NEFA needs your input, artists

Small still life by Carol L. Douglas.

I spent a happy half hour completing a survey of creative workers in New England. (The link is here.) This is a well-designed survey that asks real questions about our economic and social life. Since the economic impact of the arts is generally misunderstood by the bean-counters of this world, it behooves us all to answer, and to do so as accurately as possible.

This is the third employment-specific study done by New England Foundation for the Arts (NEFA) since 1978. Its purpose is to determine which creative occupations are flourishing in New England and how the arts mesh with other economic sectors.

My inner accountant is always leery of studies that are too vague or touchy-feely to be of practical use. This study is not like that at all. It asks specific geographical, economic and behavioral questions. In fact, I found it helpful to have my 2015 income tax return handy. However, they want to hear from you even if you aren’t making enough money to declare your art income as a business, and they want to hear about the parts of your work that are unpaid. If you’re concerned about the security of your financial information, don’t be; the survey itself is blind.

Small still life by Carol L. Douglas.

The story of Williamsburg, in Brooklyn, demonstrates why precise economic information about the arts is important for urban planning. Prior to the millennium, Williamsburg was a low-rent district. Artists began to see its value and moved in. In the early 2000s, it became a hub of contemporary music, visual arts and local hipster culture. Since then, it has steadily gentrified. What could have been a hole in Brooklyn’s side is now a popular neighborhood.

Of course, the same could be said about Rockland, ME, which I recently heard described by a tourist as “the Santa Fe of the East.” Belfast is another town that has changed a great deal since the last NEFA survey in 2007. The only way NEFA is going to be aware of the breadth of these changes is if the artists in our towns tell them.

NEFA defines creative workers as visual artists, dancers, musicians, theater makers, designers, craftspeople, architects, digital media creators, culture bearers, writers, and more. If you’re in doubt, log in and see if you’re meant to be counted.

The survey closes on November 18, so you don’t really have much time. It is restricted to residents of the six New England states.

How did that happen?

My beady little eye on the world.

Since I had no use for either major-party candidate, I went to bed early last night. As the wits were saying, the bad news was that one of them would be elected. However, my phone pinged at 11 PM. It was a friend who is an ardent Hillary supporter, talking about how she wanted to die. After chatting with her, I went on Facebook and saw innumerable shocked and angry posts. (I’m an artist from New York, so the majority of my friends are liberal.) The same people who’d been celebrating all day yesterday for electing the first woman president were posting things along the lines of, “I’m trying to understand. How did this happen?”

In the 1950s, psychologist Leon Festinger developed a theory of cognitive dissonance, which basically says that holding contradictory beliefs is stressful and people will do anything to squirm out of it. The more deeply held the belief, the stronger the dissonance. Among the strategies we use to cope is confirmation bias. This is our tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms our preexisting beliefs or hypotheses. When we read and remember information selectively (and we all do), we are engaging in confirmation bias.

Today our best friends are machines that do that biasing for us. The average American spends 11 hours a day using electronic gadgets. All of these have some kind of confirmation bias built in (the channels you select, for example, affect the news and commercials you see) but the most insidious are your computer and your smart phone.

Yes, your computer is watching you, and yes, it is developing a profile for you based on the sites you visit, your search terms, your purchases and social media profile. That’s relatively innocuous when it comes to what salad dressing you buy, but in 2012, the major parties started using the same tools to target political ads. We started seeing advertising that reinforced, rather than challenged, our beliefs.

Our clickstreams also influence the results we get when we are searching. Google has complicated (and patented) algorithms that say that when we search for A, B, and C, the result will be offered in a particular order. That’s based on user history, and it has a tendency to lump us into herds.

Then there’s the fallacy that you choose your friends. Every time you open Facebook, it scans and collects all the posts made by all your friends and ranks them. The algorithm is complicated and hidden, but how frequently you interact with the poster is certainly part of it. So too is hiding similar posts.

Needless to say, you very rapidly weed out the people you don’t particularly like, the ones you find boring, or—in many cases—the ones who disagree with you. Most users only see the top few hundred posts, which they’ve selected through their own internal biases. The machine then takes over and reinforces these biases. The posts you favor influence the posts you see. This is why last night so many people posted things like, “But I don’t know a single person who supported him!”

