Author: Carol L. Douglas

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Why does any bird sing?

The above cartoon has been making the rounds among my musician friends this week, and for good reason.
Maya Angelou said the caged bird sings for freedom, but in fact birds—caged or free—sing because their songs are hardwired into them. The mother of a young performer said to me recently, “She has always been a singer. When she was a little girl, I would hear her singing while she played.” Likewise, my mother would tell you that I have had a pencil in my hand since I was old enough to sit up.
But in truth, almost all children sing, dance and draw. It seems to be hardwired into them the same way singing is hardwired into songbirds. Non-verbal self-expression is natural to them, and they often use art in ways that amaze adults. But somehow most children learn to stop making art as they enter adolescence.
Perhaps this is because verbal and spatial reasoning has finally caught up with their expressive skill. But there will be the occasional kid who defies social pressure and continues to produce art; to me, that is the very definition of talent and the best indicator of long-term success in visual arts. That obsession is far more important than whether he or she can render a face or a horse according to the rules set down by their art teachers.
Even among those who remain obsessed with making art, a different and more insidious joy-killer happens when art stops being an avocation and becomes a vocation. That is the need to measure success in terms of money or fame, rather than intent or that far more subjective issue, quality. To me, this is the most paralyzing problem I face as a painter.
Painting is a form of communication, and hits on a website, sales, and shows are the only way we can measure who is listening. There is, after all, little point in talking to oneself. But painting is a form of communication with a long window. For all I know, I may be talking to people who aren’t even born yet.

Note: my website is up, at www.watch-me-paint.com, and, yes, it has a counter.

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I’ve been looking forward to this!

My website is online as of today. It’s not a finished piece of work, and has been beset with difficulties, including a hijacked URL, but here it is:
The website has an RSS feed from this blog, so I went back and captured an image of it with this post repeating itself. Call this an inspiration from childhood, from visiting Lucas Samaras’ “Room No.2” (popularly known as the mirrored room) at the Albright-Knox and studying my endless reflections.

One of Lucas Samaras’ reflecting rooms, sans me.
The web designer isn’t totally finished, so she doesn’t want herself tagged, but she’s doing an awesome job!
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Rejuvenation

Workspace or spiritual battleground?
This weekend I spoke with a former student who is now in his fourth semester at Rhode Island School of Design. Inevitably, we discussed criticism. He made a point I’ve heard from other students: all art school criticism is fundamentally self-referential. What matters isn’t the technique, intellectual rigor or theory brought into the process, but how the work relates back to the artist.
This circular thinking came back to me forcefully this morning. For the past few weeks, our pastor (Tony Martorana at Joy Community Church) has been talking about spiritual rejuvenation. I was struck by how much modern art needs that. Truly, a valueless, concept-free, rudderless visual art world is nothing more than those dry bones Ezekiel so powerfully and movingly described.
But that’s still abstract; I wrote last week that I don’t see myself having the moral intelligence to paint the cardinal virtues. Pastor Tony used an agrarian metaphor to describe spiritual rejuvenation, to which I can easily relate. And I don’t mean to denigrate the spiritual significance of his instruction, but I can see in it a path to better work as an artist.

Rocks are annoying except in viniculture, where they end up being an important part of good wine. (But there’s such a thing as torturing a metaphor.)

The following are his bullet points:
1.       Remove the rocks. In the northeast, our fields are planted on former forests, where acidic soil caused rocks to rise to the surface. So our fields are surrounded by dry stone walls made of rocks painstakingly removed by our ancestors.

Rocks make soil hard to till and block moisture and root growth. They are not living things; they never were living things. We all have metaphorical rocks in the landscape of our painting technique. These are the internal voices that say things like, “I can’t,” “I’m a second-rate talent,” “I don’t have an MBA,” as well as the bad work habits and distractions that come from a life of working alone.

