Happy Independence Day!

In just four years, we’ll be celebrating the 250^th anniversary of our grand social contract. Here’s a challenge to you to paint what challenges us.

Breaking Storm, 48X30, oil on linen. Available. Apparently, every time I paint the flag it involves a boat.

In just four years we’ll be celebrating the 250^th anniversary of our grand social contract, the United States. At my age, it’s not unreasonable to wonder if I’ll make it. I have no doubts about Uncle Sam; he’s tough.

I was 17 at our bicentennial. The world should have been my oyster, but that wasn’t exactly how it played out. My older sister and brother had died in two separate, horrific accidents. Every memory from the time is tinged in bleak.

Six bucks a pound, 12X16, was painted in 2020 when lobster dropped to that price. It was $7.70 on my local dock on Friday, at the same time that diesel fuel has doubled in price. Not everyone is getting rich in the current inflation spiral.

However, I loved history, and I spent lots of time with people much older than me, people who decorated their homes with antiques, debated the strategies of the Civil War, and pored over Eric Sloane books.

I never believed that there was any hope I’d live long enough to see our semiquincentennial (my beloved siblings having set such bad examples), but I’ve never doubted our nation’s fundamental toughness. We’ve been through far worse—civil war, repeated cycles of boom and bust, political corruption, world war.

Striping, 6X8, oil on canvas, available.

Interestingly, we’ve never suffered a famine. The economist Amartya Sen has argued pretty persuasively that famine and democracy are inconsistent with each other. Famine occurs not only from a lack of food, but from inequalities in the food-distribution systems. While the Dust Bowl and the Year Without a Summer produced local hardship, people could and did vote with their feet.

When I hear young people talk about us having approached the ‘limits’ of democracy, I remind them that, as they love to eat, they have a strong interest in preserving democratic institutions.

Safety check, 6X8, oil on canvas, long gone to another home.

At 17, I’d have been surprised by the issues that convulse us today—not because they’re so different, but because they’re so familiar. I have a foster brother who came out as gay in the late 60s, I am from a multiracial city, I lived in a Jewish neighborhood, and abortion has been legal in New York since 1970. Race, religion, sexual preference and abortion are discussions that have been going on for my whole life. The difference is the bandwidth they take up today. We had just exited the Vietnam War at the time of the Bicentennial, and that was where our hearts and minds were concentrated.

However, there is a difference, and it has to do with our reaction to violence. In May, 1970, the National Guard fired on anti-war rioters and killed four students at Kent State. The nation was convulsed, and that event galvanized anti-war opinion. Last week, 53 illegal migrants died in an overheated tractor-trailer in Texas and we just hunker down and wait for the next catastrophe. We’re inured to death, which is a very frightening thing.

I don’t want to add to the ugliness of the world, but I do think it’s time to think about bigger issues. The problem is that social-justice art doesn’t pay, which is why I have a storage-room full of the stuff. But sometimes these things need to be painted.

My friend Mark suggested I create a challenge to artists to paint about social justice, and to post their work publicly. To this end, I have created a public group is on Facebook, here. I ask just three things:

• The work be genuine painting, not just billboards of angry words;
  
  
• We must respect differing opinions and try to understand the thinking that went into work with which we disagree;
  
  
• No political arguments; if you feel strongly, paint your feelings, don’t engage in verbal invective. I’ll just delete the comments.

And on that note, happy Independence Day! Enjoy your cookout!

I'm working, and other falsifications

In which our heroine blows off painting for a walk in the Maine woods.

Breaking Storm, by Carol L. Douglas, 48X30. It's finished, so perhaps I deserved a day off.

I had every intention of working on the Fourth of July. It’s one of the best business days at Camden harbor. At such times plein air painting becomes performance art. It drives some painters mad to be interrupted constantly. I don't mind.

Still, something Poppy Balser told me has been resonating. She’s taken the summer off from events to spend time with her kids. My youngest is twenty and has a summer job. However, this may be the last summer he comes home from college.

Rock hound with his dad.

This child is a rock hound. He loves picking the stuff up and turning it in his hands, puzzling out its story. He goes to school in the Genesee Valley of New York. Its red Medina sandstone is great for building gloomy Gothic insane asylums, but not so good for mineral or gem inclusions.

Mt. Apatite pit mine.

Van Reid is the author of a series of witty historical novels about coastal Maine. Last winter he told me about an abandoned feldspar quarry near his house. On Saturday, we hiked up to see it. It sits alone and silent in a vast empty wood, rimmed with ancient rock.

