fbpx

Category: plein air painting

Posted on

Elegy for a house

I have no idea what the next chapter in this house’s history will be, but for many years it was a haven for New York plein airpainters.
Kaaterskill Falls, by Carol L. Douglas

If the legal system creaks along as it should, an important property will pass out of the plein airworld today. This is Jamie Williams Grossman’s home in Palenville, NY. Jamie is married to New York State Supreme Court Justice Victor G. Grossman. Vic is required to live in his district, which covers Westchester and four other counties. When it came time for them to downsize, it was the Catskill house that had to go.

The house is a long, open structure, originally built as a barn for the farm across the road. Its conversion was top notch—steel stairs, a large open kitchen, and pleasant, airy rooms. The foundation rested on bedrock which intruded poetically into the basement. Along one side of this lower level, Jamie built a long, sunny studio. When she was in residence, so too were her birds.
Clouds over the Catskills, by Carol L. Douglas
To get there, you turned off a local road and dropped sharply down a gravel lane that seemed to peter out in scrub. Even when you knew where you were going, it was easy to miss.
The property is dotted with waterfalls. Some are seasonal. If you felt so inclined, you could hike to one of the more remote ones. The most beautiful passed right under the driveway. Dropping rapidly down from the road, it broke and crashed on huge granite boulders before burbling away in a small stream. I once dropped a palette knife into the water. A year later, Jamie found and returned it, after inscribing it with my name so I wouldn’t lose it again.
Kaaterskill Creek, by Carol L. Douglas
A meadow sits below the house, surrounded on all sides by woods. A venerable old tree crabs Wyeth-like to the sky, skirted by an old stone wall. There was never a shortage of material, but the property itself wasn’t the reason most painters came to stay with Jamie. Her house was minutes away from some of the most storied sites of Hudson River School painting: Platte Clove, Kaaterskill Falls, North-South Lake, and the Pine Orchard, where the Catskill Mountain House once stood. Drive a few minutes more and you were at Cedar Grove, the home and studio of painter Thomas Cole, founder of the Hudson River School. Cross over the river and you were at Olana, the estate of Frederic Edwin Church.
I had the good fortune to be invited back many times. I was not alone. There are always fine artists around when I visited. Sometimes we spent as much time tweaking our gear as painting. It was on a hike up Kaaterskill Falls that Johanne Morin showed me her super-lightweight aluminum easel, which I then copied and have used ever since.
Olana overlook, by Carol L. Douglas
There were men among the painters who gathered there, of course. But the group always seemed weighted toward women. This was the first true sorority of serious, professional women painters I ever knew. I met lifelong friends in Jamie’s creek, and cemented relationships over her table.
I’ll still paint in that area, and I’ll still stop and see Jamie no matter where she is, but it’s the end of an important era in the New York plein air community. Jamie and Vic, from the bottom of my heart, thank you for your years and years of hospitality and support.
Posted on

Sensible Maine

Not all regional differences are about the landscape, the accents and the buildings. There are also differences in character.
Erie Canal Sketch by Carol L. Douglas. You’re pretty, New York, but don’t let it go to your head.

Last year, Bobbi Heathand I stopped on the road and bought boxes, bubble wrap and tape. We left these, carefully marked, for our work to be returned after a show in New Jersey. Mine were mailed back unsecured and unwrapped. Mercifully, nothing was damaged, but had that $3000 of inventory been ruined, the Postal Service would have been justified in not paying the claim. Our host at that event was gracious and kind, but the slipshod mailing left me thinking poorly of the event.

