Category: Uncategorized

Posted on

Why we buy art supplies

Nova Scotia Sunrise, 12X16, oil on canvasboard, $1159 unframed. The Bay of Fundy has high bluffs, but I can’t imagine a storm surge coupled with forty-foot tides.

My Zoom class was discussing ways to manage anxiety. “Is buying more and more art supplies a sign of painting anxiety?” Pam asked.

“Don’t judge me!” someone else laughed.

I’m cleaning my studio involuntarily. As of last night, Hurricane Lee was on track to nick Cape Cod and graze Maine on its way to the Bay of Fundy. Unless that hurricane does a 180, we’re due for, at a minimum, high seas. Normally I’d sit back with a glass of wine and watch the fun, but I’m supposed to be teaching watercolor aboard schooner American Eagle starting on Saturday.

The students in my watercolor workshop aboard schooner American Eagle get QoR paints, Princeton brushes, and Strathmore paper. You can’t begin to learn with bad materials, but nor do you need a surfeit of stuff.

“The time for taking all measures for a ship’s safety is while still able to do so,” wrote Admiral Chester W. Nimitz (in response to three ships of the Pacific Fleet being lost in a typhoon). “Nothing is more dangerous than for a seaman to be grudging in taking precautions lest they turn out to have been unnecessary.”

Captain Tyler King and reservationist Shary Cobb Fellows have roughed out a plan. We’ll stay in port another day, and the first day of the workshop will take place in my studio. Nobody needs to be bobbing around Penobscot Bay in high seas, including the boat herself, which is on the National Register of Historic Places.

Every September, my studio is, frankly, a mess. I’ve been using it as a staging ground all season. It’s not just cluttered, it’s filthy, and there’s no way I’m hosting a workshop in it the way it looks right now.

That led me to sorting art supplies. I’m a reformed shopper; I haven’t bought a tube of paint or a canvas that I haven’t needed for twenty years. But before that, oh, boy, did I have a problem.

The deck of the schooner American Eagle. We’ll get out there, but probably not on Saturday.

Added to that, people tend to leave things at my studio and they give me art supplies as gifts. Some are extremely useful, like the Rosemary brushes my students bought me a few years ago, or the charcoal Karen brought me from France. Others, not so much, but I’m very sentimental.

In my experience, people tend to buy unnecessary materials for three reasons:

  1. In lieu of actually buckling down to do the work. I’m not pointing fingers here, but a man I know always makes the first step of any job going to Home Depot. He may or may not get any farther.
  2. Because they’re frightened of actually painting. Shopping for art supplies is a lot easier than facing their fears.
  3. To experiment. That’s why I have a tube of liquid graphite, oversized chalks and various colored pens in my studio-none of which I use very often. On the other hand, that’s also why I have watercolor pencils, which I find indispensable.
Breaking storm, 48X30, oil on canvas, $5,579 framed. I know I just used this painting in my blog, but it seems somehow too appropriate, as that’s American Eagle rounding Owl’s Head.

I  freely distribute my supply lists for watercolors, oils, pastels and acrylics. If you stick with them, you can paint for the lowest cost possible. Still, I get many letters from experienced painters, like L, who wrote, “I’m always trying to decide if I am missing some beautiful mixes by limiting my colors too much.” That’s FOMO, or fear of missing out.

You can spend hundreds of dollars buying paint and supplies that are useless or redundant. My online class, The Perfect Palette, is meant to steer oil painters away from this. But perhaps even more important is to analyze why you’re going shopping in the first place.

My 2024 workshops:

Posted on

Monday Morning Art School: Painting the ocean

Breaking storm, 48X30, oil on canvas, $5,579 framed includes shipping in continental US

“How do you paint water?” is probably the most common question I’m asked. It reminds me of that old joke:

“Where does an elephant sleep?” 
“Anywhere he wants.”

Water is so immense, slippery, and mercurial, that it is impossible to nail it down into a schtick. And thank God for that.

Instead, the painter of water must rely on observation. Reflections are a distortion of the surrounding environment. That’s true whether you’re painting them on the ocean, or in a glass of water. These reflections are never going to be consistent but they will follow the laws of physics.

