Seasick in my studio

Athabasca Glacier, oil on linen, by Carol L. Douglas

We bought this house during a fierce February a few years ago. It hasn’t snowed like that since. Yesterday’s storm was the first blizzard I’ve worked through in this studio. It has glass on three sides. The rolling, boiling, rocketing snow was more than my stomach could take.

That’s the first time in my life I’ve ever been seasick. Tea and crackers sorted it out soon enough, though.

I visited the Athabasca Glacier in the Columbia Icefield in the Canadian Rockies at the end of September. It was approximately the same weather as yesterday in Maine—bitterly cold, with wind that roared like a freight train. This is why I painted it from a photo.

I freeze my palette between uses. It was a bit of work finding it in the middle of that storm.

There is no way to get a sense of scale from this vantage point, but that small footpath leading up to the toe of the glacier is about 6/10^ths of a mile long and rises precipitously. It is marked with signs noting the farthest reach of the glacier at points over the last century. One seldom sees the effect of time on the landscape so graphically. Short of including a ghost glacier, however, I can’t include that information in this painting.

In a sense, this painting is a transcription, because it’s an accurate rendering of the only vantage point most tourists will ever see. The painting I started next is the opposite. It is based not on a real spot, but on a moment in time.

Underpainting of wildfire, by Carol L. Douglas

The northern Rockies are pockmarked by wildfires; they’re a natural part of that area’s life cycle. There’s something very ominous and beautiful about those still, dead forests. I painted a small portrait of one along the Alaska Highway. We passed through other, monumental ones, on the Top of the World Highway and in the Banff-Jasper park complex. These fire zones are often posted with the dates of the fires. Some forests regenerate achingly slowly. Others seem to sprout back almost overnight.

Mary and I found ourselves winding up a steep mountain grade within a very large burn area. The sky was milky in the angry way it is during a blizzard, or downwind of a forest fire. There was no sun, just a hazy light indicating where it might be.

My palette returns to the cold at the end of the day. That drift is close to my height.

What I’ve started here is based on that experience of winding and twisting in a dead forest. For the most part painting doesn’t concern itself with time or motion—we leave that to filmmakers and musicians. But both are, of course, part of the natural world. 

I’m my own restorer!

Mount Rundle, oil on canvas, by Carol L. Douglas

While the storm raged outside my studio yesterday, I retouched paintings from my Canada trip. I’m nearly done with this task.

I’m working on paintings whose emulsion was damaged by being stacked before they were completely dry. There isn’t much thinking involved, since I did all that on site. I just mix the proper color, fill in scratches and smears, and restore the original appearance.

A typical smear.

How did they get banged up in the first place? I had wet-storage for about a dozen paintings. Generally, after that, work is dry enough to be wrapped and binned with wax paper liners. It may have been the constant cold, but for some reason, they weren’t setting up very fast. I was constantly shuffling paintings to keep the wettest ones to the top.

No Northern Lights tonight, oil on canvasboard, by Carol L. Douglas

In addition, the roads were jaw-breakingly bad in many places. Part of our daily routine was to check the tailpipe and repack the back of the truck. All that bouncing meant that some things were inevitably going to be damaged.

Muncho Lake, oil on canvasboard, by Carol L. Douglas

In only one of these paintings did I make a material change. That was to add reflections on Muncho Lake. I knew they were there at the time, and they were important for the composition. However, Mary was sick, sleeping in a motel room at Toad River. I’d been gone all day and that was long enough.

Avalanche Country, oil on canvas by Carol L. Douglas

I don’t have much need for reference pictures at this stage. Since I didn’t take many, that’s a good thing. In comparing my trip photos with my paintings, I notice how blue all my photos look, and how vague the structures of the mountains are. It seems to me that my little pocket Panasonic camera perceives atmospheric haze more than my aging eyes do.