2.       Remove the stumps. These are things which once lived and which might have produced good fruit, but do so no longer. In my life, these are primarily the lessons of the dead, which were perhaps well-meant and instructive when I was fifteen but which tend to hobble me today. (That isn’t meant to denigrate the importance of those people, for in the not-too-distant future I may be a stump to that kid now at RISD.)

Then there’s pruning.
3.       Remove the weeds. In early spring, everything is covered with a green loveliness, and it’s frankly hard to tell the useful plants from the bad. Then overnight your garden is overrun with bindweed and dandelions are blowing across the lawn. I often have a hard time distinguishing between good and bad ideas, because often the bad ones are frankly more seductive. In the garden, I use my intellect and experience to determine which plants are weeds, and I pull them before they set roots. I ought to be able to do the same with my bad ideas.
4.       Plant a sufficient harvest. There are many factors which limit the harvest, but it can never be greater than that ordained by what we’ve planted. If you never work, you can’t expect to create very much of a body of work, can you? If you work sporadically, or half-heartedly, what do you expect to pull out at the harvest time? If you plant weeds, can you expect to harvest fruit?
5.       Then wait. You’re not going to harvest a crop overnight. In fact, in the world of art it is very possible that we may not live to see our harvest at all. But that doesn’t mean the harvest won’t be there.

(All the bullet points are Pastor Tony Martorana’s and were given by him as points of spiritual growth. This specific exposition and application to painting is my responsibility and I don’t mean to misquote him or twist his initial message.)

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Seven Deadly Sins

Justicia, left, and Veritas, right, by Walter Seymour Allward, c. 1920. Cast for the never-finished memorial to King Edward VII, which was interrupted by the onset of WWII, they were found buried in 1969 and installed in front of the Supreme Court of Canada in Ottawa in 1970. (Photos by Carol L. Douglas)

In reading Trollope over Christmas I was startled to realize that the Victorians thought of Purity as a virtue rather than a state. It was a trait to be nurtured, rather than preserved. In discussing this, my friend John Nicholson, pastor of Siloam Baptist Churchin Marion, Alabama, suggested that he and I each ask young people we know to name and discuss the Four Cardinal Virtues of antiquity.
The Four Cardinal Virtues originated with Plato’s Republic. Although they were amplified in turn by the Church Fathers, they are not exclusively religious, and should be attainable by all men. These virtues are Prudence, Justice, Temperance and Courage.
Tomb of Sir John Hotham, 1st Baronet, of Scorborough (died 3 January 1645), featuring the Four Cardinal Virtues and his wonderfully desiccated skeleton.
These are in contrast to the three theological virtues of 1 Corinthians 13—Faith, Hope and Charity—which are unique to the Christian moral worldview. The pairing of these sets of virtues comes down to us as the Seven Virtues, often set against the Seven Deadly Sins.
John’s informal poll was a complete bust on my end. Only one of the college-educated, church-going youngsters I asked had any clue what the Cardinal Virtues are. The exception knew the answer not because of any superior moral education, but because she is an art historian. She recognized the Four Cardinal Virtues from Giotto’s Allegories of the Vices and the Virtues in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua.
Pride, as exemplified by the building of the Tower of Babel, 1563, by Pieter Bruegel the Elder
Until the early 20th century the Four Cardinal Virtues  were commonly represented as female allegorical figures on public buildings and tombs; prior generations would have had no trouble answering John’s question.
We’re accustomed to artists of the past taking on the great questions of morality, but virtue and vice have been absent from the painter’s vernacular since the 19th century, unless they were to be dealt with ironically, surrealistically, or not at all. So imagine how intrigued I was by Jamie Wyeth’s Seven Deadly Sins at the Farnsworth Museum in Rockland, ME. I thought it brilliant at the time and have not changed my opinion.
Anger, 2008, Jamie Wyeth
We have gulls here in Rochester, and they’re noisy, nasty creatures, perfectly suited for the depiction of sin. But perhaps more important, the Seven Deadly Sins themselves—wrath, greed, sloth, pride, lust, envy, and gluttony—are all reflections of our animal state.
The question that’s turned in my mind since has been what Wyeth meant by these paintings. There’s no irony in them, but the context of his life and overall work would not lead an outside observer to believe he understands those sins in the same way I do. On the other hand, I don’t see myself having the moral intelligence to paint this subject. An interesting conundrum, indeed.
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Dissidence and the triumph of audacity

Nadia Jelassi with two of the figures from her sculpture, Celui qui n’a pas.

