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Author: Carol L. Douglas

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Monday Morning Art School: transferring your drawing to canvas

A painting that started as a watercolor, which I gridded on plexiglass.

Last week I taught a plein air workshop in Sedona, AZ. One of my students did a superlative sketch but somehow managed to flatten out the diagonals when transferring to her watercolor paper. Gridding is harder in watercolor than it is in oils and acrylics, but it is a skill that needs to be mastered when learning to paint. In watercolor, just use very light pencil lines and erase, or use tiny cross marks at each intersection. Or, if you’re transferring a drawing of the same size, use Saral transfer paper.

Why grid instead of freehand?

We use preliminary value sketches to work out questions of composition. They allow us to take risks that we can’t when going straight to canvas. Why reinvent the wheel, or worse, regularize our risky decisions in the final painting? Gridding is a fast and easy way to set our best drawings in paint.

On Friday, I wrote about free apps like Grid Maker, GridMyPic, etc. that allow us to paste grids directly over photographs in our phones. I’m looking forward to using them for gridding over my drawings, although for reasons of artistic control, I’d never grid across a photo. I have many notebooks full of gridded drawings that I wish I could make whole again.

First, consider aspect ratio

To start transferring your drawing to your canvas, work out whether the aspect ratio of your sketch is the same as the canvas. This is the proportional relationship between height and width. Sometimes this is very obvious. For example, a 9X12 sketch is the same aspect ratio as an 18X24 canvas. But sometimes, you’re starting with a peculiar little sketch drawn on the back of an envelope.

By the way, I never sketch into a box; I always sketch and then draw the box around my drawing. This allows me the freedom to explore what’s important in the scene without worrying about squeezing it into a preformed box. After, I can draw a box around it in the proper aspect ratio.

Everything starts with ratios

Remember learning that 1/2 was the same as 2/4? We want to force our sketch into a similar equivalent ratio with our canvas.

Let’s assume that you’ve cropped your sketch to be 8” across. You want to know how tall your crop should be to match your canvas.

Write out the ratios of height to width as above.

To make them equivalent, you cross-multiply the two fixed numbers, and divide by the other fixed number, as below:

Use your common sense here. If it doesn’t look like they should be equal, you probably made a mistake. And you can work from a known height as easily as from a known width; it doesn’t matter if the variable is on the top or the bottom, the principle is the same.

The next step is to grid both the canvas and sketch equally. In my painting above, my grid was an inch square on the sketch and 4″ square on the canvas, but as long as you end up with the same number of squares on both, the actual measurements don’t matter. You can just keep dividing the squares until you get a grid that’s small enough to be useful. For a small painting, that could be as simple as quartering the sketch and the canvas. I use a T-square and charcoal, and I’m not crazy about the lines being perfect; I adjust constantly as I go. The last step is to transfer the little drawing, rectangle by rectangle, to the larger canvas. I look for points of intersection on the grid, and from there it’s easy to transfer my drawing. It may seem time-consuming, but it saves a lot of work in the long run and will give you a painting that more closely matches the dynamic energy of your original sketch.

Reserve your spot now for a workshop in 2025:

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Snowing in Sedona

Watercolor by Stacy White.

“It’s supposed to snow in Sedona at 8 PM,” my husband told me as I was driving west on 89A yesterday evening.

“That’s funny, because it’s squalling right now,” I answered. Before I made it back to my digs in Cornville, I had two weather alerts on my phone. Since I’m driving a very tiny Mitsubishi Mirage, I was concerned about being blown off the road or, worse, floating away.

I’m a worrywart. Of course, nothing happened.

Acrylic by Amelia Scanlan.

There’s something wrong about snow in palm trees or cactuses, but Sedona and environs have been in a moisture deficit all winter. I feel badly for my students, who wanted to paint outdoors all week, but we had three good days in lovely weather. I’m also happy that we were able to break Sedona’s drought for them.

Plein air painting means expecting the unexpected, and that’s as true of workshops as it is of events. And, of course, we’re all learning, including me.

Watercolor by Bonnie Daley.

Snowing in Sedona

I have never taught a painting workshop where I haven’t learned something from my students. This week, it was about using apps like Grid Maker, GridMyPic, etc. that allow you to paste grids directly over photographs in my phone. That means I never have to ruin another value sketch by gridding across it in my sketchbook. Who knew?