This creates terribly bad assumptions about our group behavior and further polarizes us. It’s why so many of us were blindsided by the results. I’m not saying you should ditch your computer—heck, I want you to continue reading my blog—but I am saying that you need to test its version of reality.

Son of violence

“Salomé,” 1870, by Henri Regnault.

This Election Day is as much a mirror to our society as it is a precursor of things to come. We have endured 22 months of the basest kind of electioneering, and what that will tell future historians about our culture is not a lie.

I knew very little about Alexandre-Georges-Henri Regnault other than his saucy Salomé, which was a sensation when he painted it at the age of 26. I noticed it only because it bore a resemblance to a friend of mine, Sari Gaby, who also works in the same lush Beaux Arts style. Regnault is pretty much forgotten today.

“Thetis bringing the Arms forged by Vulcan to Achilles,” 1866, by Henri Regnault.

Regnault’s lifespan roughly equaled that of the Second French Empire. He was five during the February Revolution and eight when Napoleon III’s coup d’étatdissolved the National Assembly. During his childhood, France lost 95,000 soldiers in the siege of Sevastopol. Later that decade, France went to war in Italy and Mexico, in addition to the usual skirmishes required to expand and maintain a colonial empire.

His young death is partly the reason for his obscurity, since he really didn’t produce much work. Equally important was his subject matter. A child of war and revolution, he painted what he knew. His visceral painting style and heroic death made him a hero in France. But by the end of World War I, the world was profoundly tired of war. Martial paintings didn’t have the cachet they’d had two generations earlier.

“Automedon with the Horses of Achilles,” 1868, by Henri Regnault.

Born in Paris, Regnault was the son of Henri Victor Regnault, a noted chemist and early photographer. In 1866, the son won the Prix de Rome withThetis bringing the Arms forged by Vulcan to Achilles.

That gave him a stipend to study in Rome, so he duly went, although he grew bored with the traditional course of study. While in Rome, he paintedAutomedon with the Horses of Achilles, a classical painting with an energetic twist. It was well-received. In Spain, he painted the Spanish revolutionary, General Juan Prim. Prim rejected his painting, but it proved popular with the French public.

“Portrait of General Prim,” 1868, by Henri Regnault.

Neither his portrait of Prim nor Execution Without Hearing Under the Moorish Kingsshould be considered outside of their political context. Prim had just returned from Mexico (leading the fight against France) and was helping to launch a successful rebellion against the increasingly-tyrannical rule of Queen Isabella.

Execution Without Hearing Under the Moorish Kings of Grenada could be called the evil twin of John Singer Sargent’s Fumée d’ambre gris, painted a decade later. In both cases, the vertical composition drives our eye toward the figures. But whereas Sargent’s Morocco is a romantic travelogue, Regnault’s Grenada is dark and bitter. We are aloof from Sargent’s woman bathing herself in scent, but Regnault forces us to look up at his violent spectacle.

“Execution Without Hearing Under the Moorish Kings of Grenada,” 1870, by Henri Regnault.

The Franco-Prussian War took down the Bonapartists, but it also killed Regnault: he died in the Siege of Paris, in the Battle of Battle of Buzenval on January 19, 1871. He was just 27 years old. As an artist, he was exempted from military service. As a child of war, he felt obliged.

For a time, his heroism was feted, in works by  Camille Saint-Saëns, Henri Chapu and Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier. That didn’t make him any less dead, of course. The loss of his son and his laboratory in the same siege completely undid his father, who never recovered. Pointless, but Regnault was a product of his time, just as we are.

That Ugly Renaissance Baby thing

“The Madonna on a Crescent Moon,” artist unknown.

I spent the weekend with my grandchildren, who are both perfectly lovely but of distinct and different temperaments. I once painted my grandson. Time got away from me before I could ever paint his sister.

Whenever I spend a lot of time with them, I come back to a conundrum of pop art history: why are babies so misshapen in Byzantine and Renaissance art?

There are several academic explanations for this. The first is that naturalism wasn’t the primary goal of these paintings. Thus the Christ child was never shown crying or having his terribly stinky diaper changed. We like to assume that’s because he was the object of veneration, but we moderns wouldn’t paint babies in those situations either.

