calling Archives | Carol L. Douglas

April 1, 2022

Growth and change

How does one find one’s purpose as an artist? Should we build that into how we think about our work?

Ravening Wolves, 24X30, oil on canvas, is as close as I get to didacticism these days.

“How have you grown as a painter in the last ten years?” a student asked me.

My drawing and brushwork aren’t much different, but my color choices have certainly changed, as has my ability to relax into abstraction. That doesn’t seem like much growth for a decade’s work.

In intangible ways, however, I’ve changed a lot—I’m far less anxious about the outcome, and less didactic in my subject matter. I’ll never focus on figure as I was doing a decade ago. Although I’m proud of the work I did about women’s issues, I’ll never paint that subject again. Which reminds me: this is the last weekend you’ll see Censored and Poetic at the Rye Arts Center; it ends Saturday night.

Main Street, Owl’s Head, 16X20, oil on archival gessoboard

Ten years ago, I was still wrestling with the legitimacy of my calling. Those of you who were raised thinking that art wasn’t a ‘real’ career understand that. Today, I barely remember the question. I’m an artist because it’s all I know how to do.

Which leads me to the second question I received this week: “How does one find purpose? How have artists done it over time? Should we build that into how we think about our work?

“I see people at figure sessions banging out the exact same thing over and over. I get the impression, from talking to them, that they have been doing that, or variations of that, for years on end. And they aren’t that good. Why do these people show up? Something to do?”

Spring Greens, 8×10, oil on canvasboard

I’m the last person to denigrate regular practice, and figure is one area where that is particularly important. If I had the time right now, I’d go to my local life drawing class myself. It’s good exercise and I like the people who attend.

But I have known people who never progress past that. They were taking classes 25 years ago and are still doing that today. Some are stuck because they have day jobs. Some aren’t that skilled but enjoy the process. Some are excellent painters, but uninterested in making it a career. Amateur status is nothing to be sneezed at.

I’ve also had students who’ve just gone through a major trauma—an unwanted divorce or job separation. They were floundering and it gave them an anchor. Creativity is cheaper than therapy and for many it serves as well. When they worked out their next step, they moved on from art.

Midnight at the Wood Lot, 12X16, oil on canvasboard

But there are always that few who want to make art their life’s work. For them, the question of artistic purpose is critical. It’s inextricably bound up in one’s life purpose. Your work ought to be an expression of your thoughts or feelings, or it’s meaningless.

When I was younger, I thought that my purpose was didactic. Today, I’d be hard-pressed to put my mission statement into words, but it has something to do with glorifying Creation and helping people feel connected to it. That’s tied to my faith, but I don’t feel a need to preach through my paintings.

That, too, may change as I get older. One’s mission and calling in life is fluid. The important thing is to have the tools at our disposal to answer whatever comes up. And that’s where all those weeks and years in art class come in.

July 27, 2018

Simple Gifts

The world still has a place for exceptionalism; the young person’s first job is to recognize his own unique gifts.

Full Stop, by Carol L. Douglas

I have a friend who has a warm, light, perfectly-feminine speaking voice. However, she sings with the basses in her church. There are women who have naturally deep voices; they’re contraltos. I express my skepticism that she is one. The true contralto voice is a matter of where the timbre and power lie, not what notes the untrained voice finds comfortable.

Recently, she spent a Sunday evening with her Amish neighbors, singing. People called out hymns and then were expected to lead their selections. “Croaking” was the word she used to describe her star turn. That, I tell her, is because she’s not singing in her true voice.

It’s a great metaphor for doing the wrong thing and expecting good results. As long as she sings in the bottom of her range, she’s going to sound like a strangled frog.

Little Giant, Carol L. Douglas, courtesy Camden Falls Gallery

We’re very blessed to live in the time and place we do. My mother, the daughter of immigrants, once said, “I never had time for self-actualization.” She wasn’t kidding. She worked like a dray-horse from her sixteenth birthday on. It’s no surprise that I was discouraged from going to art school. To children of the Depression, that seemed very flighty.