I teach several painting workshops a year, and I hope that I send my students away with a variety of technical skills, including painting techniques, drawing and compositional fundamentals, and a healthy dollop of color theory. Then there are the practical skills, including material mastery, like brushes, surfaces and mediums. There are strategies for faster setup, better decision-making, and getting the best results in the fastest time. And everyone faces the same painting challenges, like dealing with slow drying in bad weather or accelerated drying in hot weather—both of which we’ve faced this week.

Oil by Rachel Houlihan.

But what a painting workshop really offers is a change in mindset. If I’ve done my job right, I’ve sparked new ideas and helped build connections between people who’ve never met before. I’m very tired, but it’s a good tired, because I’ve had a great group of students this week.

Reserve your spot now for a workshop in 2025:

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How to avoid preciousness: embrace mistakes

Painted at the Amitabha Stupa and Peace Park, by Bonnie Daley.

I’m teaching plein air in Sedona, which is one of America’s most wonderful hippie, dippy, trippy places. There’s a looseness of thinking here that leads straight to a looseness of painting, and you can see it in my students’ painting from yesterday, which veered closer to abstraction than is typical for plein air.

“One of my strengths as a painter is that I’m not worried about the result,” Rachel Houlihan told me. That means she isn’t bent about whether the painting is good or bad, she just paints. That, conversely, makes her a better painter and student because she is just never uptight about the end product.

Painted at the Amitabha Stupa and Peace Park, by Amelia Scanlan.

Avoiding preciousness in painting means embracing mistakes, spontaneity, imperfection, and risk. Here are some ideas to help you loosen up and paint more freely:

Mindset Shifts

Be more like Rachel: You will paint a lot of duds in your career; in fact, I’m three for three this week. Don’t worry about it. Throw that bad canvas on the pile and move on. If you haven’t made mistakes, if you haven’t got a pile of duds, you aren’t trying.

Painted at the Amitabha Stupa and Peace Park, by Libby Scanlan.

Embrace Mistakes: Remind yourself that mistakes are opportunities. I have noticed that sometimes the paintings that make me the most uncomfortable at the time I do them are the paintings that point the way that I’m heading in the future. And sometimes the most compelling passages of art started as accidents.

Value process over outcome: That’s really what Rachel was saying to me. When she was painting under a juniper in the Peace Park, she was perfectly content. Shift your focus from the results to being in the moment.

Set a Time Limit: If you don’t let yourself perseverate, you’re unlikely to obliterate everything that was once good about your painting.

Use Bigger Brushes: Everyone should always start with a brush that’s twice as big as they expect they need. That way they can’t overthink the details. If you need a smaller brush later, then go for it.

Painted at the Amitabha Stupa and Peace Park, by Stacy White.

Push past your comfort zone: I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard painting teachers say “not another brushstroke!” I’ve always wanted to smack those teachers. How can one know what the limit is, when one never pushes past the limit?

Painted at the Amitabha Stupa and Peace Park, by Rachel Houlihan.

Reserve your spot now for a workshop in 2025:

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Monday Morning Art School: why do we create art?

Art print by Jesse Petersen, available here. Courtesy of the artist.

I just finished presenting at the Sedona Entrepreneurial Artist Development Program (SEAD). One of my co-presenters, Jesse Petersen said: “Even if this wasn’t my job, even if I lost everything that I have now, I would always create for myself and share what I do because it is deeply meaningful and the way I process life.”

Our culture says that to do art, you have to be good at it. That’s nonsense. Art doesn’t just allow us to express emotions, ideas, and experiences, it helps us work through them.

“When I have a daily art practice and dedicate time to making art—and it doesn’t have to be good art,” continued Jesse, “I show up better for my family, friends, community, church. I used to think taking that time was selfish, but now I know that just makes me better.”

Art journal by Jesse Petersen, courtesy of the artist.

Why do we create art, according to received wisdom?

The traditional reasons for making art are:

  • Expressing thoughts, feelings, and beliefs
  • Reinforcing socially-acceptable thoughts, feelings and beliefs
  • Communicating ideas and ideals
  • Expressing beauty
  • Telling stories
  • Recording history
  • Activism
  • Creating community

But these are the reasons for which publicly-consumed art is created. What about the more hands-on, accessible, personal art? It may never have the international significance of, say, Goya’s The Third of May, 1808, but it changes countless lives.