Compare that to my experience at Santa Fe Plein Air Fiesta earlier this month. When my frames arrived broken, co-chair Jane Chapin loaned me three of hers. That flexible, kind attitude was visible in small and large ways throughout the event. They held three receptions for the artists. They cooked for us and cared for us. Their attitude makes me want to hurry back.
There are invisible differences from place to place in America, and sometimes they’re more important than what you see.
Erie Canal Bridge Sketch, by Carol L. Douglas.
I engage with government in very limited ways—the department of motor vehicles, the town clerk, the planning office, and the post office. In my small town of Rockport, ME (pop. 3,330), I’m accustomed to public officials being accommodating and thoughtful. The other day I visited the clerk’s office to ask what my excise tax would be on a new car I’m considering. It was a few minutes before closing time. The deputy clerk calculated it, commiserated, and made a friendly joke as we left.
In New York, it’s a high crime and misdemeanor if every dot and tittle is not in place. Its clerks guard their prerogatives assiduously. I should have remembered that, but I’ve gotten soft.
Catskill Farm, by Carol L. Douglas
So I was a little blindsided when my daughter ran into trouble at the local town hall. She and her fiancé need a marriage license by the weekend. They had followed the instructions on the New York State website. Of course, like everyone else, they followed them wrong. She was carrying the wrong identification.
Still, the town she is getting married in is very close to the town where she was born. She’s carrying the highest-and-greatest form of identification—her United States Passport. It ought to have been no big deal to just get a new birth certificate.
No way, no how. They won’t give it to her without her Social Security card, one of the most loosely-controlled documents Americans carry. “Homeland Security visits us, you know!” the clerk told her.
The Dugs, by Carol L. Douglas
“This is New York, right?” a friend quipped. “Try bribing them.” I won’t do that, but if it doesn’t get straightened out today, I’m going to try sending a little muscle along. And there’s always ‘the touch’, putting the word out to friends and family to see who knows someone who knows someone. Because in New York, that’s how things get done.
But back to sensible Maine for the answer. I called Camden Falls Gallery and got Howard Gallagher on the phone. “Sure!” he said, and he sent Sandy Quang over to my house to get the requisite documents from my safe. Then she got into her car and left for New York a few hours earlier than she had planned. If all goes well, Mary’s birth certificate and social security card should be in her hand by midday and the wedding will proceed as planned.
Posted on

How to plein air paint on the cheap(er)

If you’re trying painting for the first time, it makes sense to use less-expensive equipment and supplies. Here are corners you can cut.

Above Lake Champlain, by Carol L. Douglas
My friend Catherine is thrifty. When she took up plein air painting, she did it with softwood tripod easel—which you can get at Michaels this week for $7.99—and a TV table. She set a good example for those who want to try plein airpainting without breaking the bank.
The worst beginner error is to buy super-cheap paints and brushes. There are good student-grade brands out there in all media:

Cath setting up to paint with her inexpensive easel. Its limitations are fewer than you’d expect.
The difference between professional and student grade paints and pastels is the amount of pigment and the quality of the binders. In some cases, more expensive pigments will be copied with “hues.” Cadmiums and cerulean blue are often mimicked; check the label to see what you’re getting. A hue mimics (badly) the color of a single-pigment paint with less-expensive materials. For example, “cerulean blue hue” is often a combination of zinc white and phthalo blue.
A better solution is to avoid pricier pigments in the first place. There are modern pigments that do the job equally well at a lower cost. That’s what I aim for in my supply lists for oils, watercolor, acrylics, and pastels. (They’re directed to the serious amateur/professional, so the paint brands are not student grade.)
An expensive kit that I no longer use. It’s just too heavy.
I started painting on the same kind of tripod easel that Catherine bought. I still have mine. My father used a handmade version of the same easel for his whole life. It was the standard for outdoor painting in the mid-20thcentury.
I’d rather you bought one of them than a French easel. These are heavy, inefficient, and often badly-made. I gave mine away years ago. Pochade boxes are the most versatile field easels, but they’re expensive. If you’re handy, you can make one like I did. Or, there’s the classic cigar-box pochade.
The best value for money in a better easel is Mabef’s Universal Tripod Field Easel and its big brother, the Giant Field Easel. I’ve had one for decades. Even with a cracked leg, it still gamely stands up.
Mabef’s Universal Tripod Easel can be used with oils or watercolors, and is flexible enough to fit in small spaces.
Brushes don’t have to break the bank either. Even though I have a slew of fine watercolor brushes, I still often reach for my Princeton Neptunes. Oil and acrylic are trickier since cheap brushes sometimes drop bristles in your work. Jerry’s Creative Mark are fine, and Princeton also makes good, inexpensive oil/acrylic brushes, especially their 5200and 5400series. If you want a synthetic brush, make sure it imitates hog bristles, not sable. A softer brush isn’t meant for direct painting.
Posted on

This painting isn’t as bad as it looks

Actually, it was pretty much a failure, but I will try again today.