Camden Harbor, Midsummer, oil on canvas, 24X36 $3,985 framed includes shipping in continental US.

Imagine an ocean that is perfectly flat, and that you can walk on water. Looking at your feet, you can see straight down into the water. It’s not reflecting anything. Looking at a rubber ducky floating ten feet away, you’re looking at the surface at about a 26° angle. You’ll see a reflection of the ducky, the sky, and a glimpse of what’s under the surface. As you look farther away, the angle gets smaller and smaller, and all you see is the reflected sky.

Reflection involves two rays – an incoming (incident) ray and an outgoing (reflected) ray. Physics tells us that the angles are identical but on opposite sides of a tangent. This is why the reflection of a boat needs to be directly below the real object in your painting. You can add other colors into that area, but the reflection can’t be wider than the object it’s reflecting.

Water is transparent, but it has a shiny surface. Some rays of light make it through and bounce back at us from the sea floor. Reflections in glass work the same way. You can see through the glass in the surface that’s facing you, but the curving sides reflect light from around the room. Because glass is imperfect, these reflections will be distorted.

Drying Sails, 9X12, oil on canvasboard, $869 framed.

The ocean complicates matters by being bouncy. Even on the calmest day, the surface of water is never perfectly flat; it’s wavy or worse, just like a fun-house mirror. Waves are a series of irregular curves. How they reflect light depends on what plane you’re seeing at that nano-second. It seems like the easiest thing to do is to capture it in a photo and paint from that, but what we see in photos is sometimes very different from what we perceive in life.

Instead, sit a moment with and watch how patterns seem to repeat. They’re never exactly the same, since waves are a stochastic process (think random but repeating). But they’re close enough to discern general patterns.

Solid objects can also trip you up in their reflections. Consider the humble spoon. It’s concave. That distorts its reflections. There’s no point in trying to predict what you might see; it’s best to just look. Likewise, a mirror only reflects straight back at you if you’re in front of it.

Fogbank, oil on archival canvasboard, 14X18, $1594 framed includes shipping in continental US

There are times when the ocean makes no reflection at all. Only smooth surfaces reflect light coherently enough to make reflections. That’s why burlap has no reflections. Sometimes, when water is being wind-whipped, it doesn’t have reflections either. To paint such a sea, keep the contrast low. A grey, windy day, or a turbulent sea will have a surface too broken up to reflect anything but the most general light.

It’s always best to paint the reflections at the same time you’re doing the rest of the painting, rather than adding them as an afterthought. They’re a fundamental part of the design.

Some people say that reflections should be lower in chroma than their objects, but I don’t think that’s true. Often, the ocean seems to concentrate color. Sometimes, the water will be lightest at the horizon; other days there will be a deep band there. However, the farther away, the more its colors shift toward blue-violet.

My 2024 workshops:

Posted on

Quantity vs. quality

Home Farm, oil on canvas, 20X24, in an elegant copper frame with white fillet, $2898 includes shipping in continental US.

“I realize that my goals as an artist conflict with what I like and what I’ve learned,” a thoughtful reader wrote (in an actual letter, with a first-class stamp). “While I like to call them plein air ‘festivals’, I know they’re competitions designed to provide income to the host of the festival.” They’re promoted to artists as a way to sell paintings, but not all of them deliver equally.

I’ve been corrected when I’ve called these events ‘competitions’, but that’s exactly what they are. If artists aren’t competing directly for prize money, they’re competing for sales.

Main Street, Owls Head, 16X20, oil on gessoboard, $1,623 unframed.

My correspondent is learning to integrate value sketching and grisaille before going to color. “Taking time to sketch and check values on what I will paint goes against the idea of finishing five or six paintings in five or six days. As it is, I generally finish just three or four paintings in a one-week plein air event!

“Oh, well, I have six to eight months before I apply to one again. That’s plenty of opportunity to speed up my process.”

There’s no doubt that the more you do something, the faster it goes. I am quite capable of doing a value sketch, grisaille and good moderate-size oil painting within a three-hour window, but I’ve been at this a long time.

Another reader visited a large regional festival earlier this year and wrote, “I don’t get why people in the competition bang out crappy paintings in two or three hours instead of spending a day or more doing one good one. You could do four good ones versus six or more crappy ones.

