Monday Morning Art School: How to make time to make art

Having trouble finding time to get anything done? We all are.

Commit to working with others, either in a class, a group, or a workshop. It will jumpstart your process.

These days, I’m turning over my guest room as fast as the Starlight Motel down the street is turning over theirs. Not well, I might add; my brother tells me I’m in danger of losing my five-star rating. Even though I strongly discourage guests in the high season, there are still people whom I want to see.

Not having enough time to make art isn’t a unique problem. It’s something I hear from other artists in every station of life. Jobs, children, parents, spouses or homes aren’t time-killers; they’re the very fabric of our lives. Still, too often we go to bed realizing we’ve done no actual artwork that day.

Schedule studio time. If you work at the same time every day, you spend less mental energy waiting for inspiration to kick in—you just dive in and do it. That’s more than a mental trick. Your body and mind crave routine. Working on art at the same time every day makes it easier to transition into the flow zone.

Take a class. They’re fun, social, advance your skills, and—just like joining the gym—you have money riding on your involvement.

Keep the set-up to a minimum. I keep my palettes in the freezer so I can paint in small increments. I sometimes work in watercolor when I don’t have time to set up in oils. I draw when I can’t do either.

I've been recording the passing scene in sketchbooks forever. I wasn't always kind.

Put down your cell phone and pick up your sketchbook. Draw in meetings, classes and church—it won't lower your comprehension much. I’ve written about the importance of sketching many times; it separates good artists from mediocre ones.

Make work a habit. Set aside a half hour a day and use it to make some kind of art. You really can cement a habit by doing it for a month.

A small amount of time with a sketchbook can yield wonderful results.

Cut out the screen time. Even with the decline in TV watching, Americans average about eleven hours a day in front of some kind of screen. You might find that all the time you need to make art can be found just by deleting the Facebook app. (Just be sure to subscribe to this blog before you do it! The sign up box is at the top right.)

Make a studio. If you don’t have a room to dedicate to art, make a studio in a corner of your bedroom or some other underutilized space. Having a dedicated, organized work space cuts down on the set-up time each time you want to work.

Find a corner somewhere where you can leave your project up.

Make art a social activity. Join a figure-drawing or plein air group. There’s accountability in committing to work with someone else.

Run away from home. Apply for a residency somewhere. Even a week of focused work, sans family, can be great for your development. I’ll be doing one at the Joseph Fiore Art Center this September.

The dreaded deadline. I hesitate to recommend this, even though the best way I know to chain myself to my easel is to commit work for a show. Yes, deadlines make you finish things. However, they’re corrosive to body and soul. Better to just develop good work practices.

Be patient with yourself

I had cancer at age 40. Since then health issues have played a much larger role in my life. I’m always infuriated by being sick, because I like to keep busy. But if you’ve just had a baby or are recovering from pneumonia, you’re not going be efficient. Be patient. Just as you have to walk a little farther every day to regain fitness, you need to slowly reform your work schedule.

I’ve got one more workshop available this summer. Join me for Sea and Sky at Schoodic, August 5-10. We’re strictly limited to twelve, but there are still seats open.

The lies we tell ourselves about painting

Some have a germ of truth; some are out and out wrong.

Île d’Orléans waterfront farm, by Carol L. Douglas. ‘Immediate’ shouldn’t mean half-baked.

Don’t overwork it: This is the most common bromide I hear. I hate it. It encourages painters to stop prematurely, and to not work out the latent potential or problems in the work.

It’s far better to go too far and need to fix your mistakes than never understand your limits or see where you might end up. “Don’t overwork it” is a great way to permanently stunt your growth as a painter.

Replace it with this: “If you can paint it once, you can paint it 1000 times.” It liberates you to scrape out, redraw, paint over, scribe across your surface and otherwise really explore your medium. And it’s actually true.

Cirrus clouds at Olana, by Carol L. Douglas. I couldn't have painted this had I not learned how to marry edges.