Gator pond, Gulf Islands National Seashore, Ocean Spring, Mississippi.
When I was in the Bahamas in 2016, I was fascinated with palms, a family of plants with more than 2000 members. I meant to be fascinated with them on this trip, too. Instead, the southern live oak has captured my heart.
These are not true evergreens. Rather, like young beeches and oaks up north, they drop their old leaves immediately before new leaves emerge in the spring. The difference is that the old leaves remain green right up until the swap, whereas our northern ones dry up and rattle in the winter wind.
This week, the new growth on New Orleans’ live oaks is emerging. That leaves the branches denuded of their characteristic heavy, dark covering, allowing their parasites to dominate the scene. These include ball moss, Spanish moss, resurrection fern, and mistletoe. The trees seem to tolerate them, but they make them look more gnarly than they actually are.
Spanish moss at Mobile Bay. (Photo courtesy of Douglas Perot)
There are countless examples of ancient live oaks here in New Orleans. They have weathered terrible storms for many decades.
On Sunday, we made the drive from Mobile to New Orleans through a heavy rain. My intention was to paint at Davis Bayou at Gulf Islands National Seashore in Mississippi, but the rain drowned all visibility. I did this little sketch of a gator pond before the lightning drove me away.
Louisiana ‘s wild alligator population is estimated to be around two million. Apparently, that’s not enough, because there are an additional 300,000 farmed alligators here. That, I think, means you’re likely to see one anywhere there’s water. I imagine they’re relatively torpid right now. Daytime temperatures are the low sixties. Still the sun—when you’re in it—is hot, and reptiles love sunbathing.
Live oak and folly (unfinished) at City Park.
I set up to paint in City Park. This has a wonderful botanical garden, great swathes of trees, meandering creeks, and the additional attraction of the Morning Call coffee stand in the old casino. It was, however, unwise of me to choose a backlighted tree with a domed, columned folly behind it. I spent the morning cheerfully drawing the building and trees and started to limn in the colors when two things occurred to me. First, I was unbearably hot, and second, the light had turned. My backlighting was no more.
Fewer beignets, more painting time!
I gave it up and decided to go down to the historic district to find some lunch and the waterfront. What I thought might be a two-hour jaunt used up the remainder of the day.
“During the week, especially in Manhattan, the pace is so slow, you often feel that any mode of transportation might be as fast as any other—you could walk, drive, take a cab or ride the subway and get there about the same time—so we choose our transport more on aesthetic grounds,” Garrison Keillor once said.
The same seems true of New Orleans. I raced my traveling companions back to City Park—they on the trolley and on foot, me in my car. We arrived back at exactly the same time.
Posted on

Why I don’t do daily painting challenges

Just as plein air teaches you to paint fast and loose, studio painting teaches you to paint deeper.
Not every day of that year was cold. Pastel, by Carol L. Douglas.

When I finally decided to master plein air painting, I made the commitment to paint outdoors every day for one year, regardless of weather. That didn’t include Sundays, so it added up to 313 canvases painted in every kind of weather. For some reason, the worst days are the most memorable: the wind howling off the water at Ontario Beach Park, my oil paint freezing into stodge in a vineyard, or my car battery dying on a lonely country road. That was before cell phones, so I took a long, cold trudge to a nearby farmhouse to ask for a jump.

