Month: September 2020

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Heart and Soul

People are working very hard to find ways to do their job as well as in pre-COVID days. That includes my fellow artists at Cape Elizabeth Paint for Preservation.

Zeb Cove, by Carol L. Douglas, 40″x40″, oil on canvas, available through Cape Elizabeth Land Trust’s Paint for Preservation auction.


When Cape Elizabeth Land Trust’s Paint for Preservation first went virtual, I debated whether it made sense to paint large. Not only is it physically demanding, larger paintings don’t read as well on the internet. A tiny painting occupying 600X600 pixels shows off its brushwork to advantage. A huge painting loses its presence on the screen. You simply can’t see the brushwork and colors.

In the end, I decided that professionalism trumped hard-nosed common sense. I’d go on as I began. Zeb Cove, above, is a massive 40X40”. There’s an old saw that a painting should work at 30 feet, three feet, and three inches. This one, I think, does.

That big beast of a canvas, photo courtesy of Betsy Manganello

The sale may be virtual, but the painting itself sure wasn’t. Working at the end of a private road, I was worried that I’d be totally isolated. I shouldn’t have. I met the neighbors. Friends and students stopped by. It was a revolving party—all socially distanced, of course.

This year, I made a video of the first layers of my painting. It’s here on YouTube, for those of you who are interested in the process. This was a 12-hour painting stint, cut down to several minutes of video. The only parts I cut out were the long pauses when I stepped back to look. (I’ve also made a video about preparing for this event, here.)

The last few hours aren’t included because the wind was rattling my tripod so much my camera wouldn’t focus. In fact, it was so gusty that I snapped my trusty old Gloucester easel. Luckily, the photographer for the event was carrying gorilla tape, and we patched it back up.

Snap, crackle, pop! Easel down. A little gorilla tape and I was back in business.

We’re allotted three days to make one painting. Saturday was a washout, with gouts of rain. By mid-day Sunday, I was done with my subject (which is called Hair Rock). I decided to paint another rock formation out in the middle of the cove and mostly submerged except at low tide. The wind increased; the surf roared. Alas, my canvas kept working itself loose and flying at me. The final indignity was when it hit me amidships, flipped over my head, and soared about 35 feet to land in scrub. I dusted it off and packed up my gear.

One perk of being a painter is that you get to see the competition before everyone else. My peers clearly came with the same attitude as me—we would pour heart and soul into this event, regardless of the outcome. I’ve found that to be the case in my dealings this summer, whether in the grocery store, doctors’ offices, or the post office. People are working very hard to find ways to do their jobs. It’s heartening.

Surf interrupted. I’m waiting until it dries enough to scrape the debris out and then I’ll get back to it. Those distant blues ended up on my arms as it hit me amidships.

I’ve been so focused on the impact of COVID-19 on working artists, I was shocked to read that Paint for Preservation funds about 25% of CELT’s annual budget. As non-profits cancel their annual fundraisers, the stress on the charity side of our economy is tremendous.

Normally, Paint for Preservation ends with a very swank gala, the highlight of which is an auction presided over by the irrepressible Kaja Veilleux. It always sells out, because demand far exceeds the venue’s capacity. Obviously, that party is a no-go this year. However, the upside is that anyone, anywhere in the world, can bid. No ticket is required. My painting will open at $1500, which is a small fraction of its retail value. I believe all other paintings are priced similarly.

All thirty paintings will be on CELT’s website starting tomorrow. Bidding opens Saturday, September 12 at 8 AM and closes at 8 PM the following day. Last month, I wrote about my paintings for CELT’s Mystery Boxes. These will be on sale on the website as well.

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Are you a tortoise or a hare?

The person for whom drawing comes easily may not end up being the best draftsman.

Shoes, by Carol L. Douglas. Oil on canvasboard, available.

One of my students is a retired violinist. We were musing on the question of technique last week. “Practice doesn’t make perfect,” she said. “Perfect practice makes perfect.” An aspiring violinist can spend hours dragging a bow across strings, but if someone hasn’t told him about rosin, the resulting caterwauling will be awful.

As a hater of school and generally bad student (I never could sit still) I was probably more self-taught than I was educated. But, to be honest, there’s still very little ‘self’ in my education. My father taught me to draw and paint when I was a child. I then revised my technique at the Art Students League in New York. Whenever I come up against a technical barrier I can’t get over, I find someone who has solved that problem and I study their technique, either by taking a workshop from them or reverse-engineering one of their paintings.

Baby monkey, by Carol L. Douglas. Oil on canvasboard, available.

This past week, I promised my Zoom students the most difficult class they’d ever work through. (You can read it on my blog here.) I also assured them that, if they were patient and mastered what I was teaching, they would immediately be much better artists. That’s because most painters trip up in the drawing phase. Angles and measurements are the root of all drawing.

When people say someone is ‘talented’, they usually mean that person can draw well. But that’s not an innate skill; it’s learned, even by those of us for whom it seems almost intuitive. There will be some of us who can push our skills to become NASCAR drivers, but the majority of us can learn to draw as fluently as we can drive.

Saran wrap and stuffed toy, by Carol L. Douglas. Oil on canvasboard, available.

I’m someone for whom drawing comes easily. It’s taken me a long time to realize that can actually be an impediment to real skill. Because people like me can see spatial relationships quickly, without having to think through them, we don’t always take the time to measure. That’s great, except when our intuition fails us—and it will. The human mind is stubbornly attached to regularity. Left to its own devices, my brain will shorten long distances, generalize the shapes of trees, and otherwise cut corners. Artists who rely on their intuitive drawing skills will never understand why all their rocks look the same and their trees have no character.

Meanwhile, our tortoises struggle to draw an ellipse, and find the business of measuring difficult. Still, they persevere and practice. They draw through their daily lunch break, taking fifteen minutes a day to measure and depict the most prosaic things—a box of tissues, their keys. Suddenly—aha!—the idea of angles as a tool of measurement makes sense. They suddenly understand that the same technique they used to measure their car keys can also be used to mark off the rivulets and turns of a river valley, or a mountain range. It takes them longer to get to the stage where they can draw anything, but—unlike our intuitive draftsman—they learn to draw those things accurately.

Happy New Year, by Carol L. Douglas. Oil on canvasboard, available.

Cornelia Fossonce told me that her painting teacher made her draw a matchbox one hundred times. Today, she is able to play with paint handling and composition precisely because her drawing is so perfect.

I have to admit that I didn’t like that lesson when Cornelia handed it out, but I’ve come to appreciate it. If you want to be a better artist, sublimate your inner hare. Be a bit more of a tortoise. Take the time to learn to draw accurately, and your painting will improve immeasurably.