November 2020 | Page 2 of 2 | Carol L. Douglas

November 6, 2020

Hard-earned ease

It’s a paradox: we achieve looseness by mastering the small, precise details of our craft.

Tom Sawyer’s Fence, oil on canvas, Carol L. Douglas

Painting students often express the desire to paint more loosely. That’s not easy to attain. Painter Tom Root described it best when he called it “hard-earned ease,” likening it to a ballet dancer with bloody feet.

It’s paradoxical, but dancers achieve grace and fluidity by practicing a bone-aching number of precise movements. It’s the same in painting: we achieve lyricism by mastering the small details of our craft.

That starts with drawing. It’s shocking how many people try to be painters without mastering this basic skill, and how many teachers let them get away with it. Drawing is the basic reverse-engineering process of art. It’s how we analyze an object before we rebuild it on canvas.

Clouds over Whiteface, oil on canvasboard, Carol L. Douglas

You can’t develop fluid style if you can’t draw. You will flail around, guessing where things are, and then overstating everything with excessive, tight brushwork. You won’t be able to express depth or distance if you haven’t explored where depth and distance start and stop.

Conversely, if you take the time to learn to draw, your painting has room to be looser. In my class on Tuesday, a student drew a complex Anasazi pot with astounding fidelity. She was able to put the pot down in a few brushstrokes because she’d already done the hard business of figuring it out with her pencil.

Best Buds, oil on canvasboard, Carol L. Douglas

Drawing is actually easy. It doesn’t require ‘talent’; it’s for the most part a mechanical measuring process. There are many good books on the subject, and I’ve also gone into it extensively; just go to the search box to the right on this blog and type in “how to draw.” The investment is minimal; a mixed-media Strathmore Visual Journal is around $5 at our local job lots store. Use any #2 pencil with an eraser. Anything else is just refinement.

The second requirement for fluidity is process. For some reason, the arts have a reputation for attracting non-conformists, but I don’t know a single successful painter who doesn’t repeat a process with every painting. These have variations, but the components—at least in painting—are nothing new. The basic order of operations has been set in stone for centuries; only the materials get updated.

Bracken Fern, oil on canvasboard, Carol L. Douglas

If you want to find your true authentic voice, start by mastering the process. For most of us, the easiest way to do this is with a teacher, but there are fine videos and books out there as well. Practice your process so many times that it becomes second nature. Then—and only then—you will find your own, loose brushwork emerging.

Notice that I said nothing about style. It’s important, but elusive. It emerges when one has done the grunt work of developing good technique. Don’t try to pin it down too early, or you’ll box yourself into something you can’t grow past.

I’m off to Tallahassee on Sunday to teach my last workshop of the season. Next year’s dates (so far) are now on my website. Here’s hoping that 2021 is a better year for all of us!

November 4, 2020

You are what you focus on

Despite the fact that my career rests on social media, I’m all for throwing social media in the trash today.

Wreck of the S. S. Ethie, oil on canvas, by Carol L. Douglas. Available.

Like most of you, I woke up this morning wondering whether we have a president. Apparently not; most states were still counting as of 6 AM. I’m 61 years old and this is the first time I can remember this happening. I think we can take it as read that we’re in an historically-important moment.

We’re an almost-evenly divided nation. That means that the side that wins ought to be at least aware of the thoughts, ideals and feelings of the side that loses. If the past few decades are any indication, the winners will not. They will act as if their slim margin is a mandate.

The Dooryard, oil on canvasboard, by Carol L. Douglas. Available.

I’m very conservative, but I lived most of my life in staunch Democrat country: I was raised in working-class Buffalo and lived in New York during the decades when it morphed from being a swing state to being reliably blue. I’m accustomed to living, working, eating, playing and praying with people with radically-different views from mine. Until recently, it was never a problem. It shouldn’t be.

This should be obvious to any thinking person, but it’s apparently not, so I’m using my blog to state it: your political opponents are as thoughtful, smart and kind as you. That’s true for good or ill.

My friend Brenna asked recently what we planned to do after the election. “Oh, either gloat or riot,” I snarked. I was joking, but sadly, some of my fellow citizens haven’t worked their way past these options. The media will gleefully report on their antics, and the rest of us will chatter about what it means.

Beaver Dam, oil on canvasboard, by Carol L. Douglas. Available through Maine Farmland Trust Gallery.

We humans have only two ways to reconcile our differences: we either talk them out or we split up. Last time the latter happened here, it was a bloody mess: 650,000 died in our Civil War. That was 2.1% of the population. Extrapolate to our current age, and we’d be talking almost seven million people—a holocaust by any measure.

