs, as cranberries are. Instead, blueberries spread from rhizomes. You donā€™t plant them as much as encourage them. In the right conditions, they grow like weeds, including in my lawn. In that sense theyā€™re more like a natural resource than a crop.
Clary Hill #1, by Carol L. Douglas. Oil on canvas, 36X24.
Wild blueberries bear little resemblance to the fat highbush blueberries that are grown commercially in milder climes. Ours are short, tough, shrubby things, with tiny berries. The wild ones like the acidic soil and abundant sunshine of the far north, and they have their counterparts in the subarctic ring worldwide.
Today rocks can be moved with heavy equipment, but the stone walls that crisscross blueberry barrens were built by unknown, long-gone hands. The berries are hand-harvested as well. That makes the stone wall an integral part of the portrait of a blueberry barren, a subtle reminder of the vast labor that has been done on this spot for generations.
Sketch for the painting at top.
On Sunday, I went back again with watercolors. As I was setting up, a birder stopped by. Heā€™s been visiting Clary Hill for forty years, and encouraged me to cross the gate and walk to the top. There, laid out below me, was Joseph Fioreā€™s vista. I would have had to trespass to get his exact view, but the wishbone track peters off to the right, just as he painted it. Far in the distance is the coastā€”St. George, perhaps, or Owls Head.
Just like old times!
I was just settling down to work when my daughter Mary showed up. Our phones location-share, so she drove over from Augusta to find me. Mary traveled across Canadawith me, studying and reading while I painted. It was like old times. She did homework while I painted, on a barren hilltop in the middle of nowhere.

Monday Morning Art School: an art education at your fingertips

Art school averages $42,000 a year. In comparison, these books are a steal.

The most important book I recommend to my students is Art & Fear: Observations On the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking, by David Bayles and Ted Orland. This slim volume (Iā€™ve always wanted to say that) lays out the fundamental rule of artmaking: if you want to be an artist, you have to make art, lots of it, over and over again.
Drawing is a skill, not a talent. Not being able to do it holds you back as a painter. Sketching from Square One to Trafalgar Square, by Richard Scott, is a series of exercises that will take you from simple measurement to complex architecture.
If youā€™re looking for similar exercises in figure drawing, I recommend Drawing the Human Form, by William A. Berry. Itā€™s based on anatomy, not style.
Every art studio should have one anatomy textbook. I use Atlas of Human Anatomy, by Frank H. Netter. Netter was both a doctor and an artist, and he did his own beautiful illustrations. There are other, art-targeted, anatomy books, but this provides all the information I need.
Landscape Painting Inside and Out, by Kevin Macpherson, is a clear, concise guide to getting paint from the tube to the canvas.
I have a shelf full of watercolor books, but my primary pigment reference is a website, Handprint, by Bruce MacEvoy. This has replaced the classic Blue and Yellow Donā€™t Make Green, by David Wilcox. There are many different ways to get watercolor on paper. If you want to buy only one book on the subject, try The Complete Watercolorist’s Essential Notebook, by Gordon MacKenzie.
There are two color books I love. The first is Josef Albersā€™ Interaction of Color, which is filled with exercises to understand how color works. Itā€™s fifty years old. The writing is dense to our modern sensibilities, but stick with it.
Bright Earth: Art and the Invention of Color, by Philip Ball, is a brilliant, readable treatise on how chemistry and technology have combined to influence art. (Itā€™s far better than Victoria Finlayā€™s Color, which is merely a travelogue.) When youā€™re done reading it, you should have a firm handle on the differences between earth, organic and twentieth-century pigments.
I have shelves full of catalogues raisonnĆ©, museum guides, and other illustrated histories of art, but three books compel me over and over. The first is Sister Wendyā€™s 1000 Masterpieces. It is a simple compendium of things she likes. Fortunately, she has great taste. The internet wasnā€™t a big deal when she wrote this, but use it as a starting point for your own online research on artists.
The Group of Seven and Tom Thomson, by David Silcox, deals with the painters whoā€™ve most influenced me. Growing up in the shadow of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, I had no concept of twentieth-century realism, but there it was, being made right across border from me.
John Constable: The Making of a Master, by Mark Evans, illustrates a simple truth of landscape painting: it all starts outdoors.
Have a recommendation? Add it as a comment on this blog, rather than on Facebook, where it will get lost.