“The current plein air frenzy misses the point of why artists painted outside, historically, and what they really achieved.”

“I think plein air competitions have lowered the quality of plein air painting,” a professional artist told me. He is not talking through his hat; he’s been a prize-winner at top-notch national shows. “That relentless push for quantity floods the market with frankly-mediocre work.”

Blown off my feet, 16×20, $2029, includes shipping in continental US.

What’s ironic is that this friend is, himself, a very fast painter, easily capable of hammering out an excellent painting in three hours. But he’s also very tough on himself, and doesn’t submit work that he doesn’t think is up to his own standard. Painting one fast painting is not the same as pounding out half a dozen or more paintings in a week under pressure. That has a way of dulling your compositional and color sensibilities.

No matter how you go about executing your work for a plein air event, quality, not quantity, ought to be the overriding concern.

“Apple Tree with Swing,” oil on canvas, $2029 framed.

My personal preference is the event in which each artist can submit only one work. These affairs usually give the artist a few days to execute one painting, and the selling prices are, generally, commensurate. I’m able to relax and think carefully about my approach. Furthermore, 35 painters producing 35 works means sales are more consistent than in a show where forty artists each knock out half a dozen works. Many of the resulting 240 paintings are never sold.

Yesterday I quoted a student complaining about mundane landscape paintings. However, that doesn’t answer the greater question, which is: if it’s not any good, what’s the point in painting it?

I like plein air festivals, and I’m sorry that my current schedule doesn’t allow me to participate in more of them. But I also recognize their potential to be corrosive to the very spirit of plein air painting.

My 2024 workshops:

Posted on

Does the world need one more landscape painting?

Seafoam, 9X12, oil on archival canvasboard, $869 framed includes shipping in continental US.

“While standing dumbstruck (again), gazing at the Tetons, I was wondering how one could ever paint them and do them justice,” a student emailed me. “Values and composition could be perfect and not capture the clouds swirling around the peaks or the fleeting rays of sun highlighting the face of a cliff.

“Day after day, I see mundane paintings of places like this. I see painters resorting to garish colors or blocky shapes. They don’t seem driven by the quest to capture the magical essence of these places. They just want to do something ‘different’.”

The Hudson River School painters, Thomas Moran, and even the Group of Seven were partly explorers, partly documentary painters, and partly evangelists for national identity. Today, exploration and documentation are dead pursuits. As for forging a national ethos, that seems hopeless in an age of ever-fracturing social values.

Larky Morning at Rockport Harbor, 11X14, on birch board, unframed, $869 includes shipping in continental US.

What, then, is the role of landscape painting?

There are times when I ask myself, “does the world need one more landscape painting?” Landscape painting is the unloved child of the contemporary art world, looked down on by its mandarins. It’s so traditional, and so beloved by middle-class people, that it just can’t be good, right?

Sea Fog, 9X12, oil on archival canvasboard, $696 unframed includes shipping in continental US.

Looking in vs. looking outward

We live in an age of omphaloskepsis. Our ancestors would never have imagined that our solutions, our meaning, or indeed even our troubles originated within ourselves. That’s what gave us expressionism, an art movement that presents ideas subjectively, distorting them based on our emotional state. That could never have flown prior to the 20th century (although the term is sometimes erroneously used for earlier passion/mystical painting).

Abstraction and expressionism have greatly influenced landscape painting, with painters interpreting the outside world through their internal lens, such as with distorted color or extreme simplification. The first people to do this, such as Georgia O’Keeffe or Charles E. Burchfield, were very innovative indeed. However, it’s been done to death. It is only applauded today because artists and art critics are-despite what you think-very much herd animals. They’re no more courageous than any other discipline.

So, do we all have to paint like Albert Bierstadt?

Albert Bierstadt was a great painter, but he was born nearly two hundred years ago. Even the Group of Seven were painting a century ago. Their realities are not our reality, their concerns are not our concerns.

Landscape painting became significantly less important after World War I.  Many of its major practitioners, including O’Keeffe and Burchfield, along with Alex Katz, Milton Avery, and David Hockney, were chiefly concerned with applying abstraction and/or expressionism to landscape. That meant that great landscape painters like Edgar Payne were never marquee names.