“I used to think making art was a luxury to be done after my to-do list was done, now I realize it’s the first thing I should do,” said Jesse.

Two of Jesse’s art-journaling students attended the SEAD program, and both were motivated to stick around after the program ended. Long after everyone else had left, the three of them sat in the empty theater, making art together. Leslie Barrett and Sharon Gilham are what we call emerging artists, which means they’re trying to ruin a perfectly good hobby by selling their work.

Artwork by Jesse Petersen, courtesy of the artist.

“I started to do more art when my kids moved out of the house,” Leslie told me. “I had more time. I started to think about how much I liked art in the past. I was very curious about watercolor, mixed media, and books. I work in technology, so it’s nice to come home, relax, and do something for myself.”

“I’ve been creative my whole life but never really trusted I was any good at it,” Sharon said. She works in the hospitality industry, which is a tough fit because she’s essentially introverted. “Art calms me down after a long day at work.

“There are so many weird things in my head that I don’t know how to communicate with words, so this is an outlet for me. I have always been someone a little more guarded about sharing my emotions, and I try to put them into my art. I start with a feeling, a thought, or a color palette, and start the creation from that. It’s almost purely the emotion going into the piece.”

Art journal by Jesse Petersen, courtesy of the artist.

Both Sharon and Leslie took the SEAD workshop because they have seen a growing interest in their work from prospective buyers. They’re thinking about potential post-retirement careers. However, it’s clear from their conversation that they love the act of creation. As Leslie said, “I don’t try to make anything I don’t have a personal connection to.”

I can’t see why everyone doesn’t want a piece of that. Art doesn’t have to mean painting or sculpture. It could be printing, or art journaling, or photography or quilting. You really should try it.

Reserve your spot now for a workshop in 2025:

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What is art made of? Time

In Control (Grace and her Unicorn), 24X30, $3,478 framed, oil on canvas, includes shipping in continental United States.

In a tangible sense, art can be made of anything. Traditionally, it’s created with materials like paint, canvas, clay, metal, wood, and stone. But modern and contemporary artists push boundaries by incorporating unconventional materials like digital pixels, found objects, sound, light, living organisms and waste.

But of course, that’s just the modern way of saying that art isn’t just about physical materials. It also includes the ideas, emotions, and meaning behind the work. So, in a way, art is made of both tangible things and intangible creativity.

Tilt-A-Whirl, oil on archival canvasboard, $869 framed includes shipping and handling in continental US.

What is art made of? How about time?

Art takes time. It therefore contains time. In fact, you could argue that, above anything else, art is time.

Creation. Yes, there is art that takes three minutes to dash off, but that’s not that common. Far more frequently, art takes years to realize. And even those three-minute sketches rest on a history of other sketches, all of which telescope into that one final work.

“How long did that take to paint?” we’re asked. We answer, “four hours, plus the fifty years I’ve been practicing my craft.” For the artist, all the effort of creation coalesces into their most recent work.

Time as a medium. Many art forms, like performance art, film and music, unfold over time. These temporal arts could not exist without time itself.

Ravenous Wolves, oil on canvas, 24X30, $3,478.00 framed includes shipping and handling in continental US.

Time as transformation. Down the street from me is a statue of Rockport’s most famous citizen, Andre the Seal. A few years ago, his marble nose cracked, necessitating some plastic surgery. Paintings crack, sculptures erode, and even digital art is lost as technology shifts. Nothing lasts forever, at least in the form in which it was created.

Time as context. Shakespeare and John Donne may be responsible for much of modern English, but their writing is not always easy on the modern ear. The same is true of memento mori or any other artform resting on symbolism. Can you decipher the objects in Napoleon I on his Imperial Throne by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres? Meaning changes constantly, and culture discards ideas that are no longer relevant.

The time we put into viewing or listening to the art. I spent a long time with the Wilton Diptych at the National Gallery in London, with its White Hart badges and strange prefiguration of Shakespeare’s Richard II:

The breath of worldly men cannot depose
The deputy elected by the Lord:
For every man that Bolingbroke hath press’d
To lift shrewd steel against our golden crown,
God for his Richard hath in heavenly pay
A glorious angel: then, if angels fight,
Weak men must fall, for heaven still guards the right.