Dancing in the rain

If I knew what would happen, I wouldnā€™t bother trying.
The float, by Carol L. Douglas. Same subject as yesterday.
Today is my 38th wedding anniversary; Wednesday was my granddaughterā€™s third birthday. I knew Iā€™d miss these milestone events when I signed up for this residency, but had convinced myself that in the world of Skype and Snapchat, physical presence didnā€™t matter. It does.
Iā€™m reminded that my grandmother came to this country expecting to never see her homeland or family again. Despite our national myths of intrepid independence, we are a nation built on homesickness.
Even the umbrella can’t save this painting from the rain.
My intention in this residency is two-fold: to explore the intersection of water, land and mankind, and to do some really big plein air landscapes in oils and watercolor. In the world of art, oil and water definitely do not mix; together they can create an archival disaster. So, being a concrete thinker, I plan to alternate them. Wednesday was an oil-painting day, Thursday was a watercolor day.
Rachel Alexandrou, the gardener-in-residence here, told me it would rain at 12:30. She was accurate to the minute. I hunkered down in my car, my salad on my lap, and watched the storm cross Damariscotta Lake. Excess humidity of any kind is tough on conventional watercolor paper. It turns out that itā€™s not good for Yupo, either.
A droopy, dreary day from within my car.
Yupo is a synthetic plastic substrate: cool, slick and contemporary. Itā€™s the antithesis of organic. I like the way it takes watercolor, and its luminosity. However, it can be a jerk on a wet day. Water pools on the surface, and the paint is much more inclined to granulate than it does on paper.
Combined with intermittent rain, this made for nasty clumps of dark particles floating on the surface. The culprit appears to be what I thought was quinacridone violet. Thatā€™s not possible; that color isnā€™t granular at all. I have an imposter on my palette. I wonder what it is.
I switched to a quinacridone gold by QoR; it is clearer and brighter than whatever was on my palette.
I expected technical problems this first day, and I got them. My full-sheet drawing board, improvised from a folding presentation board, is too large for my swivel head easel. I donā€™t have my large brushes; theyā€™re still in England.
There is a subtle change that happens when you finally relax and paint. You stop fussing at your materials and start translating what you see. I did eventually get there, or almost there. I hashed out a painting thatā€™s mediocre in its drawing, rather muddy in its color, but interesting in its scribing. The beauty of Yupo is that it makes watercolor behave like no other paint.
Whatā€™s the end goal of this see-saw rotation of materials? If I knew what would happen, I wouldnā€™t bother trying. In this sense, experimentation with artistā€™s materials is vastly unscientific. We simply mix things up and watch. One in a hundred times it works, and when that happens, it’s magical.

Do you dread writing an artist’s statement?

The artistā€™s statement is, unfortunately, not optional.
The float, by Carol L. Douglas. This is my first work out the gate at Joseph A. Fiore Art Center. I struggled with the aspect ratio. Is it done? Beats me.

Last week I wrote about getting into galleries. The artist who prompted that post responded, ā€œI would much rather discuss how I feel my work communicates the essence of wilderness and why itā€™s important to preserve wild places, than trying to convince them that Iā€™m an accomplished painter and would be an asset to their gallery. Iā€™d be much more comfortable discussing the importance of making sure people develop an appreciation for the wild places left on our planet, than the merits of my paintings.ā€

Sheā€™s hit on a topic that most artists (including me) approach with dread: the artistā€™s statement. Iā€™ve been mulling that over this week, because a residency can be about figuring out where youā€™re going as much as it is about producing new work.
My Mabef easel may nominally hold a 24×36 canvas, but in practice it’s too heavy. So it’s back to the Gloucester easel for oils.
An artistā€™s statement can be dull as dishwater or it can hit you between the eyes. My correspondent above is clearly passionate about wilderness; Iā€™d be interested in her work just from the few sentences above.
We want our work to transmit our ideas non-verbally. Still, we are expected to write these statements. Our gallerists and collectors need a starting point for discussion.
Today I move over to Yupo and watercolor paper.
An artist statement generally contains:
  • An overview of oneā€™s ideas;
  • An explanation of materials and process;
  • A personal statement of beliefs/philosophy;
  • A closing statement.

