The most expensive lesson I never learned

Sometimes it’s cheaper to let the pros do it.

Clary Hill, watercolor, by Carol L. Douglas

If you ever work in watercolor or pastel, you know the framing cost for those media is much higher than for oils. That’s because they’re fussy and difficult to frame properly. I occasionally use both in the field but not for events; I can’t deal with glazing and spacers in the high-tension moments at the end of a show. The worst injury I’ve ever sustained as a painter happened when I was levering a large sheet of glass into a frame. It snapped under its own weight and sliced my hand. That kind of thing makes you cautious.

Last autumn I did a residency at the Joseph Fiore Art Center. The result was eight oils and eight watercolors, all 24X36. One of each will be on display at the Maine Farmland Trust Gallery starting next week; later this year the whole set will go to the Jackson Memorial Library. It’s difficult to find a frame that works well with both oils and watercolor, but after much searching I found it in a deep, shadow-box moulding from Omega. I ordered enough material for sixteen frames. It has been sitting in the corner of my studio for a month, waiting for me to find the time to start.

Clary Hill, oil on canvas, by Carol L. Douglas

If you’ve done a lot of framing you should be wincing by now at the cost of this venture. The moulding was $800 for the stock alone. I went out yesterday to find the proper glazing material for the watercolors. (It’s easier to find a picture framer than a chain clothing store in my neck of the woods, and that’s how life should be.) The glazing would be between $90 and $140 per picture, depending on what I chose. Each watercolor would also need foam core, mat-board and spacers.

But being professionals, they wanted the frame in hand before they started cutting into their expensive materials. I’d have to return with it this morning.

Glade, watercolor, by Carol L. Douglas

“Then what,” I asked, “would the cost be to assemble the whole thing right here?” The price they gave me was only marginally higher than the materials cost. Bam! I’m dropping off the test picture this morning and they can do the fiddly bits. If it looks as good as I expect it will, they can do all eight of the watercolors.

I can usually copy most things I’ve seen built, and I take pride in craftsmanship, but I’m always working with home tools. I don’t, for example, have a power stapler; I join corners with careful gluing and brackets. Their joiners and staplers don’t just make things faster; they result in tighter, neater work. And while making things is fun, it’s hardly what you want to do when pressed, as I am right now.

Float, oil on canvas, by Carol L. Douglas

I’m in a point in my life where my scarcest asset is time, rather than money. But it’s never occurred to me to hire out work I can do myself. Still, maybe there are times it’s better to let the pros do it.

“I need an admin,” I whined to my upcoming portrait client yesterday afternoon.

“Virtual assistants are the thing. And usually at an attractive fee, too,” she responded. How that works, I don’t know, but perhaps it’s time to find out.

The pernicious practice of ‘feedback'

Ditch it, says a business consultant. We artists could learn something from him.

Blizzard, by Carol L. Douglas. We all want to be outside, so my students painted out the windows yesterday. I've done that a few times myself!

One of my students just came back from wintering in Australia. We’ve been practicing formal analysis in her absence. That means we consider a painting on the basis of its formal structure. This isn’t a like-vs-dislike process, but rather an objective one, talking about how the painter uses various techniques to advance his goals.

The protocol for criticism in my studio has always been the sandwich rule. We begin by pointing out something the person did well. We then discuss what might have been handled differently. We finish by pointing out something else that the person did well, so that each session ends on a positive note.

Snow squall, by Carol L. Douglas

This method has been mocked as “fluffy bun—meat—fluffy bun,” but that misses the point. Most people are all too aware of their failures and not aware of their strengths. Catch them doing something right and they’re likely to repeat it.

Since I hadn’t given my wanderer adequate instruction, she was lost. It didn’t help that the painting we were analyzing (by another student) was a stunner. It was all too easy to gush.

There’s nothing wrong with that, and we’ll continue to use the sandwich rule for our critique sessions. My goal in practicing academic criticism with them was different. I wanted to them to start seeing how form, shape, repetition and rhythm work together in painting. But I also wanted to take the judgment out of looking at art.

