Tag: plein air painting

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Painting with dogs

Shela Fero Geiss and Matthew Fero with their parents’ two labs, private collection, oil on linen.

Dogs make lovely painting companions. Before I could bring my daughter along on painting trips, I camped and painted with my Jack Russell Terrier for company. He was a pleasant traveling companion (most dogs are), and he acted as an Early Warning System. As artists’ head are often in the clouds, painting with dogs is helpful.

I’ve never been approached by a bear or a threatening person while painting. At the hoary old age of 65, however, my left hook ain’t what it used to be. I appreciate the security painting with dogs provides.

Ever-loyal Guillo running circles around me.

My current dog, Guillo, is a mutt with a very calm disposition. He’s happiest when he’s with his people and he’s uncritical of even my worst daubs.

Of course, you must provide your painting pup with the basics: water, shade, and, if appropriate, food. In my state, a dog can be unleashed if under voice control, but that’s not true everywhere. Even here I have a tie-out in my truck. I wouldn’t let him roam free next to a busy road or near farm animals.

Painting with dogs isn’t always trouble-free. I periodically run across daft dog owners. This week it was the owner of a senescent Basset Hound whom I met while hiking. The human kicked and stomped at Guillo as we passed. That’s a self-fulfilling prophecy, as my friend Catharine would say. Guillo made a wide circle around her, but another dog might have answered her aggression in kind.

Dr. Martha Vail-Barker and her poppet, Poppy, oil on linen, private collection.

It’s your problem to keep your dog (and yourself) under control. “He just wants to be friends,” is no excuse when your dog has jumped up far enough to have given a thorough pelvic exam.

Earlier this year, Catharine was knocked down by a German shepherd, resulting in injuries that took weeks to heal. “What if that had happened to an elderly person?” she asked. (She’s 76.)

How do you know if your dog is a good boy? (Here’s a satirical answer to that question.) If you hear yourself say, “I’m sorry, he never does that!” it’s time for training. If you hear yourself say it twice, you’re the problem.

In a lifetime of dogs, I’ve broken up more than my share of fights. Twice, I’ve been bitten hard enough to break the skin. Both times were preventable.

The Beggar of St. Paul (detail) featuring dear old Max, oil on linen.

Dogs are simple empaths; they’re sensitive to the emotional states of people, and they only have two responses to threats: fight or flight. These are deeply ingrained in the evolutionary history of all animals, including us (although we can occasionally talk our way out of trouble).

Since 80% of Americans live in urban or suburban areas, our dogs spend much of their lives leashed. That cuts off the flight option, meaning that stressed dogs learn to react to threats with aggression.

A smart person learns to identify hyper-alertness, muscle tension (raised hackles), growling and barking as signs of a stressed dog. The trouble is, these can also be signs of an excited or playful dog. It sometimes takes some nous to know the difference.

If you have a highly-excitable dog who reacts badly to strangers, he might not be the best candidate for painting with dogs. But if you have a laid-back mutt, he’ll make great company.

My 2024 workshops:

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Monday Morning Art School: how to tell people what to do

Windsurfers at La Pocatière, 6X8, oil on archival canvasboard, $348 includes shipping and handling in continental US.

Witness this exchange:

“You should do more plein air events,” said A. “You’re a good painter.”

“I don’t enjoy them,” said B, who’s older and wiser. “I find them almost painful.”

“But they’re good for you,” insisted A.

I don’t think A’s comment was malicious. She works the plein air circuit. She can’t conceive of an art career that doesn’t involve competition. On the other hand, B has an extensive resume that includes signature membership in several prestigious national organizations. For her, plein air events are too much effort for too little return.

Early Morning at Moon Lake, 6X8, oil on archival canvasboard, $348 includes shipping and handling in continental US.

I love plein air events myself, but they have their downsides. There are often more artists than the market can bear, resulting in bargain-basement pricing. They can encourage artists to churn out quantity instead of quality. Without a good gallerist to guide buyers, sometimes sentimental dreck goes for good prices and fine paintings are ignored.

They can be nerve-wracking. I once did an event with a very fine painter who downed four glasses of wine in rapid succession before he could go to the awards ceremony. He took first place, but that is not a healthy way to run your art career.

Marshes along the Ottawa River, Plaisance, 8X10, oil on archival canvasboard, $522 includes shipping and handling in continental US.

Underlying A’s comment was the assumption that growth comes only through pain. Sometimes that’s true, as anyone who’s been through the creative desert can tell you. (The desert is a necessary step in growth, but you don’t realize that the first half a dozen times it happens to you.)

It’s equally true that growth comes through joy, quiet reflection, prayer, thought, or going for a walk. Each time I held one of my children for the first time was a transformative moment. It was joyful, but it came with the realization that my life was changed forever. A wedding is like that; so is getting your first dog. All have the potential to make you a better person, and the mechanism for that is joy and a determination to live up to the promise of the moment.

Pensive 8X10, oil on archival canvasboard, $522 includes shipping and handling in continental US.

I had two influential painting teachers. First was my father, who was often irascible but who taught me to draw and paint with great patience. Then there was Cornelia Foss, who is as tough a nut as ever came out of the Upper East Side. I’m not easily cowed, and I learned a great deal from her. However, my friend and sometimes-roommate Peter was a much gentler soul. I don’t think he ever finished a painting in her class. He would pluck his eyebrows out in frustration and anxiety. He’d make a good start and then wipe it out, he was so nervous. Cornelia’s indisputable genius landed on stony ground because he was so daunted by her. That’s pain to absolutely no purpose.

The second problem with A’s comment is that there is more than one way to skin a cat. (Sorry, Wylie.) My own path has been very different than A’s or B’s, but it has worked for me. Chutzpah seems to be a specialty of our age, and we’re all quick to give unsolicited advice, myself included. But if someone doesn’t seek our opinion, we don’t need to give it. If someone doesn’t depend on us for support, we can let them make their own choices. There are many routes to the same goal and what works for one person may not work for the next. That’s a big part of what makes life so beautiful and fascinating.

My 2024 workshops:

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How to become an artist

Skylarking, 24X36, oil on canvas, $3985 framed includes shipping and handling in continental US.

I learned to draw and paint from my father. However, my parents were adamant that I couldn’t major in art unless I planned to teach, and I hated the idea. That prohibition turned out to be blessing in disguise, because art education at SUNY schools in the 1970s was dismal.

I’ve helped a lot of kids get into art school but it isn’t something I’d encourage today. A year at Pratt currently runs $73,390. That is unrealistic for anyone but a trust fund baby.

Instead of being a fine artist, I became a graphic designer. Programs like Microsoft Publisher reduced the need for layout artists, so I went back to college for a software degree.

Ravening Wolves, oil on canvas, 24X30, $3,478.00 framed includes shipping and handling in continental US.

I took off my last semester immediately after the birth of my fourth child. Bored, I set up an easel in my kitchen and started painting again. “If you can paint that well after laying off for so long, forget software. The world is full of programmers; but there aren’t that many good artists,” my husband said.

I didn’t need to be told twice.

I knew my skills needed updating, so I commuted on weekends to the Art Students League in New York from Rochester. That is a 670-mile round trip, but when you want something badly enough, you’ll find a way to do it. There, I met Cornelia Foss. Her first assignment for me was to draw and paint an orange. “If this was 1950, I’d say brava,” she told me. “But it’s not.” Of my teachers, she was the most demanding, and I owe more to her than to anyone else.

In Control (Grace and her Unicorn), 24X30, $3,478 framed, oil on canvas, includes shipping in continental United States.

I decided to paint plein air once a day for a whole year, excluding Sundays. That generated an inventory of 313 landscape paintings. Having no better ideas, I started doing tent shows like Rochester’s Clothesline Art Festival. Eventually, I did these across the Northeast and Midwest.

These are fun but brutal. When 5 PM rolls around on the last day, you must pack up your merchandise, stow your tent and display walls and then drive home. I started doing plein air events instead. I still enjoy them, but I now only do a few each year.

Two old and dear friends were the nucleus of my first painting classes. Today I look back and wonder how I had the audacity to teach when I knew so little. I’ve learned as much from my students as they have from me.

I have friends who painted right after art school, but too many promising painters are forced by student loans into working other jobs. It’s more common that art is a second career. Most of us must make a living before we do art. As my mother once trenchantly put it, “In my day, we didn’t have time to self-actualize.”

Ever-Changing Camden Harbor, 24X36, oil on canvas, $3188 includes shipping and handling in continental US.

Here are my recommendations for a career in art:

At first you must play. I made prints, sculpted, and drew for decades before I settled down into painting. Don’t worry about wasting time and money at this stage; exploration is important.

Then choose one medium and do a deep dive. I was once a competent musician, but painting took all my available bandwidth. That’s a necessary sacrifice, except it never felt like a sacrifice.

Take classes and workshops. It’s cheaper and easier than trying to figure out everything by yourself.

Study art. Know your place in art history.

Do art every day, at least when you’re starting.

Let your style evolve naturally. Resist the temptation to pigeonhole yourself, or, worse, be pigeonholed.

Suck it up and apply to shows. Competition drives us to be better, faster. But don’t get discouraged; there are a lot of excellent artists out there.

Embrace marketing, it’s not a dirty word. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “Build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door.” That’s nuts. The world loves a good marketing plan, first and foremost.

My 2024 workshops:

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Intimations of spring

Spring Greens, 8X10, oil on archival canvasboard, $652 framed includes shipping and handling in continental US.

Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays me from the swift completion of my hike up Beech Hill (to paraphrase Herodotus and the US Postal Service). Here in Maine, we dropped into the teens last week. However, the worst hiking was through bucketing rain on Monday. I arrived home soaked to the bone and shivering uncontrollably. My student and friend Amy Sirianni stopped by; I met her at my door in a flannel nightgown and robe because I couldn’t get warm.

What’s a poor New Englander to do when both days and nights turn bitter? My mother used to book a flight to Florida for March or April; it gave her something to look forward to. She didn’t want to come home until winter’s back was broken.

Coincidentally, I’ve ended up doing something similar. At the end of March, I’ll again be teaching in Sedona, AZ and Austin, Texas. Instead of shivering in sleet storms, I’ll be in shirtsleeves under clear blue skies. Alleluia.

Most of my workshops are on the east coast, which is my home turf. These are the only two workshops I’m teaching in the west (although I dream of reviving Pecos). Western painting is different from New England in atmosphere, color, and vista. I’m grateful for the opportunity to work in both.

Sedona is a small city of 10,000 people located within the Coconino National Forest. The town is encircled by red sandstone massifs in various stages of erosion. They glow brilliant orange and red in the rising or setting sun.

Peace, 8X16, $903 framed includes shipping and handling in continental US.

“This color looks exaggerated to me,” I told Julie Richard of Sedona Arts Center when I finished Peace, above.

“It’s not,” she answered, most definitely.

Much of what we paint there are long vistas and those incredible red rocks set against junipers, piñons, and prickly pear cactus. We often paint from isolated trailheads, from which we can sometimes watch vast cumulus clouds form over the buttes and mesas and just as quickly blow away.

Avenue B. Market and Deli at night. We had a riot painting nocturnes here.

Austin, on the other hand, is the tenth most populous city in the United States (and grown out of all recognition from the first time I saw it). Our painting sites are urban, including the delightful Avenue B. Grocery and Market, where we painted nocturnes and ate fabulous sandwiches last year. Then there’s McKinney Falls State Park with its huge cypresses and turquoise spill basin. That’s where we painted bluebonnets in their thousands. On that magical day, hundreds of birds flew overhead in long, winding skeins.

“Canada geese?” I asked, confused.

“Pelicans,” someone answered.

I find gift-giving challenging, especially for those people on my list who don’t want or need more stuff. I could look at all the catalogs in the world and still not find the right thing for that person who has everything.

Pensive 8X10, oil on archival canvasboard, $522 includes shipping and handling in continental US.

For him or her, experiences are a better bet. If you’re looking for a truly unique gift this holiday season that feels extra thoughtful, try a workshop. (And if you want a workshop for Christmas, print this out and leave it someplace subtle, like under your spouse’s coffee-cup. He or she can use the code EARLYBIRD to get $25 off any workshop except Sedona, which is already a discounted price).

Also, if you’re thinking of buying a painting as a Christmas gift (another great idea for the person who no longer needs stuff), let me know soon. I’m my own shipping and handling department and I want to be sure your painting is delivered by Christmas. Until the first of the year, you can use the discount code THANKYOUPAINTING10 to get 10% off any painting on my website.

My 2024 workshops:

If you missed my North to Southwest virtual opening and have a high tolerance for listening to me drone on, you can watch it here.

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Beauchamp Point in Autumn

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

Each week until the end of the year I’ll be giving you a behind-the-scenes look at one of my favorite paintings. These are paintings that are available for you to purchase unless otherwise noted.

Ken DeWaard, Eric Jacobsen and Björn Runquist all live near me. In a normal year (unlike this one, where I’m tied to the studio making Seven Protocols for Successful Oil Painters), we paint together a lot. Not only are they very funny, they’re also quite tall, so I have artists to look up to.

Beauchamp Point (Autumn Leaves) was painted on a sunny fall day with Ken, on the dirt road that circles Beauchamp Point. It’s very much a local watering hole-I mean that literally, since there’s a protected swimming area with great smooth granite rocks on which you can sun yourself after your salt water dip. At the very tip of the point, there’s a land preserve that you can only access by paddling.

Spite House, located on Beauchamp Point in Rockport. Built around 1806 in Phippsburg, Maine by Thomas McCobb, this lovely colonial mansion was loaded onto a barge in 1925 and towed up the coast by tugboat. It was bought by Donald Dodge of Philadelphia who wanted it moved to Beauchamp Point in Rockport, where he planned to reside in the summers. Even the foundation was taken down and marked for re-setting on the new site. (Courtesy Digital Maine)

However, Ken is a disciple of a method he calls Park-N-Paint, which means that we never stray from our cars. I appreciate that, since my painting pack weighs about 40 lbs.

On this sparkling autumn day, the shadows were long and the sun was brilliant and warm. Ken painted the shadows on the rising forest slope. I looked down the road itself. There was almost no traffic, because very few tourists realize how lovely Maine is in October.

Rockport harbor is little changed from the time this postcard was made, as it’s home to many wonderful wooden boats even today.

The colors were brilliant, with every leaf picked out in jewel tones. As ever, I was reminded that we artists only produce a poor approximation of God’s handiwork. However, there’s something to be said for the way we interpret it. Plein air painting is truly a cooperative venture between nature and man.

You can buy this painting by clicking through here. I might even throw in directions to our secret swimming hole.

My 2024 workshops:

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The Radnor Hunt

Each week until the end of the year I’ll be giving you a behind-the-scenes look at one of my favorite paintings. These are paintings that are available for you to purchase unless otherwise noted.

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

I had horses as a kid, and I rode, but the kind of riding I did was generally country lanes or along the Erie Canal. My mare, Bess, had been trained to an English saddle and bit, so I rode her on an old hunt saddle. My gelding, Oscar, was trained to a Western saddle, so I rode him Western with a curb bit. Our third horse, Capricious, was too much for me, so I rode him as little as I could. I did do my first jump on him. It was inadvertent. I didn’t see the ditch, he did, and he flew over it beautifully.

I took enough riding lessons that my parents were pretty sure I wouldn’t fall off. After that they left me to get on with it. There was little style to my riding. I had no special clothes or boots. Our horses weren’t shod because we never rode on the road. In fact, much of their lives were spent turned out in our old orchard, where they’d get drunk every fall on rotting fruit.

I do love drawing and painting horses. This is Scout, my friend Roger’s horse. No sense fussing; he doesn’t know how to hold a pose.