That’s your style: When I was a painting student, I had a teacher tell me that heavy lines were my ‘style’. They weren’t; I just hadn’t learned how to marry, blur or emphasize edges. These are technical skills, and to master them I had to move on to the Art Students League and teachers who understood the difference between technique and style.

Ultimately, we all end up with identifiable styles, but they should be un-self-conscious, the result of putting paint down many, many times. Anything that we do to avoid learning proper technique is not a style, it’s a failure.

Blues player Shakin Smith once told me that his style was the gap between his inner vision and his capacity to render it. That made me stop worrying about style at all.

Vineyard, by Carol L. Douglas, courtesy of Kelpie Gallery. The dominant greens in this painting are based on ivory black.

Don’t use black: “Monet didn’t use black, and you shouldn’t, either!” That’s true, but only after 1886, when Monet (apparently) adopted a limited palette. On the other hand, his palette included emerald green, which was copper-acetoarsenite, the killer pigment of the 19^th century. There are limits to aping the masters of the past.

Monet made chromatic blacks, which are mixtures of hues that approximate black. Every artist should learn how to make neutrals, and not rely on buying Gamblin’s premix. But there are places where black is useful. One is in mixing greens. Another is in mixing skin tones. Contemporary painting is all about the tints (mixing with white) but ignores shades (mixing with black) and tones (mixing with black and white).

Back in the day, art students learned not just tints, but shades and tones.

Pros use more paint: Beginning artists generally don’t use enough paint, so it’s useful to tell them to increase the amount of paint. However, there are some great painters out there who work very thin—Colin Page is an excellent example. The problem is in getting to that point. It’s a mastery born of years of experience. To get there you need—annoyingly—to start with more paint.

Fish Beach, by Carol L. Douglas.

If it’s not beautiful, you’re doing something wrong: Seeking beauty instead of truth is a great way to make static paintings. Paintings go through many ugly phases before they’re finished, and sublimating their ragged edges is a great way to drain all the juice out of your painting.

I’ve got one more workshop available this summer. Join me for Sea and Sky at Schoodic, August 5-10. We’re strictly limited to twelve, but there are still seats open.

Bigger isn’t necessarily better

Is Draken Harald Hårfagre a realistic transatlantic Viking vessel?

Wreck of the SS Ethie, by Carol L. Douglas. This wreck was in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, not far from L'Anse aux Meadows.

Draken Harald Hårfagre, the enormous Viking ship that crossed the Atlantic in 2016, is stopping to visit Rockland on July 22-25. I’ll go look at it, of course, since I’m interested in the Vikings and their excursions to the New World. However, there’s never been any evidence that such a large ship ever crossed the North Atlantic. It’s the wrong type of boat.

Like modern mariners, the Vikings had different boats specialized for different tasks. The knarr was the cargo boat routinely used for long sea voyages. It was wider, deeper and shorter than a longship. Knarrs averaged about 50 feet in length with a beam of about 15 feet.

Knarrs are sturdier than longboats, and depended on sail-power, using oars for auxiliary power. They were capable of making 75 miles a day and worked the northern reaches of the North Atlantic carrying trade goods and livestock. For that reason, it was probably a knarr that brought settlers to L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland.

The Bayeux Tapestry (c. 1070) depicts English and Norman ships in traditional Viking style.

Draken is not a replica of any real vessel. Her hull was built with materials and techniques similar to those used for medieval longships. Draken’s of a class of warship known as a skeid. She is 115 feet long, 26 feet on the beam, draws 8.5 feet, and has a crew of 32 people (chosen from a pool of a thousand applicants). She’s both bigger than the average skeid and carries fewer people.

Archaeologists discovered the remains of several ships in Roskilde, Denmark. The largest was built at Dublin around 1025 AD, near the end of the Viking Age. At 121 feet, it is the longest Viking ship ever discovered. Another was around 98 feet long and carried a crew of 70-80 people.

I’m reminded of this because I regularly drive by a sign in Waldoboro with the town’s motto: “Home of the five-masted schooner.” This is referring to the first such boat built, the Governor Ames. She was the world’s largest cargo vessel at the time she was built, in 1888. The first six-masted schooner, George W. Wells, was built in Camden, Maine in 1900. These boats generally moved lumber and coal. They were built as a cost-cutting measure at the end of the age of sail, but ultimately could not compete with steel ships and railroads.

Lumber Schooners at Evening on Penobscot Bay, 1863, Fitz Henry Lane. (Courtesy of National Gallery).

Of the eleven six-masted schooners built in the United States, nine came from Maine, and seven from the Percy & Small yard in Bath. The Wyoming, built by Percy and Small in 1909, was the largest wooden sailing craft to operate in commercial service, at 450 feet long.

These boats often had short careers. An exception was the lumber schooner Malahat, which enjoyed a good long interlude running rum to San Francisco during Prohibition.

“Schooner ‘Wyoming’ of New York, the largest schooner in the World at the L & H Docks, Pensacola. 93 days from Africa with mahogany. Will now load lumber and turpentine, etc. for France.”

Extremely large wooden boats had a tendency to flex in heavy seas, which caused their long planks to twist and buckle. This in turn let seawater into the hold. A number of them foundered just a few years after launching with the loss of all hands.

The Vikings—the greatest sailors ever—kept the size of the knarr down to what was seaworthy in the North Atlantic.

Draken Harald Hårfagre crossed the Atlantic with a support ship (to film the trip). But I spoke with a former hand after the trip. “Every day, I feared for my life,” she said. I’m not surprised.

Mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun

How to paint in direct sun without your painting getting too dark.

Painting in the direct sun at Fort Williams. Not only did I need gallons of water, but I have the most ridiculous tan. (Photo courtesy of Karen Lybrand)

Yesterday, Cat Pope saw the above photo and asked me, “How do you work in the sun and not make your values too dark to compensate?” This is a common-enough problem. Experience has taught me how to compensate, but I used to do it too.

Yes, I could have chosen a shaded location from which to paint, but not at the edge of a cliff looking down into the water. I wanted that view and was willing to broil to catch it.

I have an excellent field umbrella: the EasyL by Artwork Essentials. However, the onshore wind in Maine often sends it flying. It’s gotten to the point where I don’t even bother. I wouldn’t have used an umbrella in the above situation anyway, because my canvas was already the size of a kite.

Painting with Brad Marshall along Long Island Sound, where the sea breezes are light enough to permit an umbrella. (Photo courtesy of Rye Art Center)

I started this painting with the early morning light hitting from the side. By the time the light was overhead, I had the value structure laid out. That’s important because a raking side light isn’t as strong as direct overhead light.

My red canvas is part of the solution. I aim for a value-neutral, high-chroma color. Not only is a very light canvas a liar when it comes to value, it causes eye strain.

Painting on a pale or white canvas makes you lay down those first strokes too dark. To understand why, we need to go back to the master of color mixing, Josef Albers. Albers understood that the same optics rules that played tricks in color also did so in monochrome. He did many greyscale exercises along with his more famous color work.

We perceive the dark square differently in a field of red than in a field of white.

To apply his insights to field painting in bright light, a dark square in an expanse of white reads differently than the same square in a field of mid-value color. That’s why white space is such an important concept in graphic design. In painting, we subconsciously use that white space as part of our design, and when it goes away, we’re left with something that’s dark and drab. It’s worse when the white board is shimmering in the sun. Our pupils contract terribly, altering our perception of color and light.

I mix my colors before I start painting. I have the darkest dark and lightest light set out before I put a stroke on the canvas. This limits my value range and defines my color temperature intellectually, rather than intuitively. I block in my large shapes, shooting for an average hue and value for each large mass. Then I stand back and look at the painting critically, to see if the composition laces together. If it doesn’t, back to the proverbial drawing board.

Historic Fort George, by Carol L. Douglas. This was painted without an umbrella, because I didn't want to hike the Fort Point Trail carrying extra gear.

It helps to paint in the sky last. The tendency is to paint the sky too dark. This pulls the light level of the whole painting down to match.

I complicate matters by painting in my sunglasses. This isn’t a problem as long as I remove them and check my painting from time to time. The polarizing lenses cut the glare from both the water and the paint, so it’s not really that difficult to match colors accurately. And if the sea is a little bluer than in life, is that really so bad?

Monday Morning Art School: painting when the sun don’t shine

Changing light, comfort and safety, and keeping your materials workable are big challenges for bad weather

Rocky, by Carol L. Douglas, Cape Elizabeth Paint for Preservation

I’ve had great luck with weather this year, but that isn’t always the case. Last year I did an event in a cold rain that lasted from the opening bell until the jurying was complete, at which time the sun came back out. Mother Nature may forego the rain and sulk instead. Fog is beautiful but the flat dull light of an overcast sky is a challenge to love. Organizers may sympathize, but they can’t magically change the parameters of a plein air event. The show must go on.

Outside of events, painters have the luxury of staying home when they aren’t inspired. I don’t recommend it. There are exciting atmospheric effects that take place in bad weather, and if you aren’t there, you won’t see them. Nor will you know how to cope if you suddenly find yourself in a downpour when it really matters.

Storm Clouds (pastel), by Carol L. Douglas

There are three issues involved in painting in lousy weather.

• Changing lighting conditions.
• Your material’s stability;
• Your personal comfort and safety;

Changing and imperfect light is one of the principle arguments for doing preparatory sketches. This weekend, I painted a dramatically back-lit rock for Cape Elizabeth Land Trust’s Paint for Preservation. I only had about four hours a day when these lighting conditions were true, and they weren’t true on the second day at all, because it was overcast. At the same time, I needed to include the tide, which advances almost an hour a day.

I’d done a fairly careful sketch in advance and was able to refer to it when in doubt. I repeated that process on the canvas when I started painting. Some people think underpainting is a substitute for an initial value sketch on paper. The problem, however, is that you cover up the evidence when you paint. Without my sketch as my guide, I doubt I would have retained the rigor of my initial idea.

Painting in the residue of a hurricane with Brad Marshall. (Courtesy Rye Art Center)

Watercolors and pastel are very difficult to manage in a downpour, even when they’re out of the direct rain. Paper and chalk both become saturated with moisture, making control impossible. The only solution I know is to work from inside your car. Acrylics actually benefit from higher humidity, but sideways mist and rain will make them run off the canvas too.

Remember learning that oil and water don’t mix? Instead, they form a sludgy emulsion that’s impossible to paint with. Oil paint won’t stick on a damp surface. Since the pigment is in suspension in the linseed oil, it can bleed off with water droplets. Shake loose water off and pour off any that ends up on your palette. Don't blot.

Oil paint doesn’t freeze, however, making it great for winter painting.

Storm Clouds over Lake Huron was painted in the direct rain in a terrific downpour. The paint emulsified, but sometimes you just have to capture the scene.

With any media, you should avoid letting your canvas get wet from the back. Gesso expands and contracts with moisture changes. Copious rain will destabilize canvas and warp boards.

This spring, Ellen Joyce Trayer brought a bag full of knitted cowls along to my Age of Sail workshop. She handed them out to anyone on the boat who wanted one. I was an immediate convert. They warm your neck without adding bulk. A general rule of dress: you are coldest when standing or sitting still, so bring more clothes.

Massed thunderheads are beautiful and transient but put away your lightning rod (easel) and get off your mountain long before the storm hits. Lightning strikes on both the leading and trailing edges of thunderstorms. Even if the sky directly over your head is clear, you’re at risk of a strike when you can hear thunder. Far better to get inside your car and record the pyrotechnics with gouache.

I’ve got one more workshop available this summer. Join me for Sea and Sky at Schoodic, August 5-10. We’re strictly limited to twelve, but there are still seats open.