Secrets of success over coffee

Photo by Iván Ramos

I had coffee with my pal Iván Ramos yesterday. He’s a part-time photographer and a full-time realtor, although the proportions are constantly shifting. I recently recommended he read Art & Fear: Observations On the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking, by David Bayles. He’d just finished it.

Photo by Iván Ramos

Bayles’ idea of what makes a successful artist can be boiled down to this: they keep making art. (However, don’t think you ‘get’ the book from that capsule description because every page is an ‘aha’ moment. It will be the best $7.32 you ever spend.) Launching from that, Iván and I started talking about our own organizational techniques.

Photo by Iván Ramos

Eat the Frog First—this means to start off by getting the most detestable part of the job out of the way first. Often these tasks have the greatest long-term influence on your career, but you really hate them.  If you have to eat a live frog, it doesn’t pay to sit and stare at it a long time—it distresses you and bores the frog.

For me, the “frog” is marketing and organization and part of the reason I dislike them is that they ‘distract me’ from my fundamental job. But that’s silly; they are an integral part of my fundamental job.

Photo by Iván Ramos

Time Blocking—this means doing the same thing at the same time every day, and it’s how I live my life. I approach every task—from laundry to painting—as a process that is allotted a certain amount of time, rather than as a job that must be finished. I learned long ago that this is the single best way for me to avoid “painter’s block,” because I don’t waste any time jollying myself into painting.

Photo by Iván Ramos

Don’t Break the Chain—this simply means that an artist has to work every day to be successful. Iván told me that in the early days of his career, Jerry Seinfeld put a big red X over every day that he sat down and wrote. The writer’s job, he said, was to not break the chain of Xs.

Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in Belfast, Maine in August, 2014 or in Rochester at any time. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops!

It's apple blossom time

Orchard in Blossom, 1888, Vincent Van Gogh

This week, the fruit trees are starting to come into blossom. With my usual impeccable timing, I’m knee-deep in a project in my studio. Nevertheless, if Mother Nature cooperates, my class will be outdoors painting at G and S Orchards in Walworth this weekend.

Because I want my students to see how Vincent Van Gogh painted orchards in blossom, I went to Wikipaintings looking for examples. I do this all the time, but this morning the process stopped me cold.

I’d estimate Wikipaintings has about 1900 paintings and drawings attributed to Van Gogh. Between November of 1881 and July of 1890, Vincent van Gogh painted almost 900 paintings. Wikipaintings, therefore, must have his complete oeuvre in one place.

Orchard with Blossoming Apricot Trees, 1888, Vincent Van Gogh

We can’t understand a painting in depth from the internet. However, it’s quite possible to understand a painter in breadth using a resource like Wikipaintings. And, very simply, nothing like this existed any time in the past. When I was young, we looked at paintings on slides or in books. (In comparison, internet images are very clear.) The rare and pricey catalogue raisonné, compiled by researchers, was as close as we could get to a broad view of a painter’s work.

Orchard and House with Orange Roof,  1888, Vincent Van Gogh. Wanna paint as well as Van Gogh? Draw, draw, draw…

We are beginning to see the development of online catalogue raisonné (see here for an example) but they’re almost redundant in the face of this free, open resource, Wikipaintings.

Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in Belfast, Maine in August, 2014 or in Rochester at any time. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops!

Back to Castine in July

Castine from Fort George, 1856, by Fitz Henry Lane, The town is a little more populous today.

We interrupt the feverish painting of a lobster buoy to announce that I will again be painting in the 2014 Castine Plein Air Festival from July 24 to July 26.

Castine is a beautiful old town off the beaten path in Hancock County, Me. It is home to the Maine Maritime Academy. Like my home turf in New York, it has been under Native American, French, English, Dutch, and American dominion. But it’s a rare gem in that all those levels of occupation are clear to the casual visitor. They have great museums and their historical society has taken the time to clearly mark out historic sites.

One of two paintings I did at Castine Plein Air in 2013 of the tide turning at Wadsworth Cove.

Castine’s location at the mouth of the Penobscot River estuary gave control of the interior, which meant access to furs and timber. This is why it was settled early (seven years before the Plymouth Colony) and tussled over frequently. It was briefly the capital of French Acadia.

