Owl's Head reverie, interrupted

“The Cliff under Owl’s Head Light,” Carol L. Douglas, 10X8.

As I listened to my friend Kathy field calls yesterday, I was reminded of how fragmented our lives really are, and how our memories gloss over the interruptions. Perhaps she will remember her Maine trip for birdwatching and reading, but in reality she is spending a good part of it on the phone, trying to cobble together a care plan for an elderly relative.

We got a late start painting because I wanted Brad Marshall to choose the scene. I took him to two shingle beaches and a lighthouse, all at Owl’s Head State Park. As we trudged along a wooded path, Brad reminisced about his very first plein airpainting, decades ago.

Brad Marshall’s study of the cliff below Owl’s Head Light.

Brad is a very experienced artist.  He attended the San Francisco Academy of Art, and he works as a sign-painter, doing massive pictorial murals all over the US.  His paintings are represented by the Fischbach Gallery.

There he was in Stonington, with a field easel and some paints. How hard, he asked himself, could this plein air lark be?

Brad Marshall’s study of the beach at Owl’s Head State Park.

“It wasn’t like I’d never painted from life,” he said. “I had lots of experience with that. I was just unprepared for the difficulties of plein air.”

He was totally frustrated. “I thought, who is this man?” laughed Kathy. Still, the resulting painting, A Path in the Maine Woods, has proved enduringly popular.

I frequently tell my students that plein air is the most difficult and highest expression of painting. You can paint from photos? Congratulations; you know how to copy.

My study of the beach at Owl’s Head State Park.

Why bother with the extra work of learning to paint landscapes from life? The camera does a lot of the hard work for you, but it also eliminates most choices. It flattens out light and perspective. When you paint outdoors, you’re not just faithfully recording what you see, you’re painting your relationship with the natural world.

Old buds, together again. (Photo courtesy of Kathy Jalbert)

Yesterday my own painting was fragmented by too much closeness with my cell phone. There was something I needed to straighten out about next week’s workshop. I had scheduling issues for September that could not wait. Trying to answer these questions without my laptop, I managed to create a wild kerfuffle in my own mind. I got upset with a vendor, but it turns out that I, not she, was in the wrong.

To me, multitasking just means doing everything badly. Sometimes it can’t be helped. Listening to Kathy scrambling to fix her loved one’s problem, I was reminded that peace of mind is a great gift. Many of us are so overstimulated by years of fielding emergencies that we don’t even recognize peace when it shows up at our door. I’m not grateful enough for it.

Culture clash

“Kathy reading,” by Carol Douglas (not finished).

I met Brad Marshall years ago, when I was active in New York Plein Air Painters. We tried to hold a meet-and-greet in a Czech beer garden in Astoria, but we were washed out by a crashing thunderstorm. In those days, I lived in Rochester, had a crash-pad on the Upper West Side in Manhattan, and spent too much time breaking traffic laws between those two places.

Brad and his wife, Kathy, are here to paint this week. Although they are both thoroughly-assimilated New Yorkers, Kathy actually comes from good French-Canadian Aroostook County stock. I know her as a woman who can sniff out a designer bargain in seconds, but she really does know this country well.

“Boats in Rockport Harbor,” by Brad Marshall.

People from New York City and people from Maine are both intrepid, but in different ways. It takes nerve and knowledge to throw oneself across the platform into an overloaded subway car, or to suss out the best routes on the Manhattan Transit Authority’s 660 miles of track. It takes equal nerve to hike down a granite cliff or take your small boat out into that vast ocean. Each place has its own specialized footwear, however.

Yesterday I took Brad and Kathy to two favorite painting spots: Beauchamp Pointand Rockport Harbor. I paint or linger in both places frequently. It was interesting to see them through the eyes of visitors.

Brad and I painted while Kathy read and watched birds through her field glasses.

People always talk to me when I’m painting. Yesterday, a number of them asked us how-to questions. Brad and I answered differently, because we do many things differently: sketching and composition, canvas toning, palette, solvent, brush care. There are fundamental rules to each medium, but how they’re followed can take many different forms. This is why, as a teacher, I try to explainwhy I do what I do. Understand the question, and you have a full range of possible answers.