I’m sure there were many more pleasant days during that year, but they’re not stuck in my memory. Outdoor painters, like other adventurers, love to collect war stories.
The most memorable thing about this painting is that my car battery died from the cold. Oil, by Carol L. Douglas.
That year was an essay in mastery. I learned to paint in a more direct way. I mastered the three- to six-hour painting. And I developed the discipline of working through the “I don’t feel like it” moments.
Since then, I’ve done some similar, shorter challenges. I devised them for myself to answer specific problems. For example, when I realized that I misunderstood tree structure, I painted a tree every day. And when I was hampered by circumstances from doing large paintings, I did one-hour still lives each day.
This is the season of new beginnings. For some of us, that will include painting-a-day challenges. If you’ve never done one, I encourage you to try it.
This fast sketch is a personal favorite. It hangs in my home. Oil, by Carol L. Douglas.
I won’t be joining you. Been there, done that.
Daily paintings come at the cost of finishing larger canvases, which also have their place in one’s artistic development. We tend to shy away from approaching the last-minute business of finishing. That means asking, intentionally, how refined we want the ending to be. Until you bring a painting or two to that stage of high polish, you’re suffering a case of arrested development.
There’s a trope that drives me nuts: “Not one more brushstroke! You’re done!” We’ve gotten so used to the fast painting that we sometimes forget how to develop slow ones. Not stepping beyond that arbitrary finish-line retards our development. At some point, we need to be able to tell deeper stories than are possible in a field sketch.
And then there were days that were just golden. Pastel, by Carol L. Douglas.
Just as plein airteaches you how to work fast and loose, studio painting teaches you how to go deeper. I like nothing better than haring off to a new place with my paints. But there are times when I need to work slowly.
One of the joys of living in the far north is that the calendar tells you when that’s appropriate. When the wind is howling and the snow blowing, I know it’s time to focus on studio painting. Mother Nature says so.
A note to New York muralists: Believe in Syracuse is offering a $20,000 stipend to paint a mural on a West End building. For more information, see here.
Posted on

A few questions (and answers) about plein air painting in Maine

Yes, there are bathrooms. We like to call them ‘heads’ on a boat
Jonathan Submarining, by Carol L. Douglas

If you’ve been thinking about taking my Sea & Skyor Age of Sailworkshops, this is a reminder that you have only two weeks left to get an early-bird discount. That’s $50 off the price of the boat trip or $100 off the Acadia workshop.

The Age of Sail is June 10-14, 2018 on the historic schooner American Eagle out of Rockland, ME. Sea & Sky is August 5-10 at Schoodic Institute in Acadia National Park. Here are some questions I’ve been asked recently:

Drying sails, by Carol L. Douglas

What do you do if it rains?

While the rain in Maine falls mainly on the plain, it does sometimes rain over Penobscot Bay and the ocean. American Eagle has a canopy over the main deck for when the boat is at anchor, and we’ll use that. At Schoodic, we have access to a pavilion. In either case, if the worst happens and we’re totally unable to work outside, there are interior places where we can gather.
Are there bathrooms?
Yes and no. On a boat, a toilet is more properly called ‘the head.’ Although American Eagle is a restored heritage boat, she does have these modern conveniences. Schoodic Institute does, too.
On the boat, you’ll sleep in a berth. At Schoodic, you’ll have a room in an apartment with a kitchen, two bedrooms, two bathrooms, and access to laundry facilities. Out in the woods, we either drive to the nearest park facility, or we take an amble into the woods like the locals (bear, moose, and foxes) do.
Outrunning the Storm, Carol L. Douglas
Are these workshops handicapped-access?
Schoodic Institute is, but let me know if you have physical limitations when you register. Our painting locations are all accessible by car and involve little hiking, so you won’t miss out. American Eagle is not accessible. It was built as a working fishing boat.
What about food?
In both cases, all meals are provided, so you don’t have to worry about where and when you eat. Schoodic’s chefs prepare lunches and snacks for us to take into the field, and we have breakfast and dinner cafeteria-style. American Eagle’s cook and mess-mate feed us three squares a day on deck.
Both trips include a lobster boil. Schoodic’s is prepared by a fisherman from nearby Corea, ME, who hauls that day’s catch over to us. On American Eagle, you’re likely to see Captain John Foss row his dinghy into a nearby harborage to buy seafood off the dock. You’re encouraged to make dinghy jokes.
An island lobster bake, in progress.
Can I get a glass of wine?
You can bring some along. In Maine wine and liquor are sold in grocery stores, and you can easily pick some up along the way.
What about black flies or mosquitoes?
I’ve painted in the far north from northern Alaska to Labrador, and the worst black flies I ever did see were at Piseco Lake in New York. They’re an early-summer phenomenon, which is why we’ll be out on the water in June and on land in August.
Watercolor field sketches, by Carol L. Douglas
What equipment should we bring?
For Sea & Sky, all mediums are welcome. Here are my packing lists for oils, acrylicsand watercolor. The Age of Sail is a little different. I’m supplying everything, and we’re going to work in field-sketch style in watercolor and gouache, the better to capture fast impressions.
A reader once posted this comment on my blog: “Noted watercolor painter John Marin of the Maine coast not only painted many boats but also painted from a boat. He rowed out from Mt. Desert Island where he sketched and painted quick minutes-long watercolors while bobbing in his rowboat. One was on display at the Ogunquit Museum of American Art this past summer
 Mount Desert Minute Drawing, most likely a view of Cadillac Mountain, and can be seen on this web page. 
Posted on