Tree line, by Carol L. Douglas

The Feedback Fallacy—an article that’s about to be released as a book—takes aim at the pernicious practice of feedback. Marcus Buckingham writes for a business audience, but what he has to say is applicable to the arts, in schools, and in families. He says our culture of criticism as based on three lies: 

• The best way to help you is to show you something you’re too blind to see for yourself;
• Learning is like filling an empty vessel—you lack abilities and it’s up to someone else to teach you;
• Great performance is universal and measurable. Once defined, it can be transferred from one person to another, regardless of the recipient’s strengths and weaknesses. 

Focusing on an imaginary standard of greatness—and how we fall short—doesn’t enable learning. In fact, it shuts it right down. Learning happens when we see how we might do something better, not when our errors are pointed out to us. I can tell a student a hundred times to not dab, but it isn’t until I pick up his brush and show him how to make a proper mark that he will understand what “not dabbing” means. And it won’t be until he has made great marks—uniquely, idiosyncratically his own, with power and confidence—that he will have mastered mark-making.

My backyard, by Carol L. Douglas

Positive reaction, done right, is harder than negative criticism. You need to catch a person doing something right before you can comment. That means constant vigilance and a rock-solid understanding of process. It requires being able to differentiate between idiosyncrasy, style, and the real technical issues that can cause a painting to fail. Above all, it requires confidence. Nobody is supportive from a position of weakness.

We live in a corrosive culture, and it affects all our interactions. But one thing we can do is ditch the unnecessary feedback in the studio. If you’re ever wondering whether a ‘bit of advice’ to another painter is a good idea, just don’t.

Note: my next eight-week session in Rockport starts March 12. I think I'm full up, but if you want to be wait-listed, email me. Details on my classes are here.

Buying too many paints is a classic rookie error

Mix, don't buy, your colors.

Grand Bahama palms, by Carol L. Douglas. There's really no reason to buy any greens for oil painting, and just one will do for watercolors.

“[Our] watercolor instructor wants us to buy every color we need for a painting. I think it is unnecessary because you can mix colors to get the same or similar results. What is your opinion?” a reader asked.

I ask my students to buy a specific palette based on paired primaries, but that is very different from asking them to buy a specific pigment for a painting. An artist who regularly switches out his or her paints is akin to a pianist who rearranges the keys for each song.

Buying too many paints is a classic rookie error. It’s easy to get pulled into a revel of paint-buying when you’re feeling unsure. We’ve all done it.

Tomatoes, by Carol L. Douglas, was painted without any red or green on my palette. The red you see is violet and orange.

The clear leader in marketing romance, as Handprint calls it, is Daniel Smith. I sometimes go to their website to feel the verbiage wash over me. “The mineral for our Red Jasper Genuine comes from India’s Gwalior region and is colored a rich red from iron. Historically it was often carved as amulets, vases and other decorative items.  India’s red jasper was one of stones used to beautifully embellish the Taj Mahal with other semi-precious stones that were carved and inlaid into the white marble in curvilinear flower forms… Spiritually, red jasper is associated with the base or root chakra and helps to ground and energize/heal the body and provide balance and protection.”

I can infer it’s an iron oxide red. Not as romantic, but cheap and commonly available.

Headlights, by Carol L. Douglas. No black here, either. It's ultramarine blue and burnt sienna.

Daniel Smith loves to tell people how to use each pigment: “Red Jasper Genuine is a wonderful color for landscapes, birds like the male common chaffinch and reddish egret, as well as animals who have a medium to light reddish coat like the red panda.” I imagine a studio with hundreds of tubes of their paint, in careful rows, tagged, “for sunlit shadows,” or “for moonlight,” or “for powerful, monolithic shapes.” It’s all very entertaining and poetic, but will do nothing for your painting.  

Get tough, Reader. Ask your teacher the purpose in all these single-use paints. If the answer isn’t satisfactory, it’s time to find a new instructor. Mixing color is so integral to painting that a class that avoids it isn’t going to teach you anything useful.