That’s both a problem and an opportunity. Landscape painters have the same kind of academic barriers to break through that their Impressionist ancestors did. But we also have an opportunity to develop a whole new vocabulary of landscape painting without tradition tying us down.

Stone Wall, Salt Marshes, 14×18, $1594 framed includes shipping in continental US.

Does anyone ever need to paint another wave?

I’m glad nobody ever asked Frederick Judd Waugh or Winslow Homer that question, for the art world would be immensely poorer without their surf paintings. The same can be said of Frederic Remington‘s nocturnes, John Carlson’s snow paintings, or all those haystacks Claude Monet painted. None of them painted those subjects as a schtick; they were working their tootsies off to develop as painters. And the legacy they’ve left us is priceless.

My 2024 workshops:

Posted on

What’s your default setting?

Wreck of the SS Ethie, oil on canvas, 18X24, $2318 framed includes shipping in continental US.

“My default setting is no,” Z- told me during Sea & Sky at Schoodic. What she meant was that ‘no’ is her automatic reaction when asked to do new things. It explained her reluctance to try new approaches to painting, and it was an insight I wish I’d had when I was raising my kids. I have one child whose default setting was ‘absolutely not!’ Had I understood that when he was four, eight, or twelve, I would have sidestepped many battles.

That’s because my default setting is extreme-yes. That’s just as problematic. I’ve taken many reckless chances in my life, some of which still manage to wake me up in a cold sweat. Even at my advanced age, I’m inclined to rely on intuition instead of reason. “I like making decisions,” I once told my friend Christine. That doesn’t mean I’m good at it; I just like the churn of change.

The Wave, 9X12, oil on archival canvasboard, $869, includes shipping in continental US.

Age tends to mitigate the worst of our excesses in either direction, but it’s helpful to understand where we fall on the spectrum.

Do you:

  • Enjoy unpredictability?
  • Get bored easily?
  • Engage in extreme sports or other adventure activities?
  • Make decisions quickly, without overanalyzing detail?
  • Have a high tolerance for failure?
  • Challenge conventional thinking or social norms?
  • Drive fast?

If you answer yes to most of these things you are probably a risk-taker. If you answer no, you’re probably more like my child. Of course, there are lots of people who fall somewhere in the middle.

I’ve spent a lifetime teaching myself to think before acting. Being married to a linear thinker has helped. But in art, being a risk-taker is not such a bad thing.

American Eagle rounding Owls Head, 6×8, oil on archival canvasboard, $348 unframed.

Stepping out of your comfort zone

If your default setting is no, how do you gradually expand your tolerance for risk? I vividly remember the first class Z-took with me. She called me on the phone a few hours before it started to tell me she couldn’t do it. To her great credit, she pushed herself through her self-doubts.

She was using a recognized strategy for success: she took a manageable risk (a class with people she didn’t know). That’s grown her confidence, and now she’s applying for shows and residencies.

What is the worst that can happen? You’ll make a fool of yourself? Nobody else is paying attention anyway, a fact I remind myself of, regularly.

Z-‘s desire to learn to paint overrode her anxiety. That is a cost-benefit analysis by another name, even if it’s drenched in sweat.

Skylarking II, 18X24, oil on linen, $2318 includes shipping in continental US.

Listen to yourself

Many of us run a soundtrack of negative thoughts without even being aware of it. We’d all benefit from stopping and listening to the voices in our heads. If they’re consistently pessimistic, we need to challenge our bad ideas. Would we say that to anyone else? Would we stand by and let someone else speak like that? Once you start to see a pattern of negative thinking, you can begin to replace that script with a more realistic assessment. And if you can’t find a way to redirect your thinking, it’s worth seeking professional help. (I’m from New York, where all the best people have had therapy.)

The importance of friends

Above all, a supportive painting community can do wonders for the risk-averse. “I think all painters are looking for a connection,” Z- told me. It’s a very rare person who can weather the storms of painting completely solo, so why even try?

I’m offering a class called Building on Success starting September 11. It’s about replacing those negative voices with something more positive. There are three seats left, so let me know if you’re interested.

My 2024 workshops:

Posted on

If it’s that stressful, it’s not sustainable

Possum, 6X8, oil on archival canvasboard, $435 includes shipping in continental US.