Reentering the work world

Sometimes you need a hair of the dog what bit you.

Sunset near Clark Island, by Carol L. Douglas

There are very few people I would invite over when my house isn’t clean. Bobbi Heath is one of them. She kindly brought dinner. My cough has lingered and I was downright crabby. I wasn’t sure reality was any place I wanted to be dragged back to. She ignored all that, and I’m far better for it.

The best place for rolling ocean breakers near me is in St. George, which is south of Penobscot and its canopy of islands. The tide was rising, throwing up a good screen of spray. I had about three hours where it would be in roughly the same position as it rose, paused and started to drop again.
That gave me time to approach the business of painting in a gingerly way. I did a fast watercolor sketch, which seemed like less of a commitment. The surf and the wind died as the tide turned.
Off Marshall Point, watercolor, by Carol L. Douglas
When a wave’s height reaches a point of instability, it breaks. Part of its energy is converted to turbulence, which we see as foam. How this happens varies depending on what’s hidden below the water’s surface. If the ocean floor slopes gradually up, the wave steepens until the top becomes unstable. Whitewater spills down the face of the wave. This results in long, slow breakers.
We don’t have a gradual seafloor in Maine. Here, breakers trip and collapse over ledges and sandbars. These breakers are fast and violent, releasing their energy much more quickly than a gentle spilling wave.
Being close to the Bay of Fundy, we also have a relatively high tide. That means a lot can change in an hour. At high tide, there was nothing for my particular waves to get excited about. They ended their careers in a gentle roll onto the rocks. Still, that’s as interesting as the collision of breakers, and so I painted that in oils.
Rolling, not breaking, by Carol L. Douglas
I was most interested in the light conditions, anyway. I like a strong, raking sidelight, which autumn provides here in the north. Bobbi introduced me to a new term for this: contre-jour. That’s just old-fashioned backlighting in party clothes. I found it, almost in excess.
Already, the sun makes no effort to reach the top of the vault of heaven, dragging itself around the sky’s perimeter like an old man. It sparkles like a jewel on the water and it darn near blinds the painter. Still, every old farmhouse shone like an architectural jewel, and every plant and tree was picked out in beautiful gold. It’s the most beautiful time of the year in the northeast.
I’m no birder, and I don’t recognize these fellows. They’re about the size of songbirds.
We each did a second painting, down the road in quiet South Thomaston. There was little company except flying things—some gulls, some wee water birds, and several pounds of mosquitoes per square yard.
Sooner than I expected, it was evening and my truncated workweek was done. On Saturday, I had coffee with New Brunswick artists Alan and Helen Spinney. On Sunday, I clambered around a steep piece of hillside in Belfast. Today I feel almost normal. Thanks, Bobbi.
Posted on

Respecting private property

Nobody’s around and you want to paint. Find the owner, ask for permission, or just don’t do it.

The Dugs in Autumn, by Carol L. Douglas, was painted from the shoulder of a public road.

We don’t have air conditioning here. On the most torrid of coastal Maine nights we might run a box fan. This morning I woke shivering and ran to my closet for my fluffy robe. It’s 40° F, with an expected high of 62°. This is the start of sweater weather, and it’s the maddest, gladdest season of the whole year. It’s my favorite season to paint, and I will be heading out as soon as I finish this.