As a plein airpainter, thereā€™s not much I can say about my materials; however, I can talk about my strong preference for painting from life instead of photos.
The first and last sections are great opportunities for pomposity, clichĆ©s, sophomoric writing and irrelevant anecdotes. As experienced as I am at writing, Iā€™ve fallen into those traps. I look back on some of my artistā€™s statements and cringe.
What questions could you address?
  • What compels you in your current work?
  • Why did you make this specific body of work?
  • What are the spiritual, moral, or experiential underpinnings of your work?
  • What do you want your audience to take away from it?
  • How does this work relate to work youā€™ve done before?
  • Who or what are your inspirations?
  • Is there something unique about your technique?
  • What is your place in art history? How are you building on whatā€™s been done before?
  • Is your painting tied to a specific place, a specific history, or a group of people?
I was so taken by Yupo last month that I ordered twenty full sheets of it. Here’s hoping it works as well in that size.
What points should you avoid?

  • Talking about how much you love art. Everyone does.
  • Quoting famous artists and/or poetry.
  • A minute description of your process, especially when itā€™s the same as everyone elseā€™s process.
  • Your personal experience, unless it ties in with a greater theme.
  • ā€œMy work is interesting becauseā€¦ā€
  • Comparing yourself to a famous artist.

Be spare in your prose, direct, and honest. Refer to yourself in the first person, not as ā€˜the artist.ā€™ And expect to work on it for a while. If you really and truly canā€™t write, hire someone to help you; the artistā€™s statement is, unfortunately, not optional.
In practice, Iā€™ve found that I need several different versions of artist statement (which are of course strewn all over my hard drive). Thereā€™s the short one for show applications, the longer one for gallerists, and the painfully long one that gets incorporated into press releases.

A month in the shadow of a great painter

Ghost stories, cemeteries, and the work of a great painter

Clif and I visited this old cemetery in the waning light.

If I had any talent for poetry, Iā€™d have exercised it last night. Iā€™m at the Joseph Fiore Art Center in Jefferson, Maine for a one-month residency. My room faces east. I watched the slow rotation of the night sky, the stars overflowing their courses. The dawn rose red and fiery, glinting through the trees off the waters of Damariscotta Lake.

I spent yesterday with the other visual artist in residence, Clif Travers of Kingfield, ME. Clif is both a writer and painter, and recently returned to his hometown after a long stint in Brooklyn. His work here will involve panels and prose, brackets and blocks. I’m curious about what the end result will be; I imagine he is, too.

Moving into a temporary studio is more daunting for a studio painter than for me; I simply had to offload my extra supports and was done.

My studio away from home.

When weā€™d both finished, Clif and I took a quick jaunt to Rising Tide Co-op in Damariscotta and Pemaquid Point. Itā€™s rare that I can play tour-guide to a native Mainer, but Kingfield is way inland and north.

There is a family cemetery set within the aptly-named Rolling Acres Farm. Itā€™s of a type I identify more with Scotland than America, a set of small ā€˜roomsā€™ separated by carefully-laid up dry walls.

Katahdin, 1975, Joseph A. Fiore, courtesy Maine Farmland Trust

Iā€™d already retired when Clif called up that I should come down and see the waning dayā€™s pyrotechnics. The few white stones glowed peach against the dark woods. We set off through the hayfields to photograph it, me in my bare feet.

ā€œMaybe this place is haunted,ā€ Clif enthused. Well, I was raised in a notorious haunted house, but it was late and I refused to tell him about it. Ghost stories need their buildup, after all.
My workspace is in an old barn, redolent of old hay. But I donā€™t expect to spend much time there. Iā€™ve a goal in mind for this residency. It involves the intersection of water and land, andā€”mostlyā€”painting big. Unfortunately, my monster Rosemary & Co. brushes are delayed, so Iā€™m going to have to be flexible in my approach.

View from Bald Rock, 1971, Joseph A. Fiore, courtesy Maine Farmland Trust

Who was Joseph Fiore (1925ā€“2008) and why is there an art center dedicated to him in Jefferson, ME? Fiore was born in Cleveland, the son of a violinist. He was musical himself, and that is very evident in his painting. He attended the experimental Black Mountain College on the GI Bill and studied with Josef Albers, Ilya Bolotowsky, and Willem DeKooning. Later, he taught there.