Young people often ask, “How did you become an artist?” I was one of those kids born with a pencil in my hand, but that wasn’t enough. I was painting in oils before I reached my teens (thanks to my father) but that wasn’t enough, either. I worked in other fields for several decades, drawing or painting in my few private moments. It wasn’t until my fourth kid was born that I had the courage to step into my calling.

Headlamps, Carol L. Douglas

It wasn’t my epiphany at all. My husband had a far clearer understanding of how I was “singing bass” when I’m a natural soprano. He pushed me in the direction of painting, and then supported me when I flitted off to New York City and the Art Students League to learn to do it properly.

Do I regret those years doing other work? Not hardly. For one thing, that’s how I learned the craft of writing. Working a day job also put me firmly on the side of the doers rather than the dreamers. That profoundly shaped my view of art.

American Eagle in Drydock, courtesy of Camden Falls Gallery.

Young people ask these questions because they’re struggling to figure out their own places in the world. They’re often trying to figure out how to make a living off the beaten path. I can only tell them my own story and then counsel them to dig down to their primary gifts—the ability to teach, to tell stories, to think clearly, to lead, to work with their hands, to serve, or to create. The world still has many places for unique and exceptional people; their problem is to understand their own gifts and how to use them in the service of others.

I’ve got one more workshop available this summer. Join me for Sea and Sky at Schoodic, August 5-10. We’re strictly limited to twelve, but there are still seats open.

January 12, 2017

In search of an imaginary boat

“Swells,” by Carol L. Douglas

Yesterday a visitor to my studio told me about recently purchasing her first piece of artwork, a print by University of Maine’s own Karen Adrienne. My friend had sold some possessions to pay for it, trading unwanted treasures for something she really loved. The look on her face as she told me this was radiant joy.

Just the day before, my piano tuner had, coincidentally, told me about the first piece of art he’d purchased. As he described this photograph, his face was lit by the same expression of joy. Both works were, to their new owners, highly prized and personally transformative.

We all wrestle with questions of calling. Artists, in particular, can have a hard time justifying their careers to others. We seldom see the impact of our work on the people who receive it. I’m grateful for that rare glimpse.

I’d never intended to finish the painting above. It was badly drawn and the composition—two crossing boats—seemed static. I came home from the harbor and threw it on my slush pile to be ignored. Someday my kids can shingle a house with that slush pile, but in the meantime, a visitor saw this painting, liked it, and asked me to finish it.

I can’t tell you why that happens, but it happens enough for me to say with some certainty that artists are frequently the worst judges of our own work.

Now I had a badly-drawn boat and absolutely no reference photos. (It’s a lot harder to substitute boats than it is to substitute roses or trees.) After fiddling for a while, I decided to add swells. That rectified some of the twist in the hull, and I could figure out the rest.

Working without a clear drawing is a sure-fire route to muddy color. However, I do occasionally like puddling around totally in my own imagination. I don’t think I’m done, but I’m going to let it rest a few days.

Basalt below West Quoddy Light in Lubec. These are either grey rocks or weathered basalt, depending on how much attention you’re paying.

Painting landscape without paying attention to reality can strip it of its character. After all, we can be either in our heads or in the world, but seldom in both places simultaneously.

For example, Maine is a world of granite studded with occasional basalt. Granite is blue, pink, purple, orange and peach; basalt is black. The muddy result in photographs might be browns and greys, but that is not the real color of our rocks, and painting our rocks brown is a sign of not paying attention.

I was reminded of that when I ran across this old photo of the rocks under West Quoddy Head Light in Lubec. At the time, I didn’t realize that I was seeing weathered basalt columns. My painting was fine, but I think it would have been so much more dynamic had I understood the play between the basalt and granite on Quoddy Head.

My poor defunct living room.

I have a friend staying with me this week. She decided to strip the wallpaper in my living room. Since the plum stripes clashed with my red couch, I am very grateful. In the evenings, I’ve had the satisfaction of peeling a bit of paper myself.