Last year I followed autumn across the continent from Alaska to Labrador. It’s very different in the west, where the gold aspens flame across the dark spruces. Here in the northeast, we have a more conventional show of reds and golds against the greens. That’s because we live in a hardwood forest.
Yesterday I went out exploring with Bobbi Heath. She showed me a nature preserve in my own back yard. This is Fernalds Neck, which juts out into Megunticook Lakein Camden. I’d been down the road, since a friend lives there, but didn’t realize it continued on past her house. I’m cautious about trespassing, as a general rule.
Rockport Autumn Afternoon, by Carol L. Douglas, was painted on private property, with permission.
The red (or swamp) maples were starting their show of brilliant crimson, but that’s not where we will head today. Instead, we’re aiming for the St. George Peninsula. Yesterday we scoped out a footbridge, a dinghy, and some slow-rolling waves, the last remnants of hurricane.
Some of these require standing on private property. We asked for permission at the places that interested us. Part of our job is to be ambassadors for plein air painting. That means respecting private property rights.
An artist is within his or her rights to paint from the shoulder of the road. However, boathouses, lawns and businesses are private property. So are the inviting water meadows that stretch out from the road. That ‘million dollar view’ may, in fact, be a commercial investment of a great deal of money. It looks unoccupied and poetic to you, but those heaps of buoys, pot-warp and traps are part of the owners’ livelihood, and they don’t want you messing around with them.
Wabash bottom lands, by Carol L. Douglas, was painted on private property with permission.
A few years ago, Bobbi and I set up on a roadside in Port Clyde, near an unassuming garage. While we were there, several other painters bushwacked behind the garage to paint. The owner showed up. He was rightfully enraged by the encroachment. Since we were on the road, we caught the brunt of his anger.
I’ve asked for permission to paint hundreds of times. I’ve been told ‘no’ many times. Usually it’s because the owner is chary of a lawsuit. In Indiana, I once set up along a swampy road along the Wabash River. A local warned me off. “There’s a meth house down there,” he told me.
Sadly, that’s a more common danger in modern America than wild animals. In rural New York, I set up on a roadside to paint a bucolic barn scene. A woman came out of her house and asked what I was doing. I explained and asked her, as a courtesy, if she minded. “I sure do,” she snapped. In that case, you should just leave.
Cattle, Sweets Corners Road, by Carol L. Douglas, was painted from the road side of an electric fence.
Of course, you should also respect fences. Cows and horses are pretty, but they can also be territorial, and you have no business being inside their enclosures.
Having said that, most people like artists and are curious about what we’re doing. In fact, most of my easel sales have been unexpected purchases by property owners who stopped by to look at my work.
Posted on

The way to end all wars

Hitler and Churchill were both artists. Who would have won a painting throwdown?

Mary’s First Speech, by Winston Churchill (courtesy Wikiart)

The Battle of Britain was a military campaign between the Royal Air Force and the German Luftwaffe. It was brutal and bloody, with 90,000 civilian casualties, 40,000 of them fatal. It is remembered as the first major campaign fought entirely by air forces. The United States hadn’t yet weighed in against the Axis powers, and Britain and Canada went it alone against the greater strength of German air forces.