Yet I don’t remember anything about George Stubbs’ Whistlejacket. It is in the same museum and is a painting I love, but I was tired when I got to it. The time we put into a painting influences what we take out of it.

Grain elevators, Buffalo, NY, 18X24 in a handmade cherry frame. $2318 includes shipping in continental US.

Time and the narrative painting. The challenge of the narrative painting is to tell a story in a snapshot. When we’ve painted them, we’ve frozen time.

Reserve your spot now for a workshop in 2025:

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Graffiti and creative expression

The Late Bus, oil on archival canvasboard, 6X8, $435.00 framed, includes shipping and handling in continental US.

My daughter was in Los Angeles last week. Like so many people who visit the City of Angels, she was struck by the sheer volume of graffiti. Graffiti looks different in different places; it’s not common where I live, but my brother in San Diego regularly cleaned it from the apartment complex he managed.

There are Roman examples of graffiti from 2500 years ago, mostly of the sexual or scatological variety, although the Kilroy was here kind also popped up regularly. If you’re willing to argue that art without words is also graffiti, it’s far older than written language: as old as the oldest cave art.

People do graffiti for lots of reasons, including a desire to mark territory, to shock, to rebel, or to state membership in a group. Then there’s the simple desire to create beauty. I come down firmly on the ‘graffiti is vandalism’ side, but my Australian cousin’s florist shop was proudly decked out in graffiti.

Possum, 6X8, oil on archival canvasboard, $435 includes shipping in continental US.

I think graffiti on a bridge overpass is annoying, but the Viking mercenary runic inscription in the Hagia Sofia is awe-inspiring. Yes, I’m being hypocritical, but ask me again in a thousand years.

There is a story—perhaps apocryphal—that an American reporter discovered this inscription on the wall of a Verdun fortress in 1945:

Austin White–Chicago, Ill.–1918
Austin White–Chicago, Ill.–1945
This is the last time I want to write my name here.

If so, nothing could have expressed war-weariness better.

Downpour, 6X8, oil on archival canvasboard, $348 includes shipping and handling in continental US

Creative expression

Spray paint hit the American market in the 1950s but it wasn’t until the late 1970s that a product specifically designed for graffiti was introduced. America’s youth never looked back. Graffiti was influenced by nascent hip-hop culture. From there it was only a hop, skip and a jump to graffiti’s commercialization. Banksy (whoever he really is) is now a graffiti-millionaire, and global brands use graffiti for marketing. So much for rebellion.

Although there are times when middle-class kids make feints at being graffiti artists, it’s more commonly seen in poorer neighborhoods. There’s always been a gap in lower-income education in the arts, and No Child Left Behind made it worse. Where do you go if you haven’t had the opportunity to learn traditional art? Even I can be seduced by my local hardware store’s paint department, and I have a whole studio of materials to pick from.

That graffiti is a learned art can be read from its stylistic disciplines. There are wildstyle, bubble (bloated), tag, 3D, stencil, streetart, character and many more. Kids are not learning them in art class, but they are demonstrating that the human mind longs for beauty and will work hard at developing the chops to create it. If creative expression is shut down in traditional channels, it will find its way in train yards, empty factories, bus depots, and water towers.

Regrowth and regeneration (Borrow Pit #4), 6X8, oil on archival canvasboard, $348 includes shipping and handling in continental US.

Reserve your spot now for a workshop in 2025:

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Monday Morning Art School: how can I sell my art?

Spring Greens, 8X10, oil on archival canvasboard, $652 framed includes shipping and handling in continental US.

One of the questions I’m asked most frequently is, how can I sell my art? The answer is different for each person, but it always requires a shift in outlook. We artists create work that’s specifically from our mindset. However, selling art is no different from any other sales. It’s not about us, but about the customer.

Sales is about showing how our product effectively addresses our customer’s needs. It means building a relationship with the customer and addressing his or her concerns. That two-way communication may be transient or evolve over a long period of time. 

Your customer may want to beautify a space, prove something to himself or others, engage with the artwork on an intellectual level, or even just match his wallpaper. All are perfectly valid reasons to buy a painting.

Early Morning at Moon Lake, 6X8, oil on archival canvasboard, $348 includes shipping and handling in continental US.

Do you have a strong, consistent body of work?

