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Tag: gallery opening

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Letters from home

Opening Saturday, May 31, 4-7 PM
Carol L. Douglas Studio/Richards Hill Gallery,
394 Commercial Street, Rockport, ME, 04856
May 30-June 26, 2025
Tuesday-Sunday, Noon-5 PM

Lobster pound, 14X18, oil on canvas, $1594 framed includes shipping and handling within the continental US. This is true nostalgia, since this lobster pound is no longer with us.

Certain places evoke collective nostalgia because they serve as shared universal touchstones. These are places where personal and collective memories intersect. Maine is one of them, which is why I’m calling my first show this season Letters from Home.

Letters from Home opens on Saturday, May 31 from 4-7 PM, at 394 Commercial Street, Rockport, ME. If you don’t stop by for a glass of wine and hors d’oeuvres, I’ll be terribly disappointed. For one thing, I hate leftovers.

Country Path, 14X18, oil on archival canvasboard, $1,275 includes shipping and handling in continental US. This isn’t in Maine, but it’s in the show because country roads and paths are places which inspire that feeling of nostalgia in us.

Collective nostalgia and the meaning of place

Maine is in New England, but it’s too north-woods to be in the top drawer of the social tea chest. (That’s true of much of northern New England, although the Yankee village-square and sugar maple aesthetic is universal.)

Still, Maine is a cultural touchstone of many virtues which we associate with New England. These include community, rugged individualism, self-sufficiency, respect for nature and hard work. I know we now like to adopt a cynical attitude about those things, but I submit that’s a pose. Even when we can’t succeed at them, we still, deep down, admire those traits. Our feelings about them are embedded in our collective nostalgia for Maine.

To most of America, Maine exists out of time. We’re all nostalgic for an America that once was, and the remnant of that exists here in Maine more than many other places. While most of my readers have never even visited my little town (but you should), we all have memories of a time when America had smaller communities, mom-and-pop motels, restaurants that weren’t chains and quieter roads. These memories may not even be from our own generation, but universal images that go back generations.

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

Places also carry an imprint of history. None of us are old enough to have hauled up cod onto the icy decks of schooners that plied the Grand Banks. However, we understand their importance, and are happy to see them, restored and resting in our harbors.

Not all these paintings are from Maine, because I don’t always paint here. But they’re all of things I think of as universal archetypes from the past. That’s our collective home.

Artists like me are, of course, terrible offenders at promoting collective nostalgia. We don’t do that cynically, or manipulatively. Like everyone else, we feel the pain of loss and change, so we paint what’s disappearing.

Please join me on May 31, from 4-7 PM for the opening of Letters from Home, at my gallery at 394 Commercial Street, Rockport, ME.

Evening in the Garden, 9X12, oil on archival canvasboard, $869 framed includes shipping and handling in continental US.

Reserve your spot now for a workshop in 2025:

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All good things must come to an end: my end of year reflections

Autumn farm, oil on canvasboard, $1449 framed includes shipping and handling in continental US.

This evening marks the end of my 2024 gallery season. I’ll be celebrating with a reception for my current workshop students from 4-6, and I’d love to see you. On Saturday, I’ll dismantle the gallery, and on Sunday, I’ll head west for the 20th Annual Sedona Plein Air Festival.

Among my end of the year reflections is the realization that our stellar autumn is balanced by simply ghastly weather elsewhere. There’s been horrific loss of life and property during hurricane season and a nasty heat wave in the west.

Autumn Farm, Evening Blues, oil on canvasboard, $1449 framed includes shipping and handling in continental US.

Although there’s a definite nip in the air most mornings, this autumn has been glorious in the northeast. The dryness has meant that the tapestry of color has emerged early and brilliantly. We’re at that beautiful moment when leaves range from lush greens to amber, crimson and gold. The air is crisp and invigorating and carries a whiff of woodsmoke and fallen leaves.

None of that should preclude my praying for my Southern friends.

It’s cold enough that I’ve started lighting the woodstove at night, but we haven’t had a frost. And it’s apple season, so I’m baking an apple cake for tonight’s opening. It’s my mother’s recipe, and it’s reliably good.

Why am I closing now, when things are so lovely here? I’ll get back from my perambulations just before the holidays, during which we humans never seem to rest. But just as nature needs a dormant season in which to rest, so do we Maine artists. We’ve been flapping hard all summer. I’ll take those few weeks before Thanksgiving to reassess and reflect.

Beauchamp Point, Autumn Leaves, 12X16, oil on archival canvasboard, $1449 framed includes shipping and handling in continental US.

End of the year reflections

“Work smarter, not harder,” is something I’ve never really understood. I’ve worked as intelligently and as hard as I could. However, this year I turned 65. Although I have no intention of retiring, I’m finding my usual pace is more punishing than it was ten years ago.

That makes me evaluate what I’ve been doing. What benefits you and me the most? What is busy work? Do I have enough time to paint, or am I focused so much on teaching that I’m forgetting my first love? Is it fair to my family and friends to work nonstop every summer?

Just in case you think those colors can’t be real, here are my chickadees painting on Beauchamp Point on Tuesday.

Every opportunity comes at a cost. For example, in 2024, I taught a lot, but that meant I didn’t do many openings. Traffic in my gallery suffered. I need to do a cost-benefit analysis of each aspect of my business.

By the way, none of this end-of-the-year reflection means I’m cutting back on my blog. I get a lot of joy out of writing it and knowing it helps so many people.

Brilliant autumn day, 9X12, oil on canvasboard, $696 includes shipping and handling in continental US.

How about you?

End of the year reflections are a great tool. If you finished this plein air season without painting enough, you can plan time in your schedule to paint. If you keep doing other things instead, you can join a class or group to hold you accountable. If your spouse keeps interrupting you, you can use the winter months to get him involved in his own hobby. (Just kidding, honey.)

But, really, come out tonight

Student show
Richards Hill Gallery
394 Commercial Street
Rockport, ME 04856
4-6 PM
Friday, October 11, 2024

Reserve your spot now for a workshop in 2025:

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The gallery is open, finally!

It seems like it’s taken forever, but it’s really only been about three weeks…

I usually open my gallery on Memorial Day, but I was mucking around in Britain until early June. (I don’t regret that one bit.) When I got home, I still had to build the darn thing from scratch. My absolute drop-dead date was the 4th of July, and I’ve made it by the skin of my teeth.

When I moved to Rockport, my gallery was in my studio, which is a lovely, airy, large space on the back of our house. Visitors got a behind-the-scenes look at what I do. However, when COVID came to town, that space was closed down. My solution was a tent in the driveway.

Window frame, by little old me! Good for setting your drink on, but I wouldn’t lean on it too hard.

In the meantime, I started teaching on Zoom and recording how-to-paint classes. When social distancing disappeared, there was no longer room for a gallery inside my studio.

There were things I loved about the tent gallery. People could see it from the road, and there was enough fresh air for even the most dedicated social distancers. But there’s a reason we don’t store paintings outdoors. Wind and rain have done real damage to my inventory. Plus, there was no space to gather people and host an opening.

I researched using a tiny house (not handicapped-accessible) or another structure (difficult to place on this lot). The best solution was to put my gallery in the first 11 feet of our garage. I’m very grateful to my friend Barb Whitten and my husband. If it were up to me, we’d still be trying to figure out places for all the stuff that was in there. My husband worked with me every day since. It’s the most time we’ve spent on a project since we built our first house in 1987.

These are fake walls, in sections so they can come down if necessary.

Coastal color combination

You’d think after all that work, I’d enjoy picking out the paint, but instead I punted to my kids. I made about a half-dozen photo montages of my paintings in front of various paint chips and asked them to choose. The blue you see was not my first choice, but seeing it with the paintings, I think my kids were right.

“This house is becoming fifty shades of blue,” I told my daughter. But that deep blue-violet is a perfect foil for landscape paintings.

I’ve never installed a door before, let alone a door in a false wall. These are interim views of my theater set.

How to find me

My gallery (and studio) are at 394 Commercial Street, Rockport, ME. Hours are noon-5, Tuesday-Sunday until at least Labor Day. See you soon!