Joseph A. Fiore Art Center Archives | Page 2 of 2

September 7, 2018

Dancing in the rain

If I knew what would happen, I wouldn’t bother trying.

The float, by Carol L. Douglas. Same subject as yesterday.

Today is my 38^th wedding anniversary; Wednesday was my granddaughter’s third birthday. I knew I’d miss these milestone events when I signed up for this residency, but had convinced myself that in the world of Skype and Snapchat, physical presence didn’t matter. It does.

I’m reminded that my grandmother came to this country expecting to never see her homeland or family again. Despite our national myths of intrepid independence, we are a nation built on homesickness.

Even the umbrella can’t save this painting from the rain.

My intention in this residency is two-fold: to explore the intersection of water, land and mankind, and to do some really big plein air landscapes in oils and watercolor. In the world of art, oil and water definitely do not mix; together they can create an archival disaster. So, being a concrete thinker, I plan to alternate them. Wednesday was an oil-painting day, Thursday was a watercolor day.

Rachel Alexandrou, the gardener-in-residence here, told me it would rain at 12:30. She was accurate to the minute. I hunkered down in my car, my salad on my lap, and watched the storm cross Damariscotta Lake. Excess humidity of any kind is tough on conventional watercolor paper. It turns out that it’s not good for Yupo, either.

A droopy, dreary day from within my car.

Yupo is a synthetic plastic substrate: cool, slick and contemporary. It’s the antithesis of organic. I like the way it takes watercolor, and its luminosity. However, it can be a jerk on a wet day. Water pools on the surface, and the paint is much more inclined to granulate than it does on paper.

Combined with intermittent rain, this made for nasty clumps of dark particles floating on the surface. The culprit appears to be what I thought was quinacridone violet. That’s not possible; that color isn’t granular at all. I have an imposter on my palette. I wonder what it is.

I switched to a quinacridone gold by QoR; it is clearer and brighter than whatever was on my palette.

I expected technical problems this first day, and I got them. My full-sheet drawing board, improvised from a folding presentation board, is too large for my swivel head easel. I don’t have my large brushes; they’re still in England.

There is a subtle change that happens when you finally relax and paint. You stop fussing at your materials and start translating what you see. I did eventually get there, or almost there. I hashed out a painting that’s mediocre in its drawing, rather muddy in its color, but interesting in its scribing. The beauty of Yupo is that it makes watercolor behave like no other paint.

What’s the end goal of this see-saw rotation of materials? If I knew what would happen, I wouldn’t bother trying. In this sense, experimentation with artist’s materials is vastly unscientific. We simply mix things up and watch. One in a hundred times it works, and when that happens, it’s magical.

September 6, 2018

Do you dread writing an artist’s statement?

The artist’s statement is, unfortunately, not optional.

The float, by Carol L. Douglas. This is my first work out the gate at Joseph A. Fiore Art Center. I struggled with the aspect ratio. Is it done? Beats me.

Last week I wrote about getting into galleries. The artist who prompted that post responded, “I would much rather discuss how I feel my work communicates the essence of wilderness and why it’s important to preserve wild places, than trying to convince them that I’m an accomplished painter and would be an asset to their gallery. I’d be much more comfortable discussing the importance of making sure people develop an appreciation for the wild places left on our planet, than the merits of my paintings.”

She’s hit on a topic that most artists (including me) approach with dread: the artist’s statement. I’ve been mulling that over this week, because a residency can be about figuring out where you’re going as much as it is about producing new work.

My Mabef easel may nominally hold a 24×36 canvas, but in practice it’s too heavy. So it’s back to the Gloucester easel for oils.

An artist’s statement can be dull as dishwater or it can hit you between the eyes. My correspondent above is clearly passionate about wilderness; I’d be interested in her work just from the few sentences above.

We want our work to transmit our ideas non-verbally. Still, we are expected to write these statements. Our gallerists and collectors need a starting point for discussion.

Today I move over to Yupo and watercolor paper.

An artist statement generally contains:

An overview of one’s ideas;
An explanation of materials and process;
A personal statement of beliefs/philosophy;
A closing statement.

As a plein airpainter, there’s not much I can say about my materials; however, I can talk about my strong preference for painting from life instead of photos.

The first and last sections are great opportunities for pomposity, clichés, sophomoric writing and irrelevant anecdotes. As experienced as I am at writing, I’ve fallen into those traps. I look back on some of my artist’s statements and cringe.

What questions could you address?

What compels you in your current work?
Why did you make this specific body of work?
What are the spiritual, moral, or experiential underpinnings of your work?
What do you want your audience to take away from it?
How does this work relate to work you’ve done before?
Who or what are your inspirations?
Is there something unique about your technique?
What is your place in art history? How are you building on what’s been done before?
Is your painting tied to a specific place, a specific history, or a group of people?

I was so taken by Yupo last month that I ordered twenty full sheets of it. Here’s hoping it works as well in that size.

What points should you avoid?

Talking about how much you love art. Everyone does.
Quoting famous artists and/or poetry.
A minute description of your process, especially when it’s the same as everyone else’s process.
Your personal experience, unless it ties in with a greater theme.
“My work is interesting because…”
Comparing yourself to a famous artist.

Be spare in your prose, direct, and honest. Refer to yourself in the first person, not as ‘the artist.’ And expect to work on it for a while. If you really and truly can’t write, hire someone to help you; the artist’s statement is, unfortunately, not optional.

In practice, I’ve found that I need several different versions of artist statement (which are of course strewn all over my hard drive). There’s the short one for show applications, the longer one for gallerists, and the painfully long one that gets incorporated into press releases.

September 5, 2018

A month in the shadow of a great painter

Ghost stories, cemeteries, and the work of a great painter

Clif and I visited this old cemetery in the waning light.

If I had any talent for poetry, I’d have exercised it last night. I’m at the Joseph Fiore Art Center in Jefferson, Maine for a one-month residency. My room faces east. I watched the slow rotation of the night sky, the stars overflowing their courses. The dawn rose red and fiery, glinting through the trees off the waters of Damariscotta Lake.

I spent yesterday with the other visual artist in residence, Clif Travers of Kingfield, ME. Clif is both a writer and painter, and recently returned to his hometown after a long stint in Brooklyn. His work here will involve panels and prose, brackets and blocks. I’m curious about what the end result will be; I imagine he is, too.

Moving into a temporary studio is more daunting for a studio painter than for me; I simply had to offload my extra supports and was done.

My studio away from home.

When we’d both finished, Clif and I took a quick jaunt to Rising Tide Co-op in Damariscotta and Pemaquid Point. It’s rare that I can play tour-guide to a native Mainer, but Kingfield is way inland and north.

There is a family cemetery set within the aptly-named Rolling Acres Farm. It’s of a type I identify more with Scotland than America, a set of small ‘rooms’ separated by carefully-laid up dry walls.

Katahdin, 1975, Joseph A. Fiore, courtesy Maine Farmland Trust

I’d already retired when Clif called up that I should come down and see the waning day’s pyrotechnics. The few white stones glowed peach against the dark woods. We set off through the hayfields to photograph it, me in my bare feet.

“Maybe this place is haunted,” Clif enthused. Well, I was raised in a notorious haunted house, but it was late and I refused to tell him about it. Ghost stories need their buildup, after all.

My workspace is in an old barn, redolent of old hay. But I don’t expect to spend much time there. I’ve a goal in mind for this residency. It involves the intersection of water and land, and—mostly—painting big. Unfortunately, my monster Rosemary & Co. brushes are delayed, so I’m going to have to be flexible in my approach.

View from Bald Rock, 1971, Joseph A. Fiore, courtesy Maine Farmland Trust

Who was Joseph Fiore (1925–2008) and why is there an art center dedicated to him in Jefferson, ME? Fiore was born in Cleveland, the son of a violinist. He was musical himself, and that is very evident in his painting. He attended the experimental Black Mountain College on the GI Bill and studied with Josef Albers, Ilya Bolotowsky, and Willem DeKooning. Later, he taught there.

With those instructors, it’s no surprise that Fiore was, foremost, an abstractionist. However, his work is rooted in nature and he also painted lovely, loose, realistic landscapes. His paint is worked very thin, and his brushwork is loose and measured. Leaving that much canvas is the mark of a good draftsman, because any dithering shows.

After Black Mountain closed, Fiore settled in New York, where he taught at Parsons. In 1959 he and his wife began summering in Maine. They bought an old farmhouse in Jefferson, which they used for the rest of his life.

Clary Hill, 1970, Joseph A. Fiore, courtesy Maine Farmland Trust

Fiore and his wife Mary were avid supporters of Maine Farmland Trust. When the Trust purchased this waterfront farm, the idea of the art center was born.

My first response to being surrounded by his work was a kind of intellectual shock, where everything I thought I knew about painting was challenged. Now, nearly 24 hours later, I’m adjusting somewhat. But the opportunity to be submersed in another artist’s work is not to be sneezed at, so I’m adjusting my plans to allow time with the paintings every day.

August 29, 2018

So you want to be an internet star

A good online presence is focused, consistent and interesting—just like you.

Rising tide at Wadsworth Cove, by Carol L. Douglas. I selected my top Google search images for today’s blog. Seemed appropriate.

This week I’m packing for a residency at the Joseph A. Fiore Art Center. I’ll be a hermit until October 1. There will be two exceptions. The first, of course, is this blog. It runs daily except weekends and holidays, except when I’m out on the ocean. There’s no phone signal out there.

I’ll also be a panel participant in the Maine Arts Commission’s Maine International Conference on the Arts. I’ll be discussing Using Technology to Document & Promote Your Work on Friday, September 28 at 2 PM.

My success on the internet has been seat-of-the-pants. I’ve never taken a class, and whenever I start looking at online marketing courses, I get lost in the jargon. Still, this blog is a success, so I’m using this panel discussion as an opportunity to think through why it works.

A FitzHugh Lane Day at Camden, by Carol L. Douglas

Be consistent

People often ask me how to get started with a blog. My answer is that, whatever they choose to do, they should commit to doing every day. For me, that’s a strict discipline. I get up at 6 AM, write for 90 minutes, publish, and then go on to live my day.

I blogged for years, randomly, as most artists do, posting whenever I had a new piece of work or a brilliant idea. I had absolutely no traction. Then I noticed something about the internet: stirring the pot attracts people, and it has an exponential effect. The more that’s going on, the more people tend to read it.

Offer real content

If you’re looking only for a way to promote your paintings, Instagram is probably a better platform. A blog requires 400-600 words of carefully crafted content every day. It needs meat on its bones.

That isn’t as tough as it sounds. Everybody has interesting experiences, and we tell each other these stories all the time. All that really happened in this postwas that my pal got a flat tire, but the circumstances made me smile. Judging by the hits, it made a lot of you smile, too.

Parker Dinghy, by Carol L. Douglas

Find your own niche

I didn’t set out to write an award-winning blog; I set out to get rid of all the thoughts rolling around my head.

Nobody has the time to do everything, and a pallid, overstretched presence will do you more harm than good. Concentrate on what you like to do, and you’re probably doing what you do best.

Let your technology do the metrics for you

I don’t chart my progress, but I regularly check where my readers come from, both geographically and by platformsand traffic sources. I use this information to get the biggest bang out of my effort. I used to post on Tumblr; it was pointless and too much work. I’ve recently added Google Business to my daily posting, even though its numbers are small. It’s easy to do, and it promotes my physical studio.

Bathtime, by Carol L. Douglas. I don’t set out to sell paintings on my blog, but this one was purchased from a post. The buyer has become a friend.

Be patient

When I started Monday Morning Art School, I thought it was a bang-up idea. It went nowhere. I was just trying to figure out how to pull the plug when I noticed readership rising. Today, Monday is my top readership day.

The dreaded “you should”

If someone else isn’t telling me I should do something more, I’m telling myself that. They’re usually great ideas, but I also want time to paint. I keep a document on my laptop of all these “you should” ideas. I refer to this more than any other document except my packing list.

August 3, 2018

Yupo this!

It has all the charm of a milk jug but takes watercolor beautifully.

Marshall Point, oil on Yupo vellum. The bottom right corner was spoiled by potato chip grease.

I’ve been carrying around a package of Yupo translucent watercolor paper all summer, but lacked an opportunity to work with it in any systematic way. Yupo is billed as an acid-free, archival synthetic surface. It has the hand-feel of a milk jug, and a similar milky translucent surface. That’s because it’s made from polypropylene pellets extruded in a factory in Chesapeake, Virginia. So much for my hemp-wearing Green credibility.

The initial wash for the above. It has possibilities.

I find the surface seductive and deep, for many of the same reasons I find cold-wax medium compelling. I’ve been turning over the idea of working with it during my residency at the Joseph A. Fiore Art Center at the Maine Farmland Trust. The point of a residency is exploration, after all.

A detail of the spruces before I started cutting back in. It’s all experimentation, but I liked them better at this phase.

Before I started planning a major project, I needed to prove to myself that the product wasn’t just a gimmick. My main watercolor palette contains a mish-mosh of different paints acquired over decades. That’s not very scientific, but I do know how they behave on both hot- and cold-press watercolor paper.

Brad Marshall got surprisingly similar intensities on the Yupo (left) and cold-press (right). That, I think, is a function of the paint he was using.

Brad Marshall’s scientific control was much better; he pulled out the same Winsor & Newton pocket field kit he used on Wednesday. That’s a good solid kit; I have a similar one. However, it tends to a lighter pigment load than my tube watercolors.

Brad didn’t much like the vellum, but he’s a far more controlled painter than me. I think it works better for the Pig-Pen temperament.

Marshall Point lighthouse. There was no glazing possible in the dark passages; the water simply lifted the paint and redistributed it.

The sheet marks very easily. Next time I work with it, I’ll mount pages on drawing boards while wearing cotton gloves. Yesterday, I worked straight on the tablet with no board at all. It was windy and I found myself using my forearm and fingers to prevent fluttering. My sunscreen and skin oils created a film resist that I could lift with a paper towel and much scrubbing. The potato chip grease, however, made a far more permanent mark. I let paint pool over, but it had absolutely no tooth.

Of course, the same bad practice would mark rag paper as well, waiting to wreck the paper over time.

More rocks at Port Clyde. I found the separation between foreground and background difficult to control. That may mean there are no midtones possible.

Yupo’s main selling point is that you can lift paint up, solving the most significant challenge in watercolor painting. It’s fun, but I don’t think it’s any substitution for thinking out a good value structure in advance. As with all watercolor paintings, lifting affects the paints next to the paint being lifted, and the edges it leaves can be over-pigmented and gummy.

Glazing is next-to-impossible; with few exceptions, it just lifts the bottom layer back up. Glazing is such a fundamental part of watercolor technique that this changes the process altogether. Resign yourself to getting the value and hue right the first time, because you won’t be able to do the small modulations that make watercolor painting such a joy.

In some ways, the process felt like alcohol-marker drawing. At the same time, it encouraged me to finer drawing than cold-press paper ever does. The manufacturer says the paint can be fixed with Krylon Matte Finish. I’ll try that, because some method of permanent fixing is necessary before this product is useful. Putting it under glass would obscure its beautiful surface.

April 17, 2018

How I plan to spend my summer (if it ever gets here)

Teenagers and artists choose interesting paths.

Teressa studying painting in Rochester, many moons ago.

Yesterday, I got two registrations in the mail for my Rochester workshop. Kamillah started painting with me when she was a junior in high school, working at a local diner so she could afford art lessons. Now she’s a graduate architect, studying for her boards. Her sister Teressa is in nursing school. It’s a joy to see these kids embrace adulthood with such grace.

Kamillah once painted with me on a late spring weekend in the Adirondacks. We were at an inn that hadn’t opened yet for the season. It was blowing and snowing, as the higher elevations tend to do this time of year. Kamillah is tiny, and I was concerned she’d be blown off the mountain and right into half-thawed Piseco Lake. Summer eventually showed up that year, as it will this year—at some point.

I get to teach in some mighty gorgeous places!

After I got their registrations, I opened my Little Book of Workshops. As of today, I have:

Three openings for Color, Composition, and Technique, June 2-3, Mendon Ponds Park, Rochester, NY.
Three openings for The Age of Sail, June 10-14, out of Rockland, ME;
Four openings for Sea & Sky at Schoodic, August 5-10, in Acadia National Park

(I don’t know about Exploring Rye through Paint (May 11-12, Rye, NY); contact the Rye Arts Center for information about that.)

That puts me about exactly where I am every year at this time. Suddenly, when it warms up enough for people to think about painting, those slots fill up.

Will I have a chance to paint in the surf this season? Who knows? Photo by Ed Buonvecchio.

Meanwhile, I—like every other plein air painter—anxiously await jurying results. Most are not in yet, but what I have promises an interesting summer ahead. On the 27th, I fly to Santa Fe, NM for Santa Fe Plein Air Fiesta.

William Rogersfrom Nova Scotia is in that event too. That means I’ll see him twice this summer, since he’s the Honorary Chairman of Parrsboro International Plein Air Festival in early June. The roster at that event is like old home week, including many artists I’ve painted with for ages. That includes, of course, Poppy Balser.

Nova Scotia is one of the world’s great beauty spots. It’s a privilege to paint there.

I’ll be at Ocean Park’s Art in the Park in July. That’s really six old friends doing an ensemble act together, as we’ve done for several years. At Cape Elizabeth I’ll run into Janet Sutherland for the second time this summer. She’s a crackerjack painter and a regular at Castine, but we seldom get time to say more than a few words to each other. If only I could slow the tape down!

In August I’ll be back in New York for the Adirondack Plein Air Festival. And other than that, the jury’s still—literally—out.

Barnyard lilacs, by Carol L. Douglas

Except for one other thing, which is perhaps the biggest thing of all: in September I’ll be an artist-in-residence at the Joseph A. Fiore Art Center. I was raised on a farm, and I’ve got a deep affection for agriculture. This will be the first time in several years where I’ve isolated myself to paint reflectively, rather than tearing around in a car painting fast. I’m terrifically chuffed.