Chugach range from Anchorage, oil on canvasboard, by Carol L. Douglas

My eyes, my camera, and my monitor are all subjective observers, so none of them can be called objectively “true” at the expense of the others. It’s just another caution about painting from photographs, and another thing to ponder in regards to Truthiness.

I also started my second studio painting from the trip, of the Athabasca Glacier. That day, there was a ferocious, ripping wind. Even with an airtight hood, my ears rang. My easel spun helplessly on its tripod. There was no way to paint on site, so I settled for a hike and some photographs.

Underpainting of Athabasca Glacier, by Carol L. Douglas

This underpainting is not an abstraction, just a vast simplification. It reminds me a little of Rockwell Kent. Having no real desire to go down that road, I sigh and tell myself this is probably the high point of the painting.

Before anything more can happen in my studio, however, I have a driveway to shovel out. The morning dawned clear, still and cold, as if denying that it had ever stormed yesterday. “Liar!” I shout up at the sky, but to no avail.

Shovel I must. I’m having lunch with a student visiting from Tennessee. Later, a friend from Alabama is stopping by to teach me how to make biscuits. Maine is an out-of-the-way place to be the Crossroads of America, but a lot of the time it feels that way.

The day my Superpower failed

“Confluence,” oil on canvas, Carol L. Douglas

Every morning, I prod Mary until she pours herself into the car. She is still pretty low and would like nothing better than to sleep. I’m still wheezy myself, and it is hard to be the motive force in this campaign.

This morning, she realized she had left her wallet in Ft. Nelson after having her prescription filled. The clerk there couldn’t have been more agreeable, and will mail it along. However, Mary has no driver’s license. She’s been too sick to drive anyway, but I’d entertained fond hopes that she could take over before we hit Nova Scotia.

“Maligne Lake,” oil on canvas, Carol L. Douglas

On Friday night we drove to Miette Hot Springs, where I had a long dip while Mary rested. This is a beautifully situated spring, but its water is not particularly hot. Still, it was well worth the visit. It is at the northern end of the Jasper-Banff National Parks complex, making it the perfect jumping-off point for the weekend.

I painted in three locations on Saturday: along the Athabasca and Maligne Rivers, and at Maligne Lake. A lovely painting was around every corner, but three was my absolute limit.

“Maligne River,” oil on canvas, Carol L. Douglas

Jasper itself reminds me of Camden, albeit somewhat swollen. It has the same indecisive jaywalkers, but it is inauthentic, a hodgepodge of ersatz Alpine storefronts. I couldn’t tell if I was irritable at the crowds, at my own exhaustion, or at the crazy price inflation, but I was glad to leave.

We stopped at the Columbia Icefield. “This is the place,” I told Mary. The Athabasca Glacier tumbled off its mountain. Its glacial lake rested emerald green at its foot. We decided to walk to the toe of the glacier to reconnoiter.

We hiked to the toe of the glacier, but the wind was so strong my poor easel couldn’t cope.

We were met by a ferocious, ripping wind. I was protected by several layers but nothing could stop my easel from spinning helplessly on its tripod, especially with no trees on which to tie it down. I tried parking the car as a windbreak; the wind swirled around it. Meanwhile, even in my airtight hood, my ears were ringing.

“It’s no good,” I told Mary. “I will have to paint it from a photo.”

We drove on.

There are certain beauty spots that I’m conflicted about, where the character of the place is obliterated by the masses of people. Yosemite is one of these; Lake Louise is another. I would have painted it, if only I could have approached it. Even now, at the end of September, both Lake Louise and Moraine Lake are packed solid with cars and people. It was impossible to park within a mile of either.

Cars lined the roads to both Lake Louise and Moraine Lake. There was no room for a poor itinerant painter.

In general, Canadians are polite and friendly people. It seemed a pity to want to mow them down with my car, so I retreated to our hotel.

This morning I will try to get up there before the crowds return; if not, my series will be done without one of these iconic landmarks. Today we leave the Rocky Mountains behind us. The road we are now following is the Trans-Canada Highway, and it will take us safely across the prairies toward home.