As an avid reader of British literature, I always loved the idea of the hunt. However, the closest I ever got to it were the hunter-jumper classes at the Niagara County Fair. In field hunting, the riders are dressed with formal elegance, there’s a pack of baying hounds, and the horses are beautiful, muscular and brave. I always imagined them streaming along tree-lines and taking fences at a full gallop.

So when I had the chance to paint near the historic Radnor Hunt in Malvern, PA, I was thrilled. I would paint the landscape and when the horses appeared I would somehow limn them into my composition.

Few things have been more of a let-down. It was a weekday, so the riders were in ratcatcher, which is a nice enough combination of tweed and tan, but hardly the pinks (which are actually scarlet coats) or black-and-white of a formal hunt. I first spotted the riders as they picked their way slowly down a far hillside and crossed the road towards me. You can see them in my painting as little marks, if you look carefully.

The hounds didn’t seem particularly motivated to start with, and they promptly lost the scent (if they’d ever had it in the first place). Riders and horses trotted around aimlessly, a few taking soft jumps over a drainage ditch, while the huntsman tried his darndest to get the dogs organized. As the false starts dragged on, most riders pulled up in groups of two or three and chatted. Their horses cropped grass. Eventually it was apparent even to me that the subject of the hunt had outfoxed the dogs. They turned and headed back up the hill from whence they had come.

It’s easy to do a gesture drawing of a horse. You go at it just the same way you do with people.

It was hardly a scene from one of Anthony Trollope‘s novels, but I did get a cracking good painting out of it.

Yes, I romanticize horses.

Autumn Farm, Evening Blues is 12X16. $1449 includes shipping and handling in continental US. It’s a bargain compared to what a good hunter will cost you, and you won’t have feed, vet or farrier bills. Click here to purchase online.

My 2024 workshops:

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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:

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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:

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Painting Massachusetts’ wilderness

Cassie Sano’s painting of Undermountain Farm’s Victorian barns.

My father was from the west side of Buffalo and my mother was born in the first ward of Lackawanna, NY. Although they were both thoroughly urban, they bought a farm in Niagara County, NY in 1965. We had cattle, horses, ducks, and a hundred feeder chickens every spring. It was a well-ordered farm when it was established in 1861, and it’s maintained its good bones right up until the present.

Although I couldn’t wait to get away, I realize now that the countryside was a great place to grow up. Most of my practical skills came from growing up on a farm.

Yes, that’s a sheep keeping my painters company.

On Monday, I taught at Undermountain Farm in Lenox, MA. It’s got 23 horses, two sheep and two goats. The sights, the smells, and even the clatter of my shoes on the wooden barn floors were a powerful nostalgic kick.

Undermountain Farm’s horse barn has restrooms, a real step up from my childhood, where we had an external well with a pump that froze every winter. There are two horses at Undermountain Farm who are free to wander. As horses will, they really just want to scarf food the easy way. They found a broken bale directly under the hay chute, which happened to be directly in front of the restroom doors.

What? You want us to move?

Their need was not greater than my need, but they outweighed me. I pushed their noses; they pushed back. Docile they might be, but they were blocking my way. Finally, I thought, ‘just move the hay.’ Problem solved.

One of the students in this workshop is the wonderful painter Cassie Sano, who hails from Augusta, ME. That’s not nearly as sophisticated as you might think; really, she lives in the woods. She’s camping here in western Massachusetts and on the first day, she was dragging.

“I was up all night worrying about bears,” she told me.

“But you live in bear country!” I remonstrated.

“But at home I’m sleeping in my house!”

I told her all the comforting bear facts I could think of. When I got back to my daughter’s house in nearby Rensselaer County, NY, my son-in-law was cleaning up trash from a bear visit. We know they’re there; earlier this year we saw a sow and three cubs on the trail cam just behind the house.

Beth Carr’s lovely painting of Waconah Falls.

My daughter inadvertently acquired a rooster this year. Besides chasing pullets around the yard, he starts crowing just before first light. That’s another sound with a powerful nostalgic kick, as is the outraged ‘no thanks!’ from a disinterested hen.

If you’ve been to Boston and New York, you know something about the northeast. Yes, it’s urban and industrialized. However, get out of the major cities and our region is rural. In many places, it’s wilderness. If you really want to know New England and the Mid-Atlantic states, you have to get out of town.

Wow

If you got an email from me yesterday, you know I’m doing an immersive workshop in Rockport in October. I wasn’t prepared for it to be so popular; as of this moment, more than half the seats are gone. I’m looking forward to sharing my beautiful town with you.

Michael Anne Lynn perfectly demonstrated the successful phases of a good watercolor: value sketch, grisaille, color tests, and a finished painting. Now that you’ve seen this, you don’t need me.

Artists, housing and one of my students.

Creative types sometimes struggle with affordable housing just like many others. A student of mine in Austin (Mark Gale) along with a colleague of his in St. Louis, are involved in finding and supporting solutions.

They are developing a panel discussion for the 2024 South by Southwest Conference (SXSW) that showcases three success. (SXSW gets national attention.) To bring this discussion to the public, though, they need votes via a simple thumbs up on the SXSW panel picker.

Here’s a bit more info.

Or follow a direct link to vote.

The Austin program where Mark volunteers and one of those highlighted on the panel is Art from the Streets: 

Voting closes 8/20, so please do it now.

My 2024 workshops:

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The bones of painting, and a cute story

Watercolor grisaille by Rebecca Bense

Because I’ve been eating, drinking, sleeping and thinking nothing but grisaille recently, I decided to invert my usual lesson plan and start my Sea & Sky workshop at Schoodic Institute with a lesson on monochromatic underpainting.

We started with a soft blue sky that gradually resolved to a lovely milkiness and then to glumness as evening drew in. (It’s forecast to get downright surly before it clears.) But my students had strong value structures, which carried them over the rough passages.

Oil grisaille by Ann Haskell

Simplify, baby

Plein air painting can be challenging even without constantly changing light. By concentrating on value, my painters were able to focus on the bones of their painting without getting wrapped around the dual axles of hue and chroma. (A review of those terms can be found here.) As I wrote on Monday, value is king.

Oil grisaille by Linda Delorey

Let’s hustle

I’m writing this at 0:dark:30 on Tuesday morning as we try to figure out if and when the threatening storm will hit us. Don’t worry; I have a backup plan; in this case, it’s fervent prayer.

I normally write my posts the night before they’re published, but my students Karen and Diane have planned a cocktail party for Tuesday evening. We’re going for a short hike on the Sundew Trail before class, so I got up especially early to write.

I like speed and efficiency in painting too. I want to attack my color passages au premier coup, or at the first shot, instead of dithering about mixing and laying colors repeatedly on the same small section of canvas. That’s a surefire recipe for mud, whether you’re painting in oils or watercolor.

Demonstrating in watercolor to my intrepid band of students. (Photo courtesy of Jennifer Johnson)

And then there’s the brain

Grisaille is an excellent way for artists to train their eyes and minds to observe value and see underlying composition. It helps us to become more sensitive to the nuances of light and shadow, which are crucial for plein air (and indeed, all) painting.

Remember when I said ‘value is king’? Its co-regent is composition. Every other element of painting is subservient to this pair.

Linda Smiley had just started to add color information when we snapped this photo of her grisaille.

Let’s just screw around

I do my best experimentation with either a pencil or a brush in the grisaille phase. That’s where I can figure out the texture of a blueberry barren or the shape of clouds. It’s infinitely easier and faster than trying to do it in full color.

A wee anecdote from Monday’s class

A young girl, a member of a religious sect, stopped to observe us painting. She is interested in art, so Karen explained the value of a drawing practice. “Carol draws everywhere,” she said. “She even draws in church.” She told her the kind of things I draw in church, which you can find on my Instagram feed. “You could draw in church, too,” Karen added.

“I could never do that!” the young lass exclaimed.

I’m the poster child for hyperactive inattention. I believe drawing calms me down enough to open my ears. I’m not much of a believer in multitasking, but that’s one place where I think it works.

My new class, The Essential Grisaille, is available now.

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