The Battle of Britain was also the only battle in history where both leaders were artists. If, in June of 1940, Britain and Germany had instead engaged their premiers in an art competition, who would have won?
“I am an artist and not a politician. Once the Polish question is settled, I want to end my life as an artist,” Adolf Hitler said. He was bitter at his failure to gain acceptance at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, and in Mein Kampfblamed that failure on ‘the Jews’.
The Courtyard of the Old Residency in Munich, by Adolf Hitler (courtesy Wikipedia)
Hitler was rejected twice by the academy. His problem was his portfolio, which was heavy on architecture, light on portraiture and figure. One professor, noting his excellent draftsmanship, suggested that he apply to the School of Architecture. As a drop-out, he would have had to return to secondary school first, and he was unwilling.
Hitler described himself as a ‘student’ of Rudolf von Alt. However, there is no fantasy and little of the natural world in Hitler’s work. He showed a profound disinterest in the people who should have inhabited the architectural spaces he drew. If they appear at all, they are static columns. His painting style was far more conservative and pedantic than the leading lights of fin-de-siecle Vienna, such as Gustav Klimt.
Tree at a Track, 1911, by Adolf Hitler (courtesy Wikipedia)
Winston Churchill did not pick up a paintbrush until the age of 40, but he had more than four decades to practice his great avocation. “Winston found hours of pleasure and occupation in painting,” wrote his daughter, Mary Soames.
“It was a ‘love affair’ with painting – I think that is the only way to describe it. Problems of perspective and colour, light and shade gave him respite from dark worries, heavy  burdens and the clatter of political strife.” Painting enabled him “to confront storms, ride out depressions and rise above the rough passages of his political life.”
Churchill took up painting in June 1915. His sister-in-law was painting in watercolor at the family home, Chartwell. She gave him her son’s kit and urged him to try it. He was so enthusiastic he bought an oil kit the next day.
Lakeland Scene near Breccles, by Winston Churchill (courtesy Wikiart)
“The first quality that is needed is audacity. There really is no time for the deliberate approach,” he said. As a very busy man, he had no patience with the idea of traditional training. “Two years of drawing lessons, three years of copying woodcuts, five years of plaster-casts, these are for the young
 We must not be too ambitious. We cannot aspire to masterpieces. We just content ourselves with a joy ride in a paintbox.”
Churchill used painting to chase off the “black dog” of depression that haunted him through his life. By 1921, he was showing his work. He would submit pieces for jurying under pseudonyms so as not to influence jurors.
Churchill loved to paint en plein air, and his paintings are full of light and color. While he was not a master painter, he worked within the style and mood of his times, unlike the reactionary Hitler. If I were the juror, I’d give the first-place ribbon to him. Then again, I know how it ended.
Posted on

Why facts matter

What is an artist if not a truth teller? To tell the truth, you must understand what you are looking at.
Painted by Sandra Hildreth from Eagle Island during the ADK Plein Air Festival.

Sandra Hildrethnever wins prizes at the Adirondack Plein Air Festival. She exempts herself because she’s the organizer, but I hate seeing her work overlooked in the jurying. Part of what one registers in art is passion, and hers is very passionate work. She is the Adirondacks’ most tireless art champion, a fine painter whose skills are focused on what she loves.

“I paint what is wild,” she wrote. “It might be a moss covered glacial erratic deep in a tangled old growth Adirondack forest
”
Barnum Brook, 12X48, by Sandra Hildreth.
Full stop here: that’s the difference between Sandra and most of the rest of us. I understand rocks but could never identify a glacial spill under the mess of foliage of an Adirondack hillside.
A student at this summer’s workshopasked me why knowing what we were looking at was important. I was slightly nonplussed, since I like knowledge for its own sake. Still, understanding the natural world informs painting, and Sandra’s work demonstrates this.
Nocturne, by Sandra Hildreth.
Her painting of trees, top, has the authority and authenticity of fact. Her trees could be nothing other than Eastern White Pines clinging to a mountain rock in a cold lake in the northeastern forest. She has told us, as clearly as a photograph could, about the feathery needles, the soft color, the mature mien of the trees, and how the rock has cleaved with great age. Accuracy with drawing allows her to be loose with the paint. It also gives us a whiff of mountain air when we see the painting.
I don’t know Sandra well, but we painted together in a boreal wetlands a few years ago. She’s a friend of my pal and former student Carol Thiel. The two of them clamber around the ADK’s 46 mountain peaks together. Sometimes they bring their paints along on these hikes. Walking in the woods is a powerful learning experience.
Split Rock Falls, by Sandra Hildreth.
Sandra grew up in Wisconsin and has a BFA from Western Kentucky University. She taught high school art in northern New York for 31 years, moving to Saranac Lake after she retired. She paints full time and is a devoted grandmother.
She paints what she identifies as wilderness—not just the splashy big national parks, but the places where man has not yet tamed nature. “They just need to have some of the qualities of wilderness, such as very little evidence of humanity,” she wrote. “Places where nature is dominant, not civilization.”
Eclipse, by Sandra Hildreth.
At some point, an artist moves past what is painterly and beautiful and arrives at what is true. If you want to be a truth-teller, you must first understand your subject. We have all seen paintings of inoffensive, unremarkable trees and rocks. They tell us nothing about the terrifying majesty of nature. They have no lasting power. Sandra Hildreth’s forests are for the ages.