Your work should be constantly evolving; if not, you’re probably just parodying yourself. Still, you should have a strong, consistent line of development. Somewhere online you should have a portfolio showcasing your best work. This presence needn’t be elaborate or expensive; a free blog host might be sufficient if you’re just starting out. It shouldn’t be scattershot—nobody wants to see your poetry, hand-embroidery, pottery and recipes if you’re trying to sell paintings.

Your website should have a reasonably complete bio and you should have a brief artist’s statement available. You will be asked for it.

Pensive 8X10, oil on archival canvasboard, $522 includes shipping and handling in continental US.

Selling in bricks and mortar galleries and stores

Are galleries dead? Certainly not, although they’ve drifted sideways in the past few years. I particularly like well-run cooperative galleries.

The day of cold-calling with a portfolio under your arm is (thank goodness) over. Start by thoroughly researching the gallery’s current exhibitions and artists, including visiting if possible. The gallery’s website may have explicit application instructions, which simplify matters. If not, prepare a cover letter, an artist statement, and a portfolio (with links to the work online and to your social media), and send them by email.  If you don’t hear back, follow up by phone after a reasonable time has elapsed.

But coffee shops, restaurants, and offices may actually sell more work, and often charge no commission at all. Besides my own gallery, I have work in a dental office and a realtor’s office; the realtor has used my work to stage property. The more my work is seen, the higher my profile.

Selling online

If I were starting today, I’d use FASO; Eric Jacobsen, Poppy Balser, and many of my other friends are on it. It’s commerce-enabled and will scale up as you grow. I have known artists who’ve auctioned their work on eBay, but I think that needs a high profile to start with.

Spring Allee, oil on archival canvasboard, 14X18, $1594.00 framed includes shipping and handling in continental US.

Social Media

Regardless of how you plan to sell, you’ll need to make a truce with social media. I like LinkedIn and Instagram best right now, followed by Facebook, but I do post on all available social media several times a week.

This is a constantly-shifting landscape, so keep your options open. My student and friend Cheryl Shanahan is fantastic at witty reels, and I want to be more like her. Since we’re apparently keeping TikTok, it’s time to loosen up that part of my brain.

Art fairs

I’ve done art fairs from St. Louis, MO to New York City. They’re a lot of work setting up and tearing down, so I’ve aged out of them. Their great advantage is that once you’ve paid the booth fee (which can be steep) the profits are all yours.

If you do them, diversify your merchandise. For painters, that means offering prints of your work along with originals. Many people attending these events don’t really want to spend $2000 on original art, but they will spring for a nice print.

(I’m thinking about these things because I leave on Friday to present at the Sedona Entrepreneurial Artist Development Program. After that, I’m teaching a workshop, below. There are still some openings, if you’d like to join me.)

Reserve your spot now for a workshop in 2025:

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Deskilling art

“Pull up your Big Girl Panties,” 6X8, oil on archival canvasboard, $435.

A lot of my sentences these days start, “When I was a child…” Here’s one: when I was a child, most people had basic sewing skills. They were so fundamental that the government issued free instructional pamphlets to encourage people to sew more. The same was true of canning, gardening, and appliance repair.

Today, why fix or make it when you can buy it for less? Sewing has gone the way of the buggy whip, and unless something radically changes in the world economy, sewing has become a hobby.

Technology hasn’t replaced work; here in the US, those of us who work are putting in the same basic workweek as our grandparents did in 1940. But what we do in that time is very different.

Toy Reindeer with double rainbow, oil on archival canvasboard, 6X8, $435 framed, includes shipping in continental US.

Deskilling or changing?

The extended-play version of my wedding album was shot on just a few rolls of film. The photographer was extremely skilled at metering and setting exposures. Today’s typical wedding photographers shoot hundreds of pictures, focusing much more on candid shots. The camera does the technical work and the difference between any two shots in a sequence will be mostly chance.

That doesn’t mean a trained monkey can take your wedding pictures. There remain the questions of composition, visual storytelling and context. None of those can be automated and they certainly can’t be added after the fact.

Baby Monkey Riding on a Pig, oil on archival canvasboard, $435.

Deskilling art

A few years ago, most AI-generated images were laughable. They have gotten frighteningly better; there are times when only the context tells us they’re impossible (like these Trump-Biden AI-generated ‘buddy’ pictures). The only thing standing between us and a complete breakdown of factual verification is the integrity of our news sources. Ouch.