Until her arrest in August of last year, artist Nadia Jelassi was unknown in the West. (As of this writing, she doesn’t even have a Wikipedia entry.) She might have remained unknown, but for her arrest on August 17, 2012 in Tunis for ‘breach of the peace and moral standards.’ She faces a five-year prison term.

Tunisian women prior to the Arab Spring revolution enjoyed secular freedoms we don’t associate with an Islamic state, including access to higher education, the right to divorce, and freedom from the hijab. This was by no means feminism as Americans understand it, but it was not the locked-down oppression of benighted fundamentalism, either. Women played an unprecedented role in the protests that brought down the Tunisian government, so the rise in religious zealotry in the power vacuum that appeared after the revolution was particularly sad.
And the work as a whole.
Jelassi’s sculpture, “Celui qui n’a pas,” above, is an emotional response to the position she and other Tunisian women find themselves in. It obviously references the threat of stoning, which unfortunately makes it an implicit criticism of shariah. (Stoning is a legally-sanctioned punishment in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Sudan, Iran, Yemen, the United Arab Emirates, and some states in Nigeria.)
“Unlike what I used to do, it was not nuanced. I needed to shout, to express something raw. But I don’t think I sacrificed sculpture,” said Jelassi, who says her controversial work was a continuation of the textile portraits she had been producing.
“Celui qui n’a pas” was shown without controversy at the El Abdelleya gallery in Tunis until July 10, when one Mohamed Ali Bouazizi photographed works in the gallery that he personally considered “religiously offensive.” He took these images to a suburban mosque, where he gathered up a group to return to the gallery. This small mob was blocked by a larger one of the artists’ supporters.
Although Bouazizi attempted to foment violence against the gallery, he was not responsible for her arrest. The following day, a wave of violence sparked across Tunisia, prompting a police response and curfew. “Nobody lodged a complaint against me,” said Jelassi. “It was the State Prosecutor, the representative of the Justice Minister who opened the case.”
Jelassi’s protest was emotional and unscripted. Compare her to Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei. He has long been known in the West as a visual artist; his work has been shown and is in prestigious public collections worldwide. To westerners, his sculpture and photography are not dissident, but to Chinese eyes, his work is inherently rebellious, because he magnifies the forms and traditions of the West rather than those of China. Our first instinct is not to say, “Oh, that’s so Chinese!” but to say, “Oh, that’s so contemporary!” The refusal to conform to the ideals of the government, to put himself outside the Chinese propaganda machine, was his fundamental rebellion.
Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn, Ai Weiwei, 1995, three gelatin silver prints, each 148 × 121 cm.
But while Ai’s visual work is subtly anti-Chinese, his major protest took the form not of visual art but of intentional political theater. On January 10, 2006, he began to compose daily essays critical of the Chinese government. These rapidly attracted an international following. By mid-2009, he was being investigated by the Chinese government, and his communication with the outside world was completely suppressed in July of that year.
(As so often happens with political activism, the government’s attempts to suppress Ai’s work contributed to its success. He has been the subject of a book and a movie, and he is as visible in his absence as he was while blogging.)
Last week, I wrote about the limits of audacity as a virtue in art. Absent a message, it is nonsensical. But audacity is the necessary springboard for a genuine cri de coeur. All over the world, there are suffering people, but very few among them can use their talent to give voice to that suffering.
What a high calling that is.
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Memories of Maine…

When I was in Maine I was interviewed by a reported from the PenBay Pilot… and here is the story. I’ll be teaching workshops in this area next summer; I can’t wait to get back!