I’m a driven person, but every once in a while, I’ll get myself into a situation where I’ve pushed the accelerator too hard for too long. The chassis is shaking, there’s black smoke streaming from the exhaust and I’m gunning for a breakdown. It’s time for me to stop.

The artists who study with me also tend to be driven. I’ll occasionally see that same fracturing in one of them. Exhaustion threatens to derail their progress. That’s especially true when things aren’t going well with their work. It’s very easy to be bleak when you’re overtired, and easy to be tired when you’re bummed out.

We’ve all heard that prolonged stress can contribute to a weakened immune system, digestive problems, headaches, weight gain or loss, trouble sleeping, heart disease, susceptibility to cancer, high blood pressure, and stroke. Unremitting chronic stress is tied to diminished cognitive function, so it can hinder our long-term productivity.

Tin Foil Hat, 6X8, oil on archival canvasboard, $435 includes shipping in continental US.

Stress is a delicate balance.

Too much stress, and you break down. Too little, and you get nowhere.

We have all met ‘artists’ who go to openings and talk about the work they might do; in fact, there sometimes seems to be an inverse relationship between how much people chatter about their work and how much they actually do.

But there are other very serious artists who have a different problem. “I have the time to paint, and I want to paint,” they tell me, “But I just don’t seem to do it.” They engage in avoidance techniques, like cleaning, that stop them from ever getting started. That’s anxiety.

I finally have the luxury to be able to treat art as a 9-5 job, but before that I tried very hard to make a schedule and stick with it. Going into the studio every day at the same time encourages your mind to get down to it and not squirm around looking for an escape hatch.

“I know you’re all terrified,” a painting teacher once told my class. She wasn’t entirely right, but self-doubt can be bubbling along just under the surface, even in people who seem extremely confident. And it can blindside you when you aren’t looking.

Creativity may look easy, but artists invest incredible effort to create that impression. Art, if done right, is both mentally and physically difficult. It doesn’t get easier over time. “Painting is easy when you don’t know how, but very difficult when you do,” said Edgar Degas.

Pull up your Big Girl Panties, 6X8, oil on archival canvasboard, $435 includes shipping in continental US.

Finding a balance that works

Sustainability is about finding a balance that allows you to prosper over the long term. Unlike Hercules, we can’t enlist Hermes and Athena to assist us in our labors, so we need to find ways to regroup. (By 165 AD, Hercules’ fellow Romans were celebrating 135 festival and other holidays a year. Medieval peasants had even more days off. Our ancestors could teach us a thing or two about rest.)

Most modern people don’t observe a Sabbath, more’s the pity. It’s a gift, not an obligation.

Back It Up, 6X8, oil on archival canvasboard, $435 includes shipping in continental US.

Worrying won’t make it better

I really hope that most of the time you’re painting you’re ‘in the zone,’ happily making artwork. But it isn’t always like that; as I mentioned above, making art is often anxiety-inducing.

Getting older helps if for no other reason than that we’re just too blasted tired to keep worrying. But whatever your age, try to check your anxieties, perfectionism, and other mental hiccups at the door of your studio. You’ll find you have a lot more energy to work.

My 2024 workshops:

Posted on

Monday Morning Art School: the color of fall

Autumn farm, oil on canvasboard, $1449 framed.

According to the USDA, “a warm wet spring, favorable summer weather, and warm sunny fall days with cool nights should produce the most brilliant autumn colors.” We’re well on our way, having had plenty of moisture (and therefore new growth), along with balmy temperatures.

In the northeast, we’ve been seeing the first intimations of autumn for a few weeks: staghorn sumac sporting red velvety fruit, soft maples turning along the edges of ponds, and goldenrod and asters in unmowed fields.

As I look out my window, I see that the young maple across the road is turning gold on its top. It’s the perfect ombre coloring job, and Mother Nature’s been doing it for eons.

Beauchamp Point, Autumn Leaves, 12X16, oil on archival canvasboard, $1449.

This is my favorite season for painting and for sailing. The days are warm, the nights are cool, and the colors are glorious. It’s no surprise that my October immersive workshop has only two seats left.