I recently wrote a lesson about still life and was looking for an example in hyperrealism. Despite having decades of experience looking at and analyzing art, I could not tell from online images if what I was seeing was painted by human hands or was computer-generated. That means that the only thing the hyperrealist painter has is his or her brush strokes, and I am not certain that AI isn’t coming for those, too.

Hyperrealism isn’t, of course, photorealism—it’s as much an edited form of reality as impressionism. But it’s easier to fake with a computer.

Hiking, 6X8, oil on archival canvasboard, $435 includes shipping in continental US.

What this means for the rest of us

Most of us are not interested in the absolute bell-like clarity of hyperrealism. That gives us a little breathing room, but it still leaves the question of why we’re making art, and how we can do it in a way that says more than AI will.

I wrote Monday’s post about funny paintings in part because for the last month or so I’ve been seeing variations on a worn-out theme. These are not-particularly well-painted portraits of politicians spattered with verbiage. Their faces being well-known and the words being obvious, I think this would be very easy for AI to dupe. However, one thing AI seems incapable of doing is writing good jokes.

It’s harder to be funny than to be didactic. It’s harder to be winsome than to be angry. It’s harder to be subtle than to hit the viewer over the head with a sledgehammer. And, yes, it’s harder to think about beauty and logic and proportion than about dogma. So, if you’re looking for job security in the age of deskilling art, be smarter than your average AI image generator.

Reserve your spot now for a workshop in 2025:

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Monday Morning Art School: the secret to artistic immortality is… fart jokes?

Tin Foil Hat, 6X8, oil on archival canvasboard, $435 includes shipping in continental US.

He-gassen is a subject first seen at the end of the Heian Period in Japanese art. That’s roughly equivalent to the High Middle Ages in western art, so that’s very old indeed.

He-gassen (‘Fart competitions’) or Hōhi-gassen (‘Fart fight’) could just as easily be translated as the art of the fart.

Detail from He-gassen, unknown artist, Edo period.

The Edo period was a time of economic growth, political stability, and a flowering of Japanese art. To understand the culture of the time, think of Hokusai’s The Great Wave off Kanagawa. This Edo-period He-gassen scroll is by an unknown artist, but he was clearly well-trained.

This was also an isolationist time in Japanese history, so in addition to the fart jokes, there are westerners being blown home on thunderous gales of gas. There is nothing new under the sun, and that includes political satire.

Four great painters who were also funny

A country brawl, 1610, Pieter Brueghel the Younger, courtesy Christies.

It couldn’t have been easy being Pieter Brueghel the Younger. His father was one of the greatest painters in western history, and Dad died when Junior was just five years old. The son was never the painter his father was, but what connects the two is their earthy, pointed sense of humor.

The brawlers in Brueghel the Younger’s 1610 painting, above, are playing for keeps—nunchuks, a pitchfork, a jug to the head. I can’t decide if the woman on the right is dead or just dead drunk. This is all a bit rich for us lily-livered poltroons of the 21st century; we’d have never survived. We get the moral message about fighting loud and clear, but we’re also allowed a laugh at how ridiculous they look.

The five senses: Smell, 1637, Jan Miense Molenaer, courtesy the Mauritshuis.

Jan Miense Molenaer was a Dutch Golden Age painter who is somewhat less well-known today than his wife, Judith Leyster. His oeuvre was typical for the times: allegory, religion, cozy domestic scenes. He is thought to have studied with Frans Hals and it shows in his quick, easy brushwork. But Smell is not something just anyone would paint. It’s ripe; a subject that resonates with anyone who’s ever changed a diaper.

Venus Rising From the Sea – A Deception, c 1822, Raphaelle Peale, courtesy Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art

Raphaelle Peale’s Venus Rising From the Sea isn’t making fun of his subject, but of the Puritanical mores of his audience. His twist is that Venus is concealed not with a curtain, but with a pocket handkerchief. His hypothetical, hypocritical viewer could just peep around the side and get his prohibited eyeful.