“Madonna of Chancellor Rolin,” Jan van Eyck, c. 1435. The infant Jesus is the world’s great high priest in this painting, as indicated by his pose and the landscape.

But we do impute childlike qualities to children, whereas the pre-modern mind was more inclined to see them as little adults-in-training. In Renaissance and Byzantine art, the infant Christ was a representation of his Incarnation—baby, but also always God. Thus he and his mother must foreshadow his agonizing fate, or depict some other characteristic of God Incarnate.

Personally, I think the answer is mainly a practical one. First, the paintings weren’t intended to be viewed up close; they were meant to be seen at a distance, above an altar, in uneven lighting. That meant heavy modeling was important, and that isn’t compatible with the beautiful delicacy of babies.

“Madonna Enthroned,” Giotto, c. 1310.

Real babies make terrible models. As they approach toddlerhood they tolerate sitting only for limited time. They squirm, they wriggle, and they will do anything to get down and play. They are not miniature adults. Their proportions are different and difficult to capture. Their heads are enormous, their eyes widely spaced, and their noses flattened. They have loose folds of fat dangling here and there.  Try getting that down on paper while your model is screaming to get loose. I suppose the artists could have drugged the little nippers, but I doubt many mothers would go along with that.

“Maria Hilf,” Lucas Cranach the Elder, c. 1530

Ever take a baby to a studio for a photo shoot? If so, you know you can’t always get a baby to smile for the camera, and if you ask a toddler to smile, you’re likely to get something very artificial. Imagine, then, trying to project a look of complex calm and suffering onto a baby face, especially when you only have minutes to work before the baby falls asleep, soils himself, or is hungry and bored. Changing the expression on a model’s face is one of the most difficult things one can do, even with all the time in the world.

My grandson is not the only baby portrait I’ve painted, but I’ve never painted a young child from life. No modern would ever try it without reference photos, me included. Kudos to those early painters who did.

Seeking a new gallery

“Hazy mountain afternoon: Keuka Lake,” by Carol L. Douglas. Available through the Kelpie Gallery.

Yesterday, Sue Baines from the Kelpie Gallery in South Thomaston picked up eight of my works, with another half-dozen or so headed there next week. I’ve noted this gallery since it opened, since it’s on my way to Spruce Head. It stands off neat and proud against its setting near the Owl’s Head Transportation Museum. Being noticeable is a good first sign.

I’m in the process of searching out new gallery representation, and the Kelpie Gallery was the first place I approached. It started with a visit, obviously.

“Overlook,” by Carol L. Douglas. Available through the Kelpie Gallery.

The Kelpie Gallery hosted the Third Annual Paint Along the Weskeag in August, which gave me an opportunity to spend some time there unattended. I was looking for professionalism in grouping and displaying paintings. This doesn’t always mean lots of white space—it depends on the real estate—but it does mean that the gallerist is thoughtful in matching work thematically and in color relationships.

I wasn’t looking for other artists who paint like me. I wanted to see artists whose work is concerned with the issues I find compelling—the light, feel and architecture of the landscape. It is important to me, also, that they be contemporary in outlook. There is nothing inherently wrong with following the Old Masters, but a gallerist who focuses on that won’t really understand my work.

“Monhegan Lane,” by Carol L. Douglas. Available through the Kelpie Gallery.

When you show in a place that’s not philosophically attuned to what you’re doing, you won’t sell. Worse, your work subconsciously responds to their group norms. The biggest difficulty I ever face is getting into the wrong group of artists and trying to live up to their standards. It never works.

I asked how many artists the gallery represents. If you’re one of too many, your work is likely to languish in a back corner somewhere. “I don’t care to belong to any club that will have me as a member,” Groucho Marx famously said, and there’s some sad truth to that. If it’s too easy to join up, they may be less than selective. Luckily, that isn’t the case here.

“Rising Tide at Wadsworth Cove,” by Carol L. Douglas. Available through the Kelpie Gallery.

A good gallerist spends a long time looking at your work and takes only a select few. Watching them sort through my work is my favorite part of the process, by the way. Often they will choose works that I find unresolved. That tells me something about where I’m headed as a painter.