Green matrix. The blue and black circles are much smaller because they have a higher tinting strength than yellows.

My students are familiar with the exercises I give them to mix greens, because the green matrix helps them avoid the ‘wall of green’ that’s the death of so much landscape painting. I tell them to leave out the top left mixes (yellow ochre/black and Indian yellow/black) in midsummer because they’re only appropriate for autumn. Now’s the time to add those back in, because autumn is as much about bronzes as it is about reds and yellows.

There are three pigments involved in autumn color:

Carotenoids: They give us the yellow, orange, and brown colors in things like corn, carrots, and daffodils.

Anthocyanin: That’s the pigment in apples, grapes, blueberries, strawberries and plums. It’s pH sensitive, which is why it appears to be red in some places, blue in others, and even violet or black.

Chlorophyll: That’s our basic green pigment in leaves. It’s responsible for photosynthesis, so it’s a fundamental building block for life.

Chlorophyll and carotenoids are in leaves all through the growing season but anthocyanins are produced in autumn. As chlorophyll production slows down, the reds and golds and violets in leaves are unmasked.

It’s a slow roll out

None of this happens instantaneously. It starts about the second week in August and continues until just the beech and oak leaves are rattling in the wind in November.

I like high chroma as much as the next painter, but what sets the florid coloring of the maples off are the browns and russets of the beeches and oaks, the violets of dogwoods, and the yellows of birches. Furthermore, about half the trees in the Maine forest are conifers. They’re not the same green as they were in spring; they’ll get deeper and duller as they too slip into dormancy. Convincing autumn color requires all of these.

A little exercise for you

Remember the green matrix I mentioned above? It’s still the basis of autumn color. If you’ve made one up (or in watercolor, made up a mixing chart of the same), try modifying each green with tints of the following colors:

  • Quinacridone violet
  • Ultramarine blue
  • Raw sienna

(A tint is a pigment plus white. In watercolor, you’re not going to add white, of course, but just a dash of the modifying color.)

Jennifer Johnson’s green chart. Modify the green matrix above with the addition of tints as shown.

The chart above, made by Jennifer Johnson, shows how it’s done. And when you’re finished, you’ll have a solid blueprint to paint your way through every subtle shade Mother Nature throws at you this fall. Furthermore, you have another hint as to why I paint with premixed tints on my oil palette.

Another little exercise

Quin violet and cadmium orange, surprisingly enough, make red.

Try mixing cadmium orange and quinacridone violet. Have you ever seen a natural red that’s more vibrant than this? I doubt it. Red can easily be too strong in a landscape painting, so in most field work, I just mix it.

My 2024 workshops:

Posted on

When automation stops being automatic

Bracken Fern, 12X9, oil on canvasboard, $869 framed.

I get lots of emails asking who hosts my website and how to make a commerce-enabled website. The short answer is, unless you need a custom-designed storefront for things like interactive classes and online registrations along with your painting sales, you’re better off with a plug-and-play website. I addressed this question in depth here.

When automation works, it’s a beautiful thing. Sales ring in the background, customers get their receipts and information, products get sent, and everyone is happy.

American Eagle in Drydock, 12X16, $1159 unframed.

When automation fails, it leaves us in a hole. In the modern world, tech support for broken apps is slim-to-nonexistent. If you doubt me, just try asking Facebook why they’ve suddenly put you under an interdict for violating a policy. There’s no human behind the system, because the system is too large to function on a one-on-one basis.

By and large that’s just fine-it keeps productivity high and costs down. But it’s annoying when you have a problem. About two weeks ago, my website and my checkout software stopped communicating. The link wasn’t broken on our end, and therefore wasn’t fixable from our end. It took nearly a week for their so-called ‘happiness engineers’ to get back to us. (I’m not making that up. That’s really what they call their poor tech support people.)

Skylarking, oil on canvas, 24X36 $3,985.00 framed.

When it rains it pours.

All of this happened when I was on the road teaching, first in Acadia and then in the Berkshires. I’m all-in when I’m doing a workshop. About all I could manage was a brittle smile and a promise to do something soon.

I have an IT department of just 3/5th of a person. My daughter is taking a few years off to be with her toddler and part-time work suits her fine for now. I’m lucky to have this; most artists don’t. And it’s still taken us a long time to fix the problem.