L A Ring by his Fallen Easel, 1883, Hans Andersen Brendekilde, Det Nationalhistoriske Museum

Hans Andersen Brendekilde was a Dane who was raised in poverty. His social realism painting did much to raise the consciousness of Danes towards the rural poor of their own country. But that is not what strikes you in this portrait of his friend Laurits Andersen Ring. It is, of course, the dratted downed easel, which every plein air painter has suffered at least once. It’s how I learned to swear.

Let’s quit taking ourselves so seriously  

I once showed something I thought was very deep to my high school art teacher. “It’s sophomoric,” she said. I scan a lot of art groups and am daily reminded that there’s a fine line between sincerely-held opinions and mawkishness. We should have beliefs, but nobody can survive on a steady diet of drama. In almost all situations, we need humor. (Where humor fails, as in world war, a high degree of moral intelligence is called for; see Käthe Kollwitz or Francisco Goya.)

Laughing gives us a sense of perspective. It helps us accept our flaws, cope with stress, deal with awkward situations, and makes us more resilient. It puts us in a better mood, which in turn makes us more even-tempered people and painters.

Can you paint something funny this week?

Reserve your spot now for a workshop in 2025:

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Business for artists and painting in Sedona

Shadow Fingers, 11X14, oil on Baltic birch, $869 includes shipping and handling in continental United States.

First, the business

My friend Dennis used to tell me, “I’m an accountant with the soul of an artist.” That’s all very well, I’d counter, but every successful artist also needs the mind of an accountant. (Luckily, I never believed in that now-discredited left-brain, right-brain malarkey.)

On March 8-9, I’ll be presenting at the first Sedona Entrepreneurial Artist Development Program. This is open to Arizona residents aged 18 and over. The two-day intensive covers a range of topics from financial management and marketing to crafting an artist statement, developing work samples and selling artwork online. My part will be accounting for artists, and I plan to make it exciting.

Even if you hire someone to do your taxes, you still need to understand what expenses to record and what don’t matter. You need to be able to track your inventory, and, if you teach or run a gallery, how to protect yourself against liability.

Country path, 14X18, oil on archival canvasboard, $1,275 includes shipping and handling in continental US.

Painting in Sedona

Immediately following the Entrepreneurial program, I’m offering Canyon Color for the Painter from March 10-14. There are still a few seats left.

I’ve taught and painted in Sedona for several years and know great places for morning light, evening light, and all the light in between. We’ll meet on location at 9 AM, work steadily until 4, and then you’ll have the evening to hike, take one of the famous Pink Jeep tours, or try one of Sedona’s many fine restaurants. If the weather is poor—and it almost never is—we can meet in a classroom at the Sedona Arts Center (SAC).

Dawn on the Upper Red Rock Loop Road, 20X24, oil on canvas, $2,318 includes shipping and handling in continental United States.

The top five things I love about painting in Sedona

  1. The weather—there is a scene in PG Wodehouse’s Quick Service where the old prizefighter Steptoe is trying to convince his wife to give up on Merry Olde England. “What you want wasting your time in this darned place beats me. Nobody but stiffs for miles around. And look what happens today. You give this lawn party, and what do you get? Cloudbursts and thunderstorms. Where’s the sense in sticking around in a climate like this?”

    He was urging her back to California, but in Sedona it’s also almost always fine. After this winter, we deserve fine.

  2. The scenery—Sedona combines some very brilliant colors: the reds of Bell and Cathedral Rock, the lush greens of Oak Creek Canyon, the sere yellows of the chaparral, and the deep blue of the sky. Because it’s seldom overcast, shadows jump and the light shimmers. It’s just magical.

  3. The people—I’ve known Julie Richard, the executive director of SAC, for a decade. It’s the same with Ed Buonvecchio, my workshop monitor. The rest of the support staff, including Bernadette Carroll and JD Jensen (with whom you’ll have the most contact), are kind and terrifically helpful.

  4. The hiking—There are 400 miles of hiking trails in the Red Rock Ranger District on the Coconino National Forest. Then there are state and city parks. Sedona is a hiker’s paradise, and I swear Julie Richard can tell you about every single trail.

  5. The funny things that always seem to happen to me there—Painting in Sedona has led to extremely funny interactions between the punters and me. I don’t think that’s from ley lines and vortexes, but because in the grand scheme of things, plein air painters are just one more dot on the overwhelming landscape. Come prepared to smile.
Hail on the Cockscomb Formation, oil on Baltic Birch, $522 includes shipping and handling in continental United States.

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