Our only rational tool is civilized conversation, but too many of us live in echo chambers. Modern media encourages that—it surrounds you with the news, people and facts you want to hear.

Leon Festinger was the American social psychologist who pioneered the ideas of cognitive dissonancein a seminal 1956 book, When Prophecy Fails. Festinger had observers infiltrate a cult to see what would happen when the date of a doomsday prophecy came and went. The book explains how people can hold onto discredited ideas in the face of obvious contrary evidence.

Talking with Michelle, oil sketch by Carol L. Douglas. She’s a long-term poll monitor, bless her heart.

Clearly, there’s strength in numbers. As Festinger wrote, “If more and more people can be persuaded that the system of belief is correct, then clearly it must after all be correct.” Festinger did his research within a cult, but today he would find fertile ground on the internet, where all our social biases are confirmed by the ambiguous workings of artificial intelligence.

At the same time, another group of psychologists were pioneering an idea they took from George Orwell‘s biting dystopian novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four. Groupthink is a phenomenon that occurs when our need for harmony starts overriding the evidence before our eyes. Once again, there is momentum in numbers; the odd man out either starts thinking like the group, or he’s pushed out entirely. I doubt there are many adults who haven’t experienced this somewhere in their work or personal lives.

But we’re still capable of independent thinking, we humans. We have a choice—we can spend our days watching TV and surfing the Internet and getting more and more anxious, or we can turn the machines off. We can paint, read, pray, walk the dog, and talk to our real-world friends. Despite the fact that my career rests on social media, I’m all for throwing social media in the trash today.

November 2, 2020

Monday Morning Art School: the importance of process

An intelligent plan—not some mysterious quality called ‘talent’—is the basis of all successful painting.

Samantha’s finished monochrome painting.

If my students don’t finish their paintings in class, I invite them to email me pictures later. Last week, they painted pumpkins, a project which turned into a delightfully idiosyncratic exercise.

Samantha East takes my Zoom class along with her husband, Lloyd. They started as beginners and were feeling pretty intimidated by some of the other students. This week, she sent me her painting along with a very lucid description of how she fixed it. I am sharing it with you:

“I was really pretty stuck at the end of class. When I sat down today, I had a plan but again felt pretty stymied right from the start. After a few failed efforts I realized the real problem is that I was trying to figure out color mixing, values, depth and shading, and how to deal with translucent paints all at the same time. Forget even thinking about focal points and diagonal lines & triangles. That’s just way too much for me to sort through all at once.

Samantha’s first drawing

“Currently I’m really wanting to get a grip on depth and shading, so I decided to eliminate all the other puzzle pieces by reducing my palette to black and white. I redid the pencil drawing.

“Admittedly it’s not much different or better than the first but I spent a lot of time trying to really see what I was looking at and to understand it. Taking the time to do that was definitely worthwhile. I used a B&W version of the color photo above to help me see shadows and depth and value.

“It’s a tricky thing getting one’s brain to see things in a new way, in a new light… literally, in this case. It’s like learning to see again, all the while ignoring the short-cut version your brain created decades ago as in, ‘Yeah, yeah, it’s a squash and a pumpkin… move on, nothing to see here.’

Samantha’s first painting. She realized she was juggling too many elements, so she backed off the color.

“In my search for what works I ended up with two different approaches between the squash and the pumpkin which was an interesting learning event for me. I also think it made for a more interesting painting.

“It’s a tricky thing to get on canvas what’s in my head. My brain understands but somehow that’s not what comes out of the brush. I feel like I’m actually in the business of building brand-new neural pathways, and once those are in place, I’ll be able to do new and increasingly interesting things. How totally cool is that?”

Samantha:

Identified the problem as one of value (it almost always is);
Deconstructed the process and added a step—looking at a b/w photo—to help her see what she was missing;
Slowed down and really looked, rather than relying on what she thought she knew;
Redid her value drawing;
Mixed up her brushwork to add interest and texture.

Samantha is what we used to call One Smart Cookie. She’s got engineering and space degrees and flew for the Air Force for 24 years. I like teaching engineers, because they’re used to thinking about process. They don’t suffer from the bias of thinking that painting is an intuitive gift.

Samantha’s second drawing. Notice that she didn’t spend time on the extraneous matter; she’d already done that. She went to the heart of the shading question on the gourds themselves.

Many great artists can’t tell you their process, but I assure you they all have one. I teach a very ordinary method; it’s an amalgam of tips and tricks used by artists over the centuries. It’s by no means the only process, but it’s time-tested and it works. Whatever method you choose, intelligent process—not some mysterious quality called ‘talent’—is really the basis of all successful painting.