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On Art and Culture

Marc Quinn’s sculpture Alison Lapper Pregnant was the first commission for the Fourth Plinth Project in Trafalgar Square (2005-2007). It combines the best of audacity and craftsmanship.

This weekend I had the good fortune to see the great Irish-American band Solas on the second stop of their “Shamrock City” tour. Solas quarries material earlier explored by the Irish band Horslips: the Irish immigrant experience.
While Horslips were pioneering Celtic rock in the 1970s, Solas is more or less a straight-up Irish traditional band, a tradition that extends back before the mists of time. But layered on top of the music, “Shamrock City” includes a video projection in the style of Ken Burns’ “The Civil War,” which was a groundbreaking documentary released in 1990. I felt in some ways that I was in a cultural time warp.
 
On the way home, we launched into a spirited discussion in which we weighed the superior musicianship of Solas against the innovations of Horslips. Which was absolutely the “better” band? The answer, of course, is both and neither, because all such debates are ultimately pointless—both bands are poetic and moving and justified in their place in musical history.
The experience got me thinking about the ways in which art is and isn’t temporal. Is Bach any less of a genius because the Baroque was in decline at the time he was writing? Time has a way of leveling these bumps in the road. I keenly appreciate the difference between skinny jeans and parachute pants, but I’ll be darned if I can identify the difference between various phases of Regency dress. It’s of absolutely no moment to me that Bach didn’t invent the fugue—when I’m feeling fugal, he’s my go-to guy.
On the other hand, art is also nothing if not relative to its time and place. I was looking at a highly mediocre photo manipulation on Facebook yesterday. It had a middle ground of golden trees, some lavender action in the far distance, and the requisite figure on the foreground.  I said to myself: “That would make a very marketable painting.” Photoshop has, no doubt, affected the way we paint.
There is nothing new in technology driving art. The introduction of new pigments in the 19th century drove French impressionism and indeed made alla prima painting possible. But that is a matter of materials, not outlook. What has changed with the recent acceleration of interactive media is how viewers perceive the world.
We are all familiar with the idea that photography liberates the visual artist from the need for representation. We’re less easy with the idea that it also creates other obligations. What magic can painting create to compete with Peter Jackson’s “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy?
At first glance, heeding the siren call of mass media seems like inspiration, but it stops the artist from looking for their internal voice. Despite any other consideration, that internal voice must be individual; it must have the attitude of “f— it all,” which is the polar opposite of whatever mass media is driving toward. In fact, that inner “f— you” is the most important tool an artist has.
We live in one of the most beautifully-designed worlds in history, certainly the best-designed period in my lifetime. One need look no further than modern cars on the highway. With the exception of the Nissan Juke, cars are far more beautiful than they’ve ever been before. Modern architecture is beautiful, modern highways are lovely, and if I compare the humble disposable pen of today to that of my youth, I’m practically transported.
Part of the improvement is in materials, part is because we’ve shaken off the thrall of modernism and are again paying attention to history, and part of it is computer design. Part of it may also be a first glimmer of a change in attitudes about art—the end of the cult of genius.
Not comfortable? You’re not smart enough!
Frank Lloyd Wright—peace be upon him—was unquestionably a 20th century genius. In fact, he was such a genius that all minor matters such as livability, waterproof roofs, etc., were subservient to his brilliance. Heaven help you if you found his interiors damp, dark, or uncomfortable, or couldn’t read a trashy novel seated in one of the chairs you were required to keep in situ. Elevate your thinking!
However, nobody could accuse him of ignoring craftsmanship, which sets him apart from many other geniuses. In visual arts for the last century, audacity has generally been revered above craftsmanship.
This semester, my Sandy was required to watch a movie in her graduate-level Art Theory and Criticism class. I repeat her description, because I cannot find the actual video without wading through a lagoon of porn: “Naked men smeared bright red lipstick slowly, erotically, all over the lower half of their faces, then danced naked. In the next scene, they were in a pile, naked. Then one man grabbed another’s penis and flung it.”*
The point of showing this movie in an art theory class was that audacity quickly pales. One must constantly accelerate the offensiveness of the material to engage the viewer. But where is craftsmanship in this? If American teens can effortlessly film their own naked bodies with their phones, how can it be a question of skill?
Jake and Dinos Chapman’s Turner Prize-winning sculpture, entitled Death (2003). Yes, they’re audacious,
but it makes me think that if you’ve seen sex once, you’ve seen it a thousand times.
There was a proverb that still had some currency when I was young: “He that touches pitch shall be defiled.” This proverb presumed that purity is a value worth preserving. A Victorian could not have seen that video without feeling that he had “touched pitch,” but I can’t imagine an American born after 1960 who has any clue what that proverb means. But this too—as every paradigm ever has—shall pass.
So how does one move past audacity? Marc Quinn’s “Alison Lapper Pregnant” to me is the apotheosis of the modern ideal. The model is obviously handicapped, suffering from a congenital disorder that left her without arms and with truncated legs. She was raised in an institution. This is, frankly a far more brutal reality than any mincing, lipstick-wearing penis-slappers could ever attain. And the sculpture itself—carved from Carrara marble, is technically beautiful.
*You try searching for this on the net!
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A paean to painting with a 2” sash brush