Yesterday was simply too glorious to work. Instead, I asked my son if he was interested in driving west to Mt. Apatite, near Auburn, ME. This public park contains a series of abandoned pit mines. Mined until the 1930s, they continue to attract rock hounds today.

Pegmatites are igneous rocks with exceptionally large crystals. They often contain minerals. In Maine that means beryl, tourmaline, zircon, garnet, mica and quartz, not that I’d recognize most of those things. But pegmatites are beautiful in themselves. One can trace the folding and cooling of the earth’s crust in them.

On Mt. Apatite.

There are rock hounds who search old mines for marketable gemstones. We were just interested in looking.

Mica may have little economic value, but it made the woods seem as if it had been sprinkled with fairy dust. It glinted on the path and between the blueberry bushes. There were enough garnets in the rocks that even I could find them. But don’t bother going there to find your fortune in gemstone; these garnets won’t survive being pried loose from their stony prisons.

Mica in the wild.

Minerals are apparently endlessly mutable. There are over 5,300 known mineral species. Their chemical composition is often very complex. For the human mind, with its desire to classify and categorize things, they are irresistible. Plus, they’re often beautiful.

We were poking around along a cliff when an older gentleman loped easily down the rock face toward us. He introduced himself as Dan. He was clearly knowledgeable about minerals and the history of the place. He told my son how to tap the Cleavelandite to split it, and gave him some hints about proper gear, locations, and the history of the mines in the region.

“It’s gotten really busy here ever since Mindat,” he lamented (referring to a massive online database of minerals). It’s all relative, I guess: on this busiest holiday of the summer, there was nobody there but the four of us.

Happy Independence Day!

I’m all for the Tenth Amendment, but there are times when States Rights are a pain.

Fox Island Thoroughfare Light, by Carol L. Douglas. Painted plein air from the deck of American Eagle.

While we’ve been legal residents of Maine for more than two years, we still pay income tax primarily to New York. It is one of a handful of states that tax telecommuters reporting to an office within its state.

Periodically, bills are proposed in Congress to standardize the rules for taxing telecommuters. These are quickly batted down. Powerful states, New York in particular, stand to lose a lot of money. Compared to poor Maine, New York is an 800-lb gorilla in national politics.

This is nothing new. By 1750, New Hampshire and New York were tussling over the Grants, the territory we now call Vermont. It wasn't sovereignty that drove them, but money. They were each selling land grants to speculators and settlers, not particularly caring if the grants overlapped.

Replica Green Mountain Boys flag from the Battle of Bennington, 1777.

In 1764, King George III settled the debate in favor of New York. New York promptly demanded a topping-up fee to validate the grants issued by New Hampshire. This fee was almost equal to the original purchase price. For settlers scrabbling to live on a hard, unforgiving and cold frontier, it was impossibly high. By 1769, surveyors and law enforcement were being physically threatened and driven out.

Some of these settlers appealed for help from a bumptious fellow from Connecticut named Ethan Allen. Allen had left school after his father died. His only involvement with the court system was from the wrong side. Still, he was fiery, and he was willing to find the lawyers he needed.

Schooner Mercantile, by Carol L. Douglas. 

The case pitted small landowners against powerful New Yorkers, including the Lieutenant Governor and the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, which was hearing the case. As is customary in such cases, the little guys lost.

That transformed Allen into a Vermonter. He returned to Bennington and met with the grantholders at the Catamount Tavern. From their grievances, the Green Mountain Boys were born. They intended to stop New York from exercising any authority in the Grants. Allen himself sold off his Connecticut property and moved north.

In October, 1771, Allen and his Boys drove off a group of settlers, telling them, “Go your way now, and complain to that damned scoundrel your Governor, God damn your Governor, Laws, King, Council, and Assembly.” That’s an idea I’ve often endorsed, although never so poetically.

In response, Governor William Tryon put a £20 bounty on the heads of the rebels. By 1774, he was exasperated enough to raise that to £100. He passed legislation to suppress the “Bennington Mob”, as he called them. It imposed the death penalty for interfering with a magistrate and criminalized all public assembly in the Grants.

If this unattributed portrait is any indication, Ethan Allen was a character.

On March 13, 1775, the conflict spilled into outright bloodshed.  A small riot in the town of Westminster resulted in the death of two men at the hands of Colonial officials. This might have resulted in an early War Between the States, but the fracas was overtaken by events.

On April 18, 1775, 700 British troops were sent to confiscate militia ordnance stored at Concord. Local militia resisted this early effort at gun control. The colonies united in force against the British. Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys passed down through history as patriots* and heroes, not as tax rebels from New York.

*The reality was a bit more complex, but I only have 600 words here.