That’s why one of the important points of this post is for working artists to choose your website’s host carefully. Don’t buy more functionality than you need; there’s just more to go wrong.

We sometimes say ‘troubles come in threes,’ but what we really observe is that events sometimes seem to gang up on us. Chance is, by definition, random. We’re potting along under a clear blue sky and then, bam, all our metaphorical tires go flat.

After the Berkshires, I was driving home from a weekend party in the Hudson Valley when I started to develop a wicked headache. It was COVID. And that, my friend, is why we didn’t have a blog post this past Wednesday. I may be tough, but I’m not superhuman.

Which is the second important point of this post: yes, COVID is back again. Unlike prior iterations, this one is said to be mild. That means that it probably won’t kill you; however, it still kicks like a mule.

Persistent clouds along the Upper Wash, 11X14, oil on archival canvasboard, $869 unframed.

All’s well that ends well.

My e-commerce seems to be up and running, so if there was anything you needed from our website, you’re good to go. And since my last go-round with COVID, we have gotten easy access to Paxlovid. I’m already feeling a thousand times better. Thanks for asking!

My 2024 workshops:

Posted on

Monday Morning Art School: the perspective of clouds

This post first appeared in 2021, and has been edited to respond to questions from my Berkshire workshop students.

Clouds over Teslin Lake, Teslin, Yukon Territory, 9X12, available.

Clouds are not flat. The same perspective rules that apply to objects on the ground also apply to objects in the air. We are sometimes misled about that because clouds that appear to be almost overhead are, in fact, a long distance away.

I’ve alluded before to two-point perspective. I’ve never gotten too specific because it’s a great theoretical concept but a lousy way to draw. Today I’ll explain it, but it’s not how I want you to draw clouds. It’s just to understand them.

A two-point perspective grid. You don’t need to draw all those rays, just the horizon line. The vertical lines indicate the edges of your paper.

Draw a horizontal line somewhere near the middle of your paper. This horizon line represents the height of your eyeballs. Put dots on the far left and far right ends of this line, at the edges of your paper. These are your vanishing points.

A cube drawn with perspective rays. It’s that simple.

All objects in your drawing must be fitted to rays coming from those points. A cube is the simplest form of this. Start with a vertical line; that’s the front corner of your block. It can be anywhere on your picture. Bound it by extending ray lines back to the vanishing points. Make your first block transparent, just so you can see how the rays cross in the back. This is the fundamental building block of perspective drawing, and everything else derives from it. You can add architectural flourishes using the rules I gave for drawing windows and doors that fit.

All objects can be rendered from that basic cube.

I’ve included a simple landscape perspective here, omitting some of the backside lines for the sake of clarity.

As a practical tool, two-point perspective breaks down quickly. In reality, those vanishing points are infinitely distant from you. But it’s hard to align a ruler to an infinitely-distant point, so we draw finite points at the edges of our paper. They throw the whole drawing into a fake exaggeration of perspective. That’s why I started with a grid where the vanishing points were off the paper. It doesn’t fix the problem, but it makes it less obvious.

(There is also three-point perspective, which gives us an ant’s view of things, and four-point perspective, which gives a fish-eye distortion reminiscent of mid-century comic book art. And there are even more complex perspective schemes. At that point, you’ve left painting and entered a fantastical world of technical drawing.)

Basic shapes of clouds using the same perspective grid.

Still, two-point perspective is useful for understanding clouds. Clouds follow the rules of perspective, being smaller, flatter and less distinct the farther they are from the viewer. The difference is that the vanishing point is below the object, rather than above as with terrestrial objects.

Cumulus clouds have flat bases and fluffy tops, and they tend to run in patterns across the sky. I’ve rendered them as slabs, using the same basic perspective rules as I would for a house. They may be far more fantastical in shape, but they obey this same basic rule of design.

You can see that basic perspective when looking at a photo of cumulus clouds.

Clouds form where there’s a temperature change in the atmosphere. That means a flight of cumulus clouds or a mackerel sky will all have their bottoms at the same altitude, i.e. the same plane. However, there can be more than one cloud formation mucking around up there. That’s particularly true where there’s a big, scenic object like the ocean or a mountain in your vista. These have a way of interfering with the orderly patterns of clouds.

I don’t expect you to go outside and draw clouds using a perspective grid. In fact, that would be completely wrong. This post is to help you understand the concept before you tackle the subject. Then you’ll be more likely to see clouds marching across the sky in volume, rather than as puffy white shapes pasted on the surface of your painting.

Instead, I want you to observe the plane where clouds are forming, and how you’re looking up at the bottom of it. Note the real angles of the patterns they make. You use your pencil to figure this out. Line it up with the pattern of the clouds and then mark that angle on your paper, just as you do with any object you draw. Just make sure you keep the pencil square to an imaginary glass window, as you do with the pencil and thumb method of measuring.

Drawing clouds-like everything else-is all about measuring angles and distances. But the nifty thing about clouds is that in two minutes they’re totally different. Sneaky little devils.

My 2024 workshops:

Posted on

Living and painting close to nature

Marty Heagney painting at Hancock Shaker Village.

“It’s going to rain in ten minutes,” I told my workshop students.

“How can you tell?”

“I feel it in my corns.”

Lynda Mussen painting under a changeable sky at Canoe Meadows.

I don’t even know what corns are, but it seemed like a nice old-timey term for a skill that’s largely lost today. In truth, I was feeling and smelling the shift in air temperature and humidity that precedes a rainstorm. Sure enough, within ten minutes, it was coming down in sheets.

It’s been a continuation of the damp weather that has wrapped the northeast in flannel all summer. My students have been remarkably good-natured despite the mizzle and occasional downpour. That’s especially true of Cassie Sano, who’s had to dry out her tent more than once.

Yves Roblin painting at Hancock Shaker Village.

“We could paint here all week!” several people said of Hancock Shaker Village. I’d heard the same thing at Undermountain Farm. We were rained out of Wahconah Falls, but I believe it would have earned similar plaudits. Instead, we were rescued by the good people of Berkshire First Church of the Nazarene, who let us use their social hall for the day. Work continued uninterrupted.

“When the leaves turn over, and the silver undersides are showing, that’s a front change, usually not good,” I told a student from California. It’s a little like what happens when you part your hair on the wrong side; the leaves are ruffled out of their usual position. I was almost right; the weather did change. However, it wasn’t another drenching, but a clearing sky.

In the US and Canada, our weather almost always comes from the southwest. You can often tell what’s coming just by looking in that direction.

Then there’s ‘red sky at morning, sailors take warning.’ It means that a high-pressure weather system has moved east. Good weather has passed, making way for a stormy low-pressure system. The first half of that couplet, ‘red sky at night, sailors delight,’ means exactly the opposite. There’s stable air coming in from the west.

This delightfully fat sow is named ‘Stormy’. Appropriate for this week.

We used to have an old-fashioned ‘storm glass’ style barometer in our living room. It told us the same thing as the rhyming couplet with slightly more accuracy: falling pressure means unsettled weather is coming.

These signs were how people predicted the weather before the National Weather Service deployed legions of meteorologists and supercomputers to do it for us. For a detailed read, I find the air’s feel and smell just as reliable as my phone. That’s particularly true in coastal Maine, where the crazy-quilt coastline tosses weather patterns around like pinballs.

I spend several hours a day outdoors, in all seasons. People who live and work in climate-controlled environments never get a chance to develop that almost-intuitive sense of weather that our ancestors took for granted. They also never get a chance to see the subtle interplay of light and color that makes nature so magical.

This little donkey didn’t find me particularly endearing. Pity, that.

In addition to rain, we’ve seen a lot of animals this week. At Undermountain Farm, there were horses, sheep and goats. At Hancock Shaker Village, there were cattle and a great fat pig smiling as she wallowed in mud. I patted a donkey and asked him if he knew why he had a cross on his withers; he trotted away. On Thursday, we watched a family of mallard ducks dabbling in a shallow pond at Canoe Meadows Wildlife Sanctuary, with their fat tails and feet sticking straight up in the air. We couldn’t help but laugh.

And all too soon, it’s over. Today’s our last day, and then we’re gone for another year. But we’ll be back; the Berkshires are magical.

My 2024 workshops: