Category: Mary Silver

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Choose your friends wisely

The people you paint with will influence your work and your attitudes toward success.

Channel Marker, 9X12, Carol L. Douglas, available.

If you’ve ever felt the powerful need to adjust your thinking to fit in, it’s not just moral weakness. We’re designed as herd animals, and that need to conform is built into us on a neural level. Disagreeing with our friends and neighbors makes us physically, emotionally and mentally uncomfortable.

Social norms are the rules that govern our group behavior, and they’re important. They’re how we all agree to forgo self-serving behaviors for the good of the group. These social norms—more so even than the force of law—govern our society.

Fog Bank, 14X18, Carol L. Douglas, available.

Some social norms (“thou shalt not kill”) are static, but others are fluid; for example, we’ve decided over the last three hundred years that child labor is morally wrong.

Group norming affects artists as much as anyone. We tend to slip into painting like our friends and neighbors. That’s why we develop painting schools like the Group of Seven. Artists working together subtly create a stylistic group norm.

This was demonstrated to me over the past weeks as we studied composition. There are rules we accept today that wouldn’t have occurred to a Manneristpainter.

Midsummer, 24X36, Carol L. Douglas, available.

Groupthink is aspirational, too. Successful thinking can be transmitted through a group as surely as clothing choices can.

I’ve just finished a year-long session with two very successful groups of students. Mary Silver found representation in a gallery in downtown San Antonio. Patty Mabie won “best floral” in the April Plein Air salon. Lori Capron Galan was juried into the Rochester Art Club. Several sold paintings over the past few months. All painted consistently to a high level. They created a culture of success, and that has pushed all of them to a high level of performance.

There are times when artists feel very alone. I felt stylistically isolated in western New York because my own painting was based on different norms. That went away when I moved to coastal Maine. Coastal Maine is inherently no better than western New York, but my own painting ethos was there, rather than in the Hudson River School.

Sometimes it rains, 8X10, Carol L. Douglas, available.

This points to the conundrum of the artist’s way, which is two-fold. Our work is communication, but it must be done very much alone. Moreover, we are part of a social continuum, but we strive to say something unique.

In the end, that’s the definition of leadership. That has nothing to do with seniority, titles, wealth, or management. It’s a process of social influence, and it’s a great responsibility.

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What can you learn from a pumpkin?

The inner self emerges, despite our best efforts to keep it stuffed down.

Pumpkins by Maggie Daigle.

If the weather holds today, I’ll be painting with my pal Ken DeWaard. We don’t worry about painting the same subject. He doesn’t want to paint like me, and—because he won’t let me copy off his paper—I don’t paint like him.

This week I assigned my Zoom classes to paint pumpkins. They’re in season, after all. After I’d had that brilliant idea, I had to figure out something interesting to say on the subject. That was harder, but I eventually managed to marry pumpkins to a Big Idea in Painting.

Pumpkins by Mary Silver.

Color temperature is especially complicated on an orange (or blue) object, because they’re at the outside edges of that useful artistic convention we call “warm and cool.” If you’re managing the color of light by simply modulating all your colors with the same tinted white pigment, it’s no great problem. But if, like the Impressionists, you’re dialing around the color wheel to control the color of light, you run into a problem. There’s simply nowhere warmer than orange or cooler than ultramarine blue. That gave me a subject to talk about regarding pumpkins.

My students then proceeded to paint. And that’s where the real learning started… for me.

A leaning tower of pumpkins by Kathy Mannix (unfinished).

I wasn’t optimistic about the results. After all, how interesting could two dozen still-life paintings of pumpkins be? It’s not as if the gourds were out in the field waiting to be gathered up, on plants, buried in leaves, or stacked in innovative ways. Shorn of context, they would be plopped on tables from Maine to Texas. I expected to harvest a crop of very similar paintings.

Instead, there was as much variety as there would have been if I’d suggested self-portraits.

Pumpkins by Patricia Mabie.

Kathy Mannix stacked hers in a leaning tower. Samantha East added a large squash to break up the composition. Lorraine Nichols laid her gourds out on a textile printed with pumpkins; Maggie Daigle and Patricia Mabie played the stripes of their gourds against the stripes of textiles. Carrie O’Brien’s pumpkins were reflected in the bowl of a silver spoon. Somehow, each painting was reflective of each artist, “warts and all,” as Lori Galan joked about her own painting.

Pumpkins by Yvonne Bailey.

The arts are the voice of our inner self, but painting is uniquely self-expressive. It’s influenced fairly equally by both our conscious and subconscious minds. Contrary to what you might think, our subconscious expression gets stronger the more we gain technical skill. When our process runs quietly in the background, there’s space and time for our souls to start speaking.

For example, it’s impossible to mistake a Caravaggio for an Artemisia Gentileschi, even though both painted Biblical subjects, belong to the same general broad movement in art and underwent similar training. It’s not just the lighting or drafting that immediately tell us which is which, either. The very personality of their work is different.

One very warty pumpkin by Lori Capron Galan (unfinished).

There are many reasons for a teacher to avoid trying to create mini-me painters in the studio, but it’s a pointless exercise anyway. The inner self emerges despite our best efforts to keep it stuffed down.

I’m also reminded—again—that there’s little point in trying to predict the outcome of my ideas. Sometimes I’ll put something out that I think is dreck, and it catches the public imagination. Sometimes, I’ll labor long and hard on something I think is brilliant, but nobody else much cares. I’ve learned to just cast my bread upon the waters and let the results take care of themselves.