It even had a nobleman-gone-native, in the character of Baron Jean-Vincent d'Abbadie de Saint-Castin, who was married (in succession) to two Abenaki women.  Unlike New York’s Sir William Johnson, however, he appears to have been the real thing, rather than a jumped-up fur trader granted a title.

And the other one.

But all this history is overlaid not by the ruins of great mill towns, as it is here in New York, but with a “stunning collection of beautiful landscapes, rugged coastlines, historic architecture, and an abundance of New England charm,” as the Castine Arts Association quite accurately boasts.

This year, painters will be working on site for three days, with the festival culminating in a sale at the Harborview Room at the Maine Maritime Academy. They’ve doubled the exhibition space—which is grand, because it was tight—but they can’t double the hotel occupancy in the area. If you want to catch this fantastic event, you’ll book somewhere early.

Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in Belfast, Maine in August, 2014 or in Rochester at any time. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops!

Heart of the Andes

The Heart of the Andes, 1859, Frederic Edwin Church

Next month I’ll be down at Olana (the home of Frederic Edwin Church) to paint with friends from New York Plein Air Painters. To prepare myself, I stopped by the Metropolitan Museum to visit his most famous painting, The Heart of the Andes.

This is an enormous canvas—ten feet wide and five feet high—that depicts the whole panoply of earthly conditions, from the peak of Mount Chimborazo in Ecuador in the far distance to the lush jungle landscape lying at our feet.

The Heart of the Andes, 1859, (detail) Frederic Edwin Church, showing the focal tree at the lower left.

Church visited Ecuador and Columbia twice. He was retracing the journeys of a famous 19th century naturalist, Alexander von Humboldt. The Heart of the Andes is a composite view, including topography from many places.  The enormity of the canvas allows him to use more than one focal light. There is human activity, most noticeably on the path that leads us in to the cross, but we are cut off from most of it.

The Heart of the Andes, 1859, (detail) Frederic Edwin Church, showing the remarkably intricate foliage running along the right.

In the month of its first showing (in 1859) more than 12,000 people paid a quarter each to see it, waiting for hours in line.

“Nobody would pay a quarter to see a painting today,” Brad Marshall said as we looked at it. “They’d just look at it online.” But no photograph can capture this painting, particularly the intricate work running through the foreground.

The Heart of the Andes, 1859, (detail) Frederic Edwin Church, showing the church and village in the middle distance. There are worlds within worlds in this painting and the mind boggles at the idea of how he sketched it out.

Church eventually sold the work for $10,000, which at the time was the highest price ever paid for a work by a living American artist.

Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in Belfast, Maine in August, 2014 or in Rochester at any time. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops!

Anders Zorn, redux

Yesterday I went with my pal Brad Marshall to see Anders Zorn: Sweden’s Master Painter at the National Academy. Yes, I loved it. Here are a few paintings that really impressed me.

Herdsmaid (Walk), 1908. The softness of the firs is quite incredible. It appears to be wet-on-dry but I wouldn’t stake my life on that. He feels no need to be didactic about his narrative; instead, the figure of the girl and the cows disappear into the background. There is no brown in the dirtscape; it’s all shades of mauve.

Summer Vacation, 1886, watercolor. Emma Zorn posed as a tourist in this painting along the Baltic Sea. I’m blown away by the perspective in the waves; it’s perfect. So too is the soft wet (light) modeling and the dry (dark) modeling of the waves. It could be the Maine landscape with that outcrop in the background.

Lapping Waves, 1887, watercolor. Again the reflections in the water are stunningly realized, both in terms of shape and color. The houses rising on the far hillside are in perfect counterpoint.

Reflections, 1889. The foreground reed or branch screen is a problem in the intimate landscape. Painting them in can be fey; leaving them out ruins the sense of closeness. Zorn deals with this by bringing the contrast between the reeds and the background way down. The colors in the water are magical, and the light and chroma are all in the far bank, not in the figure.

Man and Boy in Algiers, 1887. Joaquín Sorolla and John Singer Sargent were renowned for their handling of white-on-white; here Zorn proves he’s just as competent at it. More than that, I feel like I know this guy; he may have been part of the late 19th century mania for Orientalism, but he’s a fully realized person.

Anders Zorn: Sweden’s Master Painter runs until May 18, 2014 at the National Academy of Art, XX Park Avenue, New York, NY.

Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in Belfast, Maine in August, 2014 or in Rochester at any time. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops!