High art, 2014-style

Submission, 24X20, by Carol L. Douglas. $1500.

We have two competing views of women here at the start of the 21^st century. Neither is healthy: woman as casual sex object vs. woman in a burqa. I painted Submission, above, at the beginning of the 2003 Iraq War. Sadly it hasn't gotten any better in the last eleven years.

Terry Richardson is an American fashion and portrait photographer whose clients and models include the glitterati of New York. He has repeatedly been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior. “Is Terry Richardson an Artist or a Predator” tells us that he’s both. However, he’s also a product of our culture.

  

Richardson’s assistant, Alex Bolotow, has been photographed fellating her boss many times, starting in her very early twenties. “There was something exciting about being involved in something that feels just really freeing,” she said, “like, ‘Oh, I’m totally expressing myself, and this is great.’ I remember being like, ‘I’m just glad to be alive in a time when this is happening.’”

Artists and their models can be friends; sometimes they're even lovers. But every artist-model relationship also involves an implied balance-of-power calculation. In the case of Richardson and his models, that varied depending on who was in front of the camera.

“Miley Cyrus wasn’t asked to grab a hard dick. H&M models weren’t asked to grab a hard dick. But these other girls, the 19-year-old girl from Whereverville, should be the one to say, ‘I don’t think this is a good idea’? These girls are told by agents how important he is, and then they show up and it’s a bait and switch. This guy and his friends are literally like, ‘Grab my boner.’ Is this girl going to say no? And go back to the village? That’s not a real choice. It’s a false choice,” said an agent (who chose to remain nameless).

Terry Richardson likes to photograph his models in the nude, by which I mean he is in the nude. Here he is with Kate Moss in a shot from Terryworld. Sadly, that's as innocuous a photo as I could find.

Richardson is an amazingly messed-up guy. He was the child of a broken marriage. His father was schizophrenic and drug-addled; his mother was brain-damaged. He’s taken his trauma and driven it brilliantly through a culture surfeited with sex. It’s what the public clamors for: used copies of his books sell in the thousands of dollars.

Is repugnance at his working methods a sign that our attitude has changed toward casual or even coercive sex? Not at all. Terry Richardson is just the sacrificial lamb for a culture that is still wallowing. Anathematize him, and he'll be replaced.

Yes, the burqa is abusive, but so too is our current western approach to sex and relationships.

I have three openings left for my 2014 workshop in Belfast, ME. Information is available here.

Folk wisdom says

Red sky over the Duchy says I'll have an opportunity to catch up on my studio work today.

Red sky at morning, sailors take warning;
Red sky at night, sailors' delight.

Dawn this morning featured a lovely rose-colored sky. Since I trust the ancient couplet, above, as much as (or more than) I trust the Weather Channel, I’ll be teaching in the studio tonight.

How old is that couplet? It’s quoted in Matthew 16:2-3, making it at least two thousand years old:

[Jesus] answered them, “When it is evening, you say, ‘It will be fair weather, for the sky is red.’ And in the morning, ‘It will be stormy today, for the sky is red and threatening.’ You know how to interpret the appearance of the sky, but you cannot interpret the signs of the times.

For those who don't read sky signs and don't trust their arthritis, there is NOAA's weather page, with its hourly graphs. They include sky cover, which makes them the plein air painter's best tool for predicting sunsets.

Joseph Mallord William Turner had a great interest in painting atmospherics. Here is his Sunrise, with a Boat between Headlands, c. 1835-40.

This wisdom works where there are strong westerlies, which happen in the middle latitudes (in which both Jerusalem and Rochester fall). Of course, I also use NOAA’s website; their hour-by-hour weather graph is the plein air painter’s best friend.

I have three openings left for my 2014 workshop in Belfast, ME. Information is available here.

How do you get to Carnegie Hall?

Barnyard at G and S Orchards, by Carol L. Douglas. 9X12, oil on canvas, $450, framed.

During Saturday’s class at G and S Orchards, my goal was to solidify the lesson from the prior week about painting into a monochromatic grisaille. This was something I used to do but had abandoned until I painted with Jamie WilliamsGrossman earlier this month. Then I remembered how much I enjoyed it.

Step one is a very rude value study. This gets simplified and refined with brush and rag.

One student went from his drawing right to masses of solid color. Nothing wrong with that, but I was a bit frustrated that he was totally ignoring my instructions. Eventually I realized he’d missed last week’s class because he had to sit for his SATs. But it was too late to show him on his canvas.

Step two is the addition of thin masses of color.

I quickly set up a demo for him. It was a small class so I was able to do rounds, come back and paint a bit on my canvas, call my student over to discuss what I’d done, and then repeat—over and over. I like being very busy and this was energizing. We did run over (about an hour and a half) because of this but nobody appeared to mind.

Here is Nina Koski's monochromatic painting. She was able to correct a composition problem very early on, rather than have it dogging her through the whole painting.

Meanwhile, Nina Koski had taken my instructions of last week very much to heart and was turning out quite a lovely painting of roses along the barnyard. I managed to get some intermediate photos of hers as well, so you can look at two different painters using the same technique.

Here Nina Koski is starting to add color.

Nina, by the way, painted a small plein air painting almost every day last week. She’s an exemplar of that old joke:

“Excuse me sir, but how do you get to Carnegie Hall?”

“Practice, practice, practice!”

And here is her finished painting. She's only been painting a few months!

I have three openings left for my 2014 workshop in Belfast, ME. Information is available here.

Social media and selling

Boats, by little ol' me. Social media allows you to get your work out to a larger audience.

Last week I got into a spirited discussion with other painters about social media and marketing. As I frequently do, I cited one of my favorite painting students.

In his other life, Brad VanAuken is a brand consultant to Fortune 100 companies and the author of a texton the subject that’s going into its second printing. (In fact it’s his success in his chosen field that somewhat slows down his progress as a painter, since he’s always jetting around the globe instead of coming to class.)

Using photos of myself painting on location helps my audience understand what I do. Standing in creeks will someday also give me pneumonia or a broken ankle, but I try not to focus on that. (Photo courtesy of Mitchell Saler, a painter you'll be hearing about in the future.)

Brad is the person who made me understand an essential truth about social media: it works more like a mesh than an arrow. I can’t cite a particular connection between, say, a Pinterest post on Tuesday and the sale of a painting on Friday, but there is no question that—somehow—it works. I’m completely booked from now until September with invitational paint-outs, shows, and classes.

Sunset in Maine, by little ol' me. I try to be transparent, to let people see my failures as well as my successes, because I want people to understand that painting isn't a question of genius, but of plugging along.

One painter suggested that platforms like Tumblr and Twitter were a waste of time because their target demographic doesn’t buy paintings. This is untrue. I need look no farther than 22-year-old Anna, who not only owns her own home (which contains purchased art) but takes painting lessons from me to boot. And even if it were true, her age cohort is in some ways the arbiter of taste for the rest of us.

I have three openings left for my 2014 workshop in Belfast, ME. Information is available here.

My White Trash Family

Rawlings Lowndes, 2013, by Kim Alsbrooks

I tend to take artist’s statements with a grain of salt, so when Kim Alsbrooks writes, “The White Trash Series was developed while living in the South out of frustration with some of the prevailing ideologies, in particular, class distinction,” the skeptic rises in me. But the work is more fun than the artist’s statement would have you believe.

Jane, 2014, by Kim Alsbrooks

After all, the artist is like a bowerbird, always collecting and repurposing junk. Who hasn’t seen flattened aluminum cans in the street and wondered how they could be useful? Like all metal painting surfaces, they’re inert and stable, so I guess they’d make a great painting surface.

Adriana on Fanta Orange, 2014, by Kim Alsbrooks

I really think her work is more about the juxtaposition of old and new than about Southern class distinctions. But as a base for landscapes, they would be awfully powerful. I see flattened cans all the time on my perambulations; maybe I’ll give this a try. After all, art is largely appropriation, right?

There are still a few openings in my 2014 workshop in Belfast, ME. Information is available here.

Off your game? Who cares?

Bathers with a Turtle (Baigneuses), 1907-08, Henri Matisse

This week some friends were discussing Thomas Kinkade, whose work is being dragged out into the public sphere through a retrospective, which in turn has engendered a flurry of new stories about his troubled life. (Predictably, none are positive.)

I was curious about why his landscapes said nothing about his personal struggles. “He did not paint what he wanted to paint; everything he painted was to sell,” said Brad Marshall.

Steamboat Leaving Boulogne, 1864, Édouard Manet

Then we moved on to bad moments by great painters. Karl Eric Leitzel mentioned how bad Matisse’s Bathers with a Turtle is, which in turn reminded me of Manet's Steamboat Leaving Boulogne and Sargent’s Spanish Dancer, in which either the head or the arms of the figure are inexplicably stuck on backwards.

Matisse, Manet and Sargent were brilliant painters; the rare duds in their oeuvre serve to point out just how brilliant they are. “When painters are that innovative and pushing painting in such new directions, they will be unsuccessful at times,” said Brad Marshall.

Spanish Dancer, 1879-82 (preparatory oil study for the main figure in El Jaleo), John Singer Sargent

And that is where I want to be: not painting what I know will sell, but painting outside myself.

This week, Pastor Bill Blakely suggested that if “I Am,” is the Lord’s name forever (Exodus 3:14), then all the “I am” statements we use to define and limit ourselves are in fact blasphemous. Thomas Kinkade was trapped by his “I am a great artist” statement; it was dissonant with the world’s opinion. Instead of painting setting him free, it made him miserable.

There are still a few openings in my 2014 workshop in Belfast, ME. Information is available here.

Just another beautiful day in Rochester

Highland Park by Brad VanAuken

For a few years now, I’ve had an ace-in-the-hole view at Highland Park—a long view through which the spire at Colgate Divinity is just visible. I took my class there this week only to find that the trees have grown so much that we were left with only a shrubby meadow. 

Highland Park by Sandy Quang

Still, it was a delightful shrubby meadow and early enough in the year that the greens were still somewhat differentiated. That meant this could be an exercise in seeing the different colors within green, and at that, they excelled.

Highland Park by Anna McDermott

Last week I started a painting with a sepia value study, a technique I used to use all the time and which I abandoned. I decided to try this out on my students, and they ran with it.

Highland Park by Nina Koski

I don’t really know why I abandoned this, because it allows you to make compositional assessments without distracting yourself with color.

And last but not least, Highland Park by little ol' me. No, you can't buy it; it was a procedural demo and I wiped it out before leaving the park.

There are still a few openings in my 2014 workshop in Belfast, ME. Information is available here.