With those instructors, itā€™s no surprise that Fiore was, foremost, an abstractionist. However, his work is rooted in nature and he also painted lovely, loose, realistic landscapes. His paint is worked very thin, and his brushwork is loose and measured. Leaving that much canvas is the mark of a good draftsman, because any dithering shows.
After Black Mountain closed, Fiore settled in New York, where he taught at Parsons. In 1959 he and his wife began summering in Maine. They bought an old farmhouse in Jefferson, which they used for the rest of his life.

Clary Hill, 1970, Joseph A. Fiore, courtesy Maine Farmland Trust

Fiore and his wife Mary were avid supporters of Maine Farmland Trust. When the Trust purchased this waterfront farm, the idea of the art center was born.

My first response to being surrounded by his work was a kind of intellectual shock, where everything I thought I knew about painting was challenged. Now, nearly 24 hours later, Iā€™m adjusting somewhat. But the opportunity to be submersed in another artistā€™s work is not to be sneezed at, so Iā€™m adjusting my plans to allow time with the paintings every day.

Monday Morning Art School: the coastal composition problem

Itā€™s easy to throw all the weight to one side when painting on the coast. Hereā€™s one way to fix that.
Roger Akeley’s solution to the coastal composition problem.
A few weeks ago, I got a message from student Roger Akeley. Roger had arrived at a drastic solution to the composition problem bedeviling his painting.
Squares are more static than rectangles, which is one reason I seldom paint in that format. However, that means their weightiness helps subdue out-of-balance compositions. More importantly, Roger cut off a good deal of the material that was pulling the painting to the left. That allowed the scree and seaweed at the bottom to take their proper place on the stage. It was a decisive solution.
Roger was dealing with a problem that regularly bedevils painters of ocean scenes: all the weight falls on one side. The second problem I commonly see (which he avoided) is a shoreline that’s an unbroken ellipse. It’s inelegant and unbelievable.
How can you avoid these problems?

Palm, by Carol L. Douglas
Seek out irregularity in the coastline. On the North Atlantic, this isnā€™t too difficult; great granite fingers reach out into the ocean. In the Bahamas, I found that significantly more difficult, as the coast was even and featureless and the surf lackluster. I used a foreground objectā€”a palmā€”to create interest, above.
Historic Fort Point, by Carol L. Douglas
Still, there are places where the weight inevitably falls to one side, and there are no atmospherics to correct the scene. When this happens, I try to keep the values tight, as I did in my painting above. If the water isnā€™t significantly lighter than the trees, the composition will gel. The risk is in being boring, hence the high chroma.
For true mastery of this problem, we must consult that genius of coastal painting, Winslow Homer. In his watercolors from Cullercoats, he frequently used figures to break the horizon. His paintings from Maine, however, used two more elemental and powerful devices, which are ours for the looking.  

Sunshine and Shadow, Prout’s Neck, 1894, Winslow Homer (watercolor), courtesy Art Institute of Chicago
Homer was the master of the sweeping diagonal. He used this over and over to hold our visual interest, playing it off the strict horizontal of the horizon line. In the watercolor above, the whole charge of the painting lies in the interrupted diagonal silhouette and its counterpoint in the clouds and sinuous driftwood. Only after serious looking do we notice the beach roses at the bottom; they are completely subdued into the shadows.
Northeaster, 1895-1901, Winslow Homer, courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art
Northeaster, above, uses a similar diagonal, this time playing against the towering white shape of the spray. In themselves, these two elements would have made a brilliant painting. But waitā€”as they say on late night TVā€”thereā€™s more. The dark in the wave to the far right echoes the rocks. Itā€™s a threatening element, but it also gives us an easy order in which to ā€˜readā€™ the painting. We see rock, the shadow on the breaker, the spray, and finally that wisp of light in the distant waves. Itā€™s not painterliness that draws us through this work; itā€™s masterful composition.
The Artist’s Studio in an Afternoon Fog, 1894, Winslow Homer, courtesy Memorial Art Gallery, Rochester, NY.
I seldom ask my students to copy masterworks. The Artistā€™s Studio in the Afternoon, also by Homer, is an exception. I donā€™t care if you do it in paint or pencil, but take an hour and set down a copy of this painting. It is a perfect compositionā€”energetic, spare, lively. When youā€™re done, please post a comment in Monday Morning Art School on Facebook telling me what youā€™ve learned.