Ogunquit rocks, by Carol L. Douglas. All four paintings were done with the same palette.

On the heels of that note came another. “Do you teach color mixing by visual understanding or by paint name?” a reader asked. “The moment I understood that there was no such thing as red, blue, and yellow, the world changed and it became possible to see the nature of each color.”

I teach color mixing (as distinct from color theory) on the basis of pigment. I’ve developed, over the years, a stable palette that gives me the widest gamut (range) of color tones. They don’t include convenience mixes.

These are combinations of two or more pigments to approximate a different pigment. Many of them were developed as substitutes for antiquated pigments that may have been pulled from the market because they’re fugitive or toxic. They are limited, because:

• Every time you add another color to a mix, you’re adding overtones;
• You can easily make the mix yourself if you should need it and;
• They’re inconsistent. Their marketing name tells you nothing.

How do I know what pigment(s) are in my paint? They’re written on the tubes, in tiny letters. Here’s a quick primer on how to read a paint tube. It sounds complicated, but it’s nothing compared to the frustration of painting with the wrong materials.

Monday Morning Art School: landscape from abstraction

Create a drop-dead painting from a so-so scene.

Wreck of the SS Ethie, by Carol L. Douglas

Certain places are fascinating for something other than their pictorial value. The angle, the light, and the setting aren’t conducive to a great composition. An example of this was the wreckage of the SS Ethie in Gros Morne National Park in Newfoundland. This is a lovely shipwreck story featuring a dog and a baby, but I’ve told it before.

I’d driven up the Great Northern Peninsula specifically to paint this wreck (and to visit the Viking site L'Anse aux Meadows.) When I arrived, I realized it was nothing more than a beautiful cove with a debris field spreading for thousands of feet along a rocky shore. There was no hulking wreck to paint, merely broken things lying around—much like my parents’ barnyard, in fact.

The actual debris field looks like this.

Hurricane Matthew was bearing down on us in the form of a blizzard, so I took photos and completed the painting elsewhere. However, I’ve used this technique successfully in plein air painting as well.

The cove itself is beautiful, and I could have painted a nice anodyne scene of it—lovely, but saying nothing about the wreck. I could have done a close up of one bit of machinery. Instead, I created an abstraction and fitted the details in to it. I do this whenever I’m feeling blocked, either because the subject matter isn’t fitting naturally, or because I’m too anxious.

Initial abstraction for Ethie, based on the word Maelstrom.

To do this, I improvise a series of shapes on a large canvas, much as if I were going to paint a non-representational painting. The only guidance I give myself is a word. In the case of the wreck, the word was maelstrom. When I demonstrated this technique last week for the Bangor Art Society, the word was mourning. Another painting I did recently started with a phrase, Dwight’s school bus. It was nonsensical; my son walked to school. That word is generally inspired by place or events, and it’s surprising how often the painting ends up reflecting the word I started with.

After the Bangor Art Society decided this was a tree, I turned it that way and started making it into one. Photo courtesy of Teddi-Jann Covell.

I start this process with a line. In the Bangor painting, it was a flat, thick line that crossed the canvas. In the Ethie painting it was rounded and rollicking. I never start this with a sense of up or down, and I often rotate the canvas while I work. This process can be the longest part of a painting. I’m searching for the composition from my subconscious, rather than from reality. Sometimes it’s based on my initial line and sometimes the line gets subsumed into something else entirely.

When the abstraction is done, I rotate the canvas to see how it might represent something real. At the demo, I asked participants to identify things they saw in my abstraction. Suggestions came fast and furious. I’d had them draw alongside me, so I then asked them to identify things they saw in their abstractions. Total silence. I asked them to trade with their neighbors and again the room was full of suggestions.

There’s a lesson here. We’re born with the capacity to recognize objects in abstract shapes; it’s part of what makes us intelligent and aware, and keeps us safe. A half-seen shape tells us, almost instinctively, when we belong on high alert. But we moderns tamp that down. We allow subliminal shapes to appear in our drawing, but then resolutely refuse to recognize them. That’s where turning the canvas is so helpful. The mind no longer sees it as ours, but as something new.

My demo painting for the Bangor Art Society. It's not finished to a level I aspire to, but I was getting tired.

Once I find the objects in my abstraction, I hew to them fairly tightly, converting them into figurative art. But I don’t always solve all the corners of my paintings at the first run. After I’ve drawn in one thing, another suggests itself. And sometimes I change up passages on the fly.

“I feel like I had to understand a lot about light/shadow, perspective, and value before I could do an invented landscape with any authenticity,” a painter commented. This is true, but we all know more than we think we know. And painting from memory is a great way to expand one’s visual memory.

Furthermore, it's not necessary to do this totally from memory. Try it outdoors, subbing in that rock over there or that tidal pool over there. You'll end up with a sense of the place, rather than a literal transcription of the place. If you use photo reference, don't start adding details until you're well along in the design process. Remember that reality should always be subservient to design.

This reaching down inside yourself is difficult business. But it’s worth experimenting with. I hope you’ll try it and let me see your results.

Finding your audience

Marketing art is about being as visible and transparent as you can tolerate.

Electric Glide, by Carol L. Douglas

“Any thoughts you ever have on who might be interested in what I do, either gallery-wise, or direct buyer-wise, I'm all ears,” a reader commented on a recent post about finding your audience. I know this painter, but she lives in Colorado and I don’t know her market. I do know she’s already taking the first step I’d recommend: applying to plein air events to get herself noticed.

What does ‘marketing’ mean?

• Getting your paintings seen by an audience;
• Keeping that audience engaged with your process via regular communication;
• Inviting them to your events.

Put that way, it’s not so daunting, is it? But expect to work half your workday at this marketing gig—first by studying how it works, and then by implementing what you’ve learned.

Dry Wash, by Carol L. Douglas

For example, although I’ve had an Instagram account for several years, I only recently figured out how it actually works. I learned that by listening to webinars and my friend Bobbi Heath.

An artist can’t have too many friends. Often, the sale is less about what you know than who you know.

Still, can you talk comfortably about specific pieces of your work? Your inspiration and process? This self-knowledge is critical to selling your own work. Here’s a test: ask your best friend about what it is that you do all day. If he or she can’t answer, then maybe you need to start talking about your process more.

Cape Elizabeth Cliffs, by Carol L. Douglas

Everyone has an audience, and it started with your family. Just as your social circle grew in concentric circles from them, so too does your audience start with close friends and family. Your friends on Facebook and your followers on Instagram are your first audience. You need to connect with them regularly about your art. From that, your audience will grow as naturally as your circle of friends did when you were a child.

Your posts in all media should be designed to show a ‘whole’ you—not just your finished paintings. Your studio, your town, your brushes, your gaffes all combine for a total picture of you as an artist. Be as transparent as you have the nerve to be.

Tricky Mary in a Pea Soup Fog, by Carol L. Douglas

And update your website, or make one if you don’t already have one. That’s your business-card to the Web, and it must be as beautiful and inviting as you can make it. It doesn’t have to be exhaustive. It should include a bio/CV, artist statement, images of your work, and contact information.

Only then are you ready to approach a bricks-and-mortar gallery, because the first thing they’re going to do is look up who you are on the Internet.

As for what galleries you should approach, that requires legwork. Make a habit of visiting galleries in your area to check out the work they sell. Get to know the gallerists. Approach only those that seem like a good fit. And don’t be afraid of rejection; there are many reasons galleries won’t take you that have nothing to do with your work.

Tom Sawyer's Fence, by Carol L. Douglas

At the beginning, I said that my reader is already applying for plein air shows. They’re a great way to be seen by a wider audience. So too are art festivals and juried shows. Apply to as many as you can tolerate.

Here’s a final bit of advice from my pal Bruce McMillan: “I tell my students in my children's book class that the way to deal with rejection when submitting a manuscript is to assume it's going to be rejected. That way you're never disappointed. And while it's away, get the next place lined up that will reject it.”