Landed in Anchorage

Approach into Anchorage.

My friend once toured Alaska in a small plane. When my daughter moved to Anchorage in 2015, this friend told her, “You’re going to the only place that isn’t beautiful!”

Nothing in Alaska is ugly, of course. Anchorage looks conceivable, which in turn seems pedestrian compared to the impossible beauty of the rest of the state. The city is situated in a basin surrounded by mountains and the sea. It’s shockingly new, because it was all leveled by the Good Friday Earthquake of 1964. But it’s graceful.

Part of us, but different.

What Alaska is, is different. I chatted with a very peaceable man last night, a pastor in a Nazarene Church outside of Anchorage. “I’d like to see when the Lower 48 comes up here to enforce gun control,” he laughed. Guns are woven into Alaska culture, and the people are scattered across an enormous body of land.

Fly from city to city in the United States and you’ll think that we’re a pretty homogenized group of people, we Americans. But get past the Big Box stores, and you’ll realize how diverse we still are. I live in a maritime village on the East Coast that is popular with tourists. Seward, AK, is about the same size and occupies a similar economic niche. The two towns are vastly different in character.

Seward may be the same size as Rockport, but it’s very different.

Our perceptions from mass media are almost always wrong. Wasilla, AK, got intense media scrutiny in 2008. I’d read about it, and seen pictures of it. But I was greatly surprised by its real presence. It’s an American suburb that looks like it could be attached to Dallas or Boston as easily as Anchorage. Yet the Wasilla hockey team raises money by having a gun show at the high school.

My pastor friend and his adult son had been out hunting caribou last weekend. No, they didn’t get anything, but “even if I don’t get a caribou, I had such a good season fishing it doesn’t matter,” the younger man told me. He’d gotten 24 salmon and two halibut. What they catch or shoot, they plan to eat.

If this shocks you, I’ll just note that it’s about a trillion times more humane than factory-raised chicken, and it’s far better for your health.

My bedside table in Anchorage.

There are signs in bear country that read something to the effect that, if you are going to shoot, you’ve probably already lost. Although a grizzly bear can weigh 600 lbs., it can also cross a clearing in seconds. I don’t have the presence of mind to test my skill against that. Heck, I don’t have the skill to test against that.

Follow my painting adventure across Canada

Last August I drove across Canada and the US to Alaska. This was not primarily a painting trip. I painted only a few watercolors from the passenger seat. However, the journey—remote, fantastical and very wild—fired a desire to do a real painting trip across Canada.

This morning I’m flying to Anchorage to start this dream painting trip. My wingman is my daughter Mary. We’ll be traveling in a fairly ancient Suzuki SUV. How this trip will pan out depends on a number of factors: the roads, the weather, and our endurance. Yes, there will be bears.

I’m bringing 65 canvases. I could finish them all, or a bear could steal my easel. There’s just no telling.

We’ll be driving the northernmost route that is possible this time of year. We have sleeping bags, winter clothes and bathing suits, just in case we find a hot spring.

I plan to post as frequently as possible, but internet is spotty way back of beyond. How can you be sure to keep up? Subscribe to my Bangor Daily News blog, and you will get my dispatches as soon as I file them.

That’s http://watchmepaint.bangordailynews.com. At the bottom of the page, you will see a block that looks like this:

Fill out the subscription information, and you’ll be added to my list.

Did I mention there will be bears? 

Painting clouds

“Whiteface makes its own weather,” by Carol L. Douglas. High contrast clouds and a flat brush imply rain.

Clouds are a terrific, rampaging part of the landscape, and often the best part of a composition. I love painting them. They seem so easy that I never figured there was much secret gnosis to painting them, any more than there is some magic trick to painting water. However, last week a reader wrote asking for tips about painting clouds, and she got me thinking about how I manage them.

Clouds have perspective, but it is upside-down from earth-bound objects. That’s because the vanishing point is the horizon, putting the farthest clouds at the bottom of the sky. While we mostly look at the tops of earthbound objects, we mostly look at the bottoms of clouds. That makes the shadow color predominant.

Altocumulus clouds over the Hudson River, by Carol L. Douglas

As with earthbound objects, there is also atmospheric perspective: clouds are generally lighter and duller at the horizon. This, however, is subject to circumstances. At dawn and dusk the horizon may be the most colorful part of the sky. A good storm turns everything on its head.

Figuring out the color of clouds is easy: there’s a color for the highlights, and a color for the shadows, and these are more or less opposite each other in color temperature. On a peaceful day, the values of shadow and highlight are almost the same. When there’s a real range in value in the clouds, you have an ominous sky.

Surf study by Carol L. Douglas

Note and use the patterns of clouds, rather than randomly placing one or two clouds in the canvas. The pattern should be part of your design. White, puffy cumulus clouds often appear in repetitive patterns across the sky. Cumulonimbus clouds are towering portents of rain or worse. These are the clouds that often have dark shadows and odd coloring, for they are livid.

A mackerel sky, high in the atmosphere, is a sky knitting itself together in advance of a change in the weather. “Mares’ tails and mackerel scales make lofty ships to carry low sails,” is an acknowledgement of this phenomenon. High-atmosphere clouds have no volume. They are merely regular patterns of white against a blue sky.

Higher cirrus clouds (above) and cumulus clouds (horizon) at Olana, by Carol L. Douglas

I used to live in the Great Lakes region. If I looked north, I would almost always see a band of cumulus clouds low on the horizon, racing down the center of Lake Ontario. Such local weather patterns exist all over the country. They are part of the ‘sense of place’ where you live. You can’t paint them until you observe them.

How do I translate those observations onto my canvas? In practice, I mix a puddle of the shadow color of the cloud and a puddle of the light color. I race around, first with the shadow color and then with the highlight color, to create a pattern. When that is established, I used particular clouds as reference to finish the details. Since clouds constantly morph, there is no danger of repetitiveness. This is the only time I ever use straight white from the tube, for it sometimes acts as my mid-tone in clouds.

“Clouds over Hudson, NY,” by Carol L. Douglas

What brush? As with everything else, it depends on what you are trying to say with your mark-making. A flat will convey energy. A filbert or round will allow you to be more lyrical. It’s up to you.

Dr. Albert C. Barnes, founder of the Barnes Collection, was very particular in how his paintings were hung. He believed that he could improve individual paintings’ compositions by juxtaposing paintings and furnishings in the greater space of a room. That’s pretty cheeky considering the Impressionist masterpieces he collected, but in his defense, nobody knew they were masterpieces yet.

You can use clouds in your painting to redirect the viewer in the same way. Although—like water—clouds’ patterns are usually wavelike and horizontal, there is no reason to be hidebound about that. Within the reality of their structure, you can find ways to lift and lead the viewers’ eyes.

The greatest painter of clouds alive today is the Glasgow-trained landscape artist,James Morrison. I strongly encourage you to study his paintings, to see how his clouds have volume, character and energy. They are never an afterthought in the landscape; they are a potent force within it.

How to take a day off

“Low Tide, Old Orchard Beach,” 8X6, by Carol L. Douglas

My life in the summertime consists of grueling road trips punctuated by short periods of paying bills. I live in America’s Vacationland. My career is what many people think of as a hobby. Every day should feel like a day off, right?

Most people have a structured schedule where they work a certain number of days and then have a few days off. That isn’t true for the self-employed, particularly artists who work another job to hold body and soul together. Many of us work seven days a week during the season. I’ve written before about how important it is to take a day off, but I can’t always do that on a regular basis.

People who only see me in public think I’m pretty high-key, and I am. I can work from early morning to late at night, turn out a lot of work, and chatter to passers-by at the same time. But after seven or eight days of that, I’m totally exhausted. The world starts to seem bleak. Little things irritate me. I start to develop cold symptoms as my body rebels.

“Early morning on the beach,” 8X6, Carol L. Douglas

The first day of recuperation is horrible. I can sometimes sleep 24 hours straight. Even with that, it might take three days before my inner Imp is back, bouncing up to see what kind of trouble I can get into.

I am fully aware that this kind of hypomanic/sleep pattern could result in a diagnosis of bipolar disorder. However, I imagine this is how the human animal generally worked before he was stuffed into a cubicle for eight hours a day. Since I am not delusional, I don’t think I’ll seek treatment for it.

However, my lifestyle means I have almost no capacity for normal recreation activities. I hate shopping, eating out, and watching TV or movies. Parties make me almost insane with boredom.

This week, I’ve been sans car as our fleet of aged hoopties cycles through the local garage for their annual autumn fit-out. This has forced me into a quieter place. I have a friend taking a workshop nearby, and she’s stopped by with wine and cheese twice. I’ve spent a few evenings sitting outside contemplating the stars. I’ve walked around Rockport. It’s felt wonderful to slow right down.

Dealing with rejection

“Rocks at the American Yacht Club,” 2013, by Carol L. Douglas. This is a good example of a bad photo, but it’s all I’ve got.

A friend of mine and I were contemplating a show that neither of us got into. We’re both old and experienced, but this one particularly bothered us.

If you haven’t experienced rejection, you probably aren’t pushing your boundaries enough. There’s always a level of event just above your current one. They’re worth aspiring to. Participating in them is, as my friend noted, like going to school with bigger kids. It smartens you up.

It helps to be reasonable about where you are in your professional development. If you’ve never painted in a plein air event, it’s unlikely you’ll get into a large national event.

Jurying is subjective, illogical, and unfathomable, so don’t pin your hopes on any one event. None of us knows what goes on behind the curtain. There are often structural constraints that aren’t spelled out, like picking a certain number of participants from the local region, or places already held by prior year prize-winners.

Even braced, you’re eventually going to get one of those letters that stings.  Maybe the entrance fee was princely; maybe you really admire the juror; maybe you’re painting circles around some of the other people who got in. None of that matters. Keep your disappointment to yourself as much as it’s humanly possible to do.

“Mamaroneck, NY,” by Carol L. Douglas

It’s possible to use rejection as a teaching tool. For example, I’ve been rather sloppy about how I’ve photographed paintings this season, since the pictures are often an afterthought, done in the shadow of my car moments before handing the work in. This is a wake-up call for me to put more effort into them, since they’re the only record I retain.

Time has shown me that, if I didn’t get into a show, there was something else I was supposed to be doing instead.  That turned out to be the case here. I was invited to paint at the American Yacht Club in Rye, NY on behalf of the Rye Arts Center on October 23. I love Rye, I love boats, and I’m looking forward to it.

But God doesn’t always drop another event into my calendar in an even swap. I figure that as long as I’m pushing myself to be a better artist, competing in the marketplace, and working hard, these things even out. And I always have fun in the process.