We ate lunch at the harbor. It took a long time in arriving, something I no longer even notice. Yes, things move more slowly in Maine than in New York. This is, after all, Vacationland. What’s the hurry?

It was a perfect day to paint. (Photo courtesy of Brad Marshall)

“Why would you want to be in the City when you can be here?” I asked Brad and Kathy, with all the enthusiasm of the recent convert.

“Pizza, the theatre, galleries, shopping, medical care, convenience…” they started.

“No granite canyons, no panhandlers on the subway, no smell of car exhaust or garbage, and no rats scampering along the streets in the early morning light,” I countered. There are many things I don’t miss about urban life.

I used to call New York “the center of the known world.” I no longer feel that way, but it’s nice to know it chugs along unchanged, and that my friends are still there whenever I want to go back to visit.

Holy mackerel!

My demo painting. Not inspired or finished, but by the time we were done, everyone had done all the steps.

I hate whole-class demonstrations, mostly because I hate watching them myself. Nevertheless, some processes require step-by-step instruction, and I try to sneak them in where possible.

With oil paint, you can set your easel up like a lectern in front of a group. With watercolor, particularly used as a field sketching medium, it’s not that simple. The work needs to be angled nearly flat, which makes watching the process more difficult.

Even in Vacationland painting classes fade away in August. People have things to do. Yesterday I was down to two students. Both are in the early stages. It was the perfect time to go over the basics of watercolor.

My idea was similar to those paint and sip events that are so popular right now. Being mid-morning, there was no wine. (Of course, there is no real relationship between drinking and art, any more so than there is between drinking and engineering.) Furthermore, I didn’t give them a canned subject; we would choose a general area in which to work and they could frame it as they wanted.

Come to Maine to paint. The conditions are strenuous, but you will learn a lot.

We did each step in unison. First we chose subjects, then we did a value study, then we cropped our studies. We transferred our drawing to paper, did washes, built in darks.

At no time did we proceed to the next step before all three of us had finished with the prior one. That has a curious way of messing with your concentration.

For a while, a school of mackerel swirled in the water at our feet, snapping at something on the surface. A large gull dove into it, coming up empty-beaked. Come to Maine to learn to paint; it’s never boring.

My polarized sunglasses let me watch this column of fish swirling in the water, but my camera could only photograph the surface.

We ran out of time long before we were finished, but we’d reviewed all the principles, including that a good painting takes a long time. Whatever the medium is, that’s universally true.

Our subject was simple and pedestrian, and eventually was obliterated by the arrival of lobster boats back from their morning’s work. None of us painted anything brilliant. But we established the order of operations for watercolor, which is so radically different from painting with oil. We were able to discuss brushes and technique in detail.

After class, I walked to the post office to get my mail. I remarked to my husband that teaching two students always requires more concentration than teaching six. I think all three of us learned a lot.

Melania's bimbo eruption

“The Laborer Resting,” oil on canvas, 36X48, Carol L. Douglas. This is a portrait of a sex worker.

Apparently, we are seeing the end of Puritan America. Only in 2016 can a small bimbo eruption in the form of a potential First Lady’s nude, lesbian-themed photos make the cover of the New York Post.

I found the photos remarkably pedestrian. There is no hint of real sex in them, merely two women being the medium through which photographer Jarl Ale de Basseville wrote his sexual fantasies. The photos are stylized to absurdity. Many men who paint or draw the female nude either romanticize, stylize or desexualize the female form in this way. In the timeless words of women through history: “Men! What can you do?”

“Saran Wrap Cynic,” 20X24, oil on canvas, Carol L. Douglas. Saran Wrap speaks to the commodification of women.

I spent a few years doing a body of work about misogyny and the toothlessness of the naked woman. My model, Michelle Long, is in fact a very strong, intelligent woman. I wanted to create something that spoke of the real state of women in this world, and she was game enough to work with me. Read anything else into those paintings and you’re projecting your own issues.

Perhaps this background colors my opinion about Melania Trump’s photos. However, they do speak to a bigger issue in sexual politics. Melania Trump’s dilemma was that even brilliant women have a hard time breaking out of a concrete housing block in Slovenia. A young lad from the Dominican Republic can escape poverty by utilizing his body to throw a baseball. Women don’t have that option.

This morning I was reading about a famous 19th century courtesan, Marie Duplessis. She was the inspiration for Verdi’s Violetta in La Traviata and the younger Dumas’ Marguerite Gautier in La Dame aux Camélias, but her life story is hardly heroic.

Marie was, in fact, a severely-damaged party girl of a type we moderns know all too well. Born Rose-­Alphonsine Plessis, she was the daughter of impoverished Norman peasants. Her alcoholic father savagely beat her mother, who died when the girl was seven. Her father abandoned her the following year, reappearing periodically after she turned 11 to try to sell her to strangers. When she was 14, he made a deal for her with a notorious debaucher. She ended up abandoned in Paris, where she took up work as a laundress and shop-girl.

Consider the girl’s dilemma: she could continue to work six days a week, 13 hours a day for 22 francs a month, until she was destroyed by hard work. Or, she could accept an offer of a furnished flat and 3000 francs to do the one thing she had been trained for: sex.

“The Servant,” 36X40, oil on canvas, Carol L. Douglas.

Duplessis was a celebrity, thanks in part to her string of famous paramours, who including both Dumas and Franz Liszt. She in part set the Victorian standard for pale, ethereal beauty. Of course, this was tuberculosis, which killed her at age 23.

To the end, she was a frenetic party girl. Her coachman reported that “at the end she drank nothing but Champagne.”

“I’ve always felt that I’ll come back to life,” she told her maid.

Non-marital sexuality is, too often, about power and influence. No, I don’t want my daughters showing up nude in the New York Post, but hopefully we have prepared them for better things than that.

I realize that sometimes it’s a fine line, but there is a difference between used and user. The latter should be censured; the former pitied.

Let that be a lesson to me

I’m going to look at this in the studio later and see if I can regain the sense of the Mercantile looming. Shadows, perhaps.

My flagging energy has been at war with the calendar. Two weeks from tomorrow I fly to Scotland for a wedding. That pretty much marks the end of my working summer, although I do have one event after that. That doesn’t mean I stop painting or that the crowds mysteriously evaporate, but the crush of people lets up a bit after Labor Day.

I stopped by to see a friend on my way home on Saturday. “I’m tired, hot and cranky,” I told her.

“Like you’ve been the last three times I saw you,” she replied.

The nicest thing I started this weekend was a small study of the Mercantile’s anchor.

I can see it in my work. I painted three things over the weekend in Camden. The best of these, a little study of an anchor, didn’t get finished. The one with the greatest promise—a tiny tender sheltering under the bow of the Mercantile—didn’t work. I should have known when I sketched it five times without a good composition that I was on the wrong track. Instead, I tried to force it to happen on the canvas. Without the Mercantile looming over it, it was just another dinghy.

Can I fix that in the studio? Possibly; I’ll try today. In fact, I need some serious time to finish up all the half-done work that’s waiting for me.

Sometimes I’m too dumb to stop. (Photo courtesy of Susan Renee Lammers)

Most of us work long days during painting events. I also blog about them, which usually adds an hour or two to my working day. There are some dead giveaways that I need a rest:

1. The bottom of my backpack starts looking like the bottom of my purse, a collection of flotsam and jetsam that has escaped its proper places;
2. My ‘filter’ gets jarred loose and I say things I usually keep to myself;
3. I gain weight;
4. My composition is uninspired;
5. I fight a dehydration headache and am too dumb to fix it with water;
6. My house and car get ratty.

I’ve said many times that people should take at least a day off every week. Rest is a great gift. “The Sabbath was made for mankind, and not mankind for the Sabbath,” Jesus said. Do I follow that advice? Only fitfully, I’m afraid. Today I have a sore throat and headache, and I think it’s just my body telling me to drop the pace down a notch.

The Angelique has been following me everywhere. Here she is curled up in Camden harbor.

I’m not the only person getting tired. I can hear it in the slow but steady increase in beeping horns as I walk to the Rockport post office at midday. Our tolerance for others is fraying, ever so slightly.

People ask me why I blog when it adds more work to my day. The nicest part of the weekend was a visit by reader Fay Terry of Pinehurst, NC. On Friday, she joined Renee Lammers and me on the docks to paint. Yes, social media has its downside, but its ability to connect like-minded people is invaluable.