As in all painting, the quality
of the brush matters. And, no,
this isn’t a 2″ sash brush.

Our Christmastide project was to rebuild and refinish our kitchen cabinets and rehang the doors, a task that has stubbornly remained undone for nine years. As with all such tasks, it’s taken longer than I budgeted, the unconscious expectation of which is why I let it ride that long in the first place.
My studio, overrun (these are the insides of the doors).
I like applying finishes, whether it’s on woodwork or painting on a canvas. The actual process is the same—you start with a sticky, gelatinous fluid, and your object is to overcome its innate desire to drip, to puddle, to build up in ridges, to wick where it isn’t wanted, to separate into its constituent parts—in short, you lay it down as elegantly and economically as is possible, in the places you planned for it to go.
Painting on a canvas and painting in a room are both essays in trompe-l’œil, whether it’s a question of creating a face or a forest on linen, or fooling the eye with putty and painter’s caulk.
And, regardless, you still have to clean the brush.
Top cabinets, sans doors. Still more
to do on the window frame.
It’s no accident that one of the most skilled landscape painters I know—Brad Marshall—earns his daily crust as a sign-painter (featured here, in the New York Times). It’s no surprise that the best painters in my household are Sandy, Mary and me, because we’re the three most likely to be found painting on canvases. You develop a steady hand from using it.
This kitchen has the original cabinets from 1928, and a soda-fountain-style banquette, and the game is to update them wittily without overriding them stylistically. That means respecting their weird little corners and worn hardware. Of course this has been far more work than tearing them out and replacing them would ever have been, but that wouldn’t have been very respectful of the house. They were never intended to be unpainted, but after 90 years of repainting, they required stripping, and the birch-and-poplar cabinetry is finish-grade by modern standards, so I decided to stain the upper cabinets and all the doors and paint the bottom ones, which were originally built from a lower grade of pine (and have been substantially rebuilt by my engineer spouse).

Meanwhile, my current landscape languishes on its easel. I can’t get to it past all these doors.

Bottom cabinet, with a drawer inserted
(sans hardware) for illustration purposes.
The dog food is real.
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Mind control; thought control

A very typical boy illustration of a “smoking gun,” albeit better executed than most.
From the sketchbook of one of my former students.

I’m particularly fond of teenagers and especially that creature-in-crisis, the teenage boy. I’m currently the proud owner of a 16-year-old model, and I’ve taught others in my studio. And of course you know that I’ve been assiduous in telling my students to draw, draw, draw—to draw in class, to draw on the bus, to draw on dates. I don’t care what they draw; I don’t care where they draw; I just want them to draw.

So imagine my shock and dismay when I read in Salonthat a 16-year-old high school student in Egg Harbor City, NJ, was arrested after doodling in his notebook. The boy drew what has been variously described as either weapons or a flamethrower hand (which is the second most-common trope among teen boy artists, after guns).
Another drawing, same kid.
Having clearly never before seen a teenage boy, a staffer called the local cops, who—instead of rolling their eyes—searched both the school and the kid’s home with sniffer dogs. There they found chemicals which when combined could create an explosion, and pieces of electronics which when rebuilt could have been used to make detonators.
Boys of that age live in a
comic-book universe.
(I am glad they didn’t stop by my house, since they would have found electronic parts and chemicals strewn all over the kitchen, this being our week to refinish the kitchen cabinets and repair the light fixtures.)
This would all be the makings of a ridiculous story, except that the boy was sent to juvenile detention while the so-called crime was investigated.
(Read more here, here, here, and here.)

I’m not much of a believer in gender differences, but having taught a lot of teenagers to draw and paint, I know there are distinct differences in what they draw when they’re not being ordered around by the likes of me. Teen girls draw archetypal faces and bodies (often in Regency clothes). Teen boys draw weapons and fight scenes. This is universal, and I’m shocked that anyone working with kids doesn’t know this.
Last year I had a sweet kid in my studio, SH, who has graciously allowed me to share some of the gun doodles from his sketchbook. SH is every mother’s dream kid—handsome, kind to others, involved in extracurricular activities, a competitive swimmer, camp counselor, and having excellent manners. But when he was bored, he drew guns—just like every other boy I’ve ever known.
This is a typical girl drawing of the same age, again better executed than most.
By my daughter.
Drawing is a form of thinking as well as communicating, and in the hands of most people is primarily therapeutic and cathartic, rather than descriptive. A kid who draws a flamethrower is dealing with the stress of sexuality in a time-honored manner. A kid who draws a monster clawing off Mrs. Addlepate’s face has in fact found an excellent way of dealing with the stress of Mrs. Addlepate’s inanities. On the other hand, the kid who is prohibited from expressing his frustration, his zeal, his intelligence, his adolescent hormones and his pain is a kid who’s more likely to quite literally “go ballistic.”
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A brief foray into indirect painting

“Adirondack autumn grove,” 12X16, oil on canvasboard, 2012
(please excuse the reflections; my camera isn’t back yet)
I had a few minutes in my studio the other day and was contemplating some “fails” from the field—plein air paintings that didn’t really work. Now, I have stacks of these, and they don’t bother me in the least… they are the pictorial record of experiences and impressions, rather than finished paintings. But occasionally I find one I want to touch up.
Just as it came from the field.
This one was done in the company of Marilyn Fairman last autumn, and while I liked the overall composition, the structure somehow got lost in the moment (it happens).
With changes marked out.
I decided to seek and restate the darks using a transparent glaze. I first learned to paint indirectly— using many thin layers of paint and medium to achieve one’s desired visual effects—and it’s a technique I generally reject in my dotage. Nevertheless, there are times when such indirect painting is the fastest way to fix a painting. This is almost always when the problem area has to go darker; although one can glaze with zinc white, it’s usually just easier to repaint the offending passages with your usual muck.

As often as I say I don’t make up my own medium, sometimes I do…
this time with a small amount of paraffin wax added to kill the gloss.

I’ve been studying the Maine seascapes of Winslow Homer, in particular his use of the dark diagonal, and it seemed it would be just the thing to fix this painting. After noting the passage I wished to make darker, I mixed a palette of three transparent pigments: Indian yellow, transparent earth red, and dioxazine purple. With these I was able to quickly make the shadows cool and the highlights warm.

Transparent glazing colors–Indian yellow, transparent red oxide, dioxazine purple .
The whole repair took less than five minutes. Now, I don’t know if this qualifies any longer as a “plein air” painting, since I adjusted the values in the studio. Nor do I care. The issue is whether it satisfies the viewer, and I’d say it is now closer than it was on that lovely autumn day.
Merry Christmas to all my dear friends!