In other words, it’s been a week for doing, not thinking. Inevitably, that leaves me with a lot of deferred thinking to do. That’s what I love most about my job. It’s a constant tug-of-war between my hands and my head.

September 17, 2013

Wrestling with God, Part 2

The Calling of Saint Matthew, 1599-1600, by Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, no stranger to sin himself.

Yesterday, Sandy Quang wrote about wrestling with God and Oswald Chambers’ realization that his calling was not to art school, but to the ministry. Last night I got this note from a friend who is a Texan, a convert to Judaism, and who has sort of fallen away from her spiritual practice.

I was staying with my friend Lester, in his guest room on the lake, while another Bubba put a new steering column in my truck for me. All day on Saturday [Yom Kippur], I was feeling guilty about not fasting, not attending service, not hearing a shofar this year… yada, yada, yada.

Lester proceeded to get totally shit-faced drunk and act like an ass on Saturday night. I had no truck, because it was at Mechanic Bubba’s.

We had to go to Walmart so I could get cash to pay Mechanic Bubba the next morning. I drove Lester‘s car because he couldn’t drive anywhere without risking arrest. (I’d been drinking tonic water.)

While I was in Walmart, a big thunderstorm rolled in. When I ran out to the car, I was drenched in 30 seconds flat. When I started to drive back to Lester’s house, I realized the defroster wasn’t working, so we had to use a towel to wipe the windshield down every 30 seconds. I could only see four feet in front of me on the highway. Someone honked at me, and I was unsure if the headlights were even on, so I asked Lester to take a look.

I should have driven off and left him standing there.

When he got back in he started cussing at me that I had lights. Was I happy that he was soaking wet? When we got back onto the highway, he really started yelling. I could, literally, see nothing in front of me; the rain was coming so hard.

I said, “Lester, you’d better stop yelling at me.” He wouldn’t stop, and I was getting mad.

Mad.

I said, “Keep talking, bud, keep talking.”

So he did. “I was a g*d d%^$*#d Air Force Navigator for twenty effin’ years! You don’t HAVE to see anything because I know where I’m going.”

I saw a bright light. I swerved to the side of the road, reached in the back seat for my purse and told him “Good luck getting home without getting arrested, because this is where I get out.”

It was 10 PM. I could see what looked like a little honkytonk, with light streaming out of the doorway and music playing.

Lester leaned over and yelled, “That big black guy down there is probably going to attack you!”

I stood in the middle of the road in the darkness, looked at drunken Lester, then looked back down the hill to the source of the light and the music. The big guy in the doorway was wearing a tallit and blowing a shofar.

And there, in the driving thunderstorm, I laughed at Lester and pointed down the hill. “I’ll be safer down there with him than up here with you!”

I sat outside that little multiracial church for over an hour waiting for a ride from my mechanic. I didn’t go in, but they were very nice and lent me a cell phone to make my call. The rest of the time I just sat outside the open door, under the eaves of the old honkytonk. The sign was even still up: “The Double Ringer.”

They had taken over the building but hadn’t even taken the honkytonk sign down yet.

I had a great time, and reveled in the irony that I got to hear the shofar and preaching, and yelling, and speaking in tongues, and laying of hands, and healing, and preaching on fornication (which I was quite proud not to have had to ask forgiveness for).

Conversion on the Way to Damascus, 1600-1601, by Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio. In addition to being the best-painted horse’s derriere in art history, it graphically illustrates that it’s never a good idea to turn your back on the Living God.

Hearing prayers for Israel and the Jewish people, in English and Spanish, was pretty dang cool, although I have to admit at one point, I was looking up at G-d, saying, “Why me?” But the shofar answered that, and I laughed. And I hope G-d laughs. Anyway, I’m pretty darn sure He must.

Join me in October, 2013 at Lakewatch Manor—which is selling out fast—or let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in 2014. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops!