Dépaysement, redux

Still life composed by Tarryl for my amusement. My fellow painters here are all down-staters.

A few weeks ago I wrote about dépaysement, the sense of disorientation one has on arriving in a strange place. I have to confess I’m feeling that again. I’m in Saranac Lake, NY, for the Sixth Annual Adirondack Plein Air Festival, and it’s 38° F. this morning. Yes, you read that right. I’m staying with a group of artists led by Tarryl Gabel, who is a veteran of painting up here in August. As I’m writing this, she’s sliding jeans over her leggings, preparing to hie off to Paul Smiths. 

My bedroom is an old-fashioned sleeping porch.

Coming from the Maine coast as I did, I have sleeveless shirts, capris, and sandals with me. “But you’re a northern girl,” Tarryl protested, implying that I should have known better. This is true, but Rochester and Buffalo have warm autumns, courtesy of the Great Lakes, which act as massive heat exchangers. Having said that, 38° F. on an August morning is cold for anywhere in New York State.

Crista cooks like I do, meaning she put herself in charge of snack food.

I’ve known Tarryl for a long time but not that well. She and Crista Pisano and I have done Rye’s Painters on Location together for many years. They’re the only people I expect to know in this temporary artists’ commune.

The essence of the Adirondacks: a porch overlooking the lake.

Our home-away-from-home is a ramshackle turn-of-the-century pile along Flower Lake. The view is lovely and the furniture is vintage. After the solitude of my off-the-grid cabin and the luxury of the Fireside Inn, this is a third kind of living: it has the character of a family camp in the mountains, complete with deferred maintenance. But as I keep saying, “I don’t have to fix it.”

Tarryl's painting hat. It's iconic.

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The best laid plans

Double rainbow over the schooner Appledore, returning to Camden Harbor.

I like to lead painters in a convoy to our painting sites, since they are usually places rather than addresses. On Friday, my parade managed to get ahead of me. No problem, I thought, because we are heading for one of Maine’s best-known sites: the Mount Battie Auto Road in Camden Hills State Park. The view from this 800-foot peak is assumed to be the place that inspired Edna St. Vincent Millay’s Renascence, composed when she was a teenager living in Camden, and first recited to guests at the Whitehall Inn.

Marjean and Nancy painting the vista.

All I could see from where I stood
Was three long mountains and a wood;
I turned and looked another way,
And saw three islands in a bay.
So with my eyes I traced the line
Of the horizon, thin and fine,
Straight around till I was come
Back to where I’d started from;
And all I saw from where I stood
Was three long mountains and a wood.

Janith's fifth day of painting ever, and she turned out this very credible painting of the view.

Camden is one of my favorite painting venues in Maine. However, the problem with Camden as a teachingvenue is that the traffic is atrocious. Suffice it to say that with the miracle of modern GPS, I managed to lose everyone, and we started late. No matter, though; the view was wonderful. And nobody fell off the summit of Mount Battie.

Clouds you could eat with a spoon.

Some travelers took off for Pemaquid, some for Portland, and the remainder went down to Camden to have fun. Although the forecast was for it to be clear, a small spit of rain moved in. It didn’t soak us, but it did make an amazing double rainbow over the windjammer fleet at Camden Harbor. “I have set my rainbow in the clouds, and it will be the sign of the covenant between me and the earth,” said God, and who can look at a rainbow without a sense of awe? It was a fitting end to a fantastic week, and a promise of more good things to come.

Nancy loaned me her hiking poles (mine were buried in my trunk) to climb over the rocks from painter to painter. I reciprocated by using them as pointers.

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I love the constant action at Camden Harbor. Here, a class has a sailboat race.

A family affair

Cecilia and her granddaughter. (Photo courtesy of Janith Mason)

Several workshop participants are traveling with their spouses, their children, grandchildren, and a niece. Yesterday, one of my students was watching the cavorting of some of these kids and remarked, “It’s so nice to see these kids here.”

Three sprites on a rock. The Maine coast is perfect for doing nothing. (Photo courtesy of Sandy Quang)

I agree. I’m not teaching them, but I’m enjoying having them with us. Some of them are drawing or painting along with their adults, too.

Look beyond the lighthouses and rocks and sea, and there are other parts of the landscape that are uniquely Maine. There is the light, which veers between sharp clarity and misty fog. There are the modest Maine capes of the early 19th century, with their steep roofs and gables. And there are the trees, shaped by the offshore breezes.

We started the day painting under a shelter, because it was cool and rainy. (Photo courtesy of Sandy Quang)

Yesterday dawned cool and misty, so we started painting in Belfast City Park, which has a shelter. One would never know that there was an opposite shore on the mouth of the Passagassawakeag River, with all the mist. What a great opportunity to work on painting the traps in trees in the style of the Canadian Group of Seven painters.

By mid-day we were able to move out from beneath cover. (Photo courtesy of Brad VanAuken)

Several workshop participants have asked me to post Loren’s color wheel on my blog. Loren made this as a way to teach himself how to mix the paints on his own palette. The outer ring is comprised of either the straight-out-of-the-tube paints themselves or mixes of two straight pigments. The next wheel is made of tints of the outer-wheel colors with white. Next are shades of the outer-wheel colors mixed with black. The center is the color mixed with its complement.

Loren made this color wheel to help himself better understand the pigments on his palette. I like the idea so much I suggested it to everyone as homework.

Today we are off to Mount Battie and Camden Harbor—a lovely end to a week that has just flown by.

My recommended palette--here in acrylics: white, cadmium or Hansa yellow, Indian yellow (transparent), cadmium orange, yellow ochre, raw sienna, burnt sienna, naphthol red, quinacridone magenta, ultramarine blue, Prussian blue, black.

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Lesson #1: sunscreen makes a lousy white paint

Three houses, a bad photo of a decent painting by little ol' me.

It’s a little hard to get an hourly forecast for a specific spot on the Maine coast. It can be pouring in one place and clear in the next town over. However, not only was the National Weather Service calling for rain, my New York buddies were all talking about the whopping deluge they’d just gotten.

Lyn painting the Fort Point lighthouse.

No painting trip to Maine is complete without a lighthouse, and my intention had been for us to paint the Grindle Point Lighthouse on Islesboro. Without knowing exactly when it would start raining, relying on ferry transportation seemed unwise. Instead we drove north to the Fort Point light, where my charges promptly spread themselves across a quarter mile of terrain to paint. That is why I take my bicycle while teaching, although since the grounds include the ruins of a Revolutionary War fort, a mountain bike might have worked better.

Loren learned that the cover on his truck leaks.

The rain held off until  we could regroup at the hotel for a demo, which I did using Sandy’s kit.

Elizabeth and Sandy did some foraging for the painters.

It’s always hard to use someone else’s paint, and I was complaining that hers mixed poorly. That was partially because it’s not good paint, but it turns out that dab of white at the left of her palette was sunscreen, not paint. I’m not asking why it was there.

Dedicated students watching a demo in the rain. "I learned that you oil painters have it easy," said Virginia.

A demo is a great opportunity to reach painters of all levels. Earlier in the day, I’d talked to Cecilia and Nancy about a new way of setting up their paintings than straight-up drawing. Both are naturally good compositors, but this technique gives more consistent control over the outcome. I was able to demonstrate that.

Nancy's first attempt at the view.

After a while, Nancy left and went back to her own balcony to finish a painting she’d started earlier. When she was done with that, she painted the same scene again. I loved seeing how she integrated what I’d told her, and how it made the second painting stronger.

Nancy's post-demo painting of the same view.

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Rain affects people differently. This is the artist formerly known as Brad.

Let’s start at the very beginning

This is Janith's second-ever painting, of tugboat reflections.

Lynn managed to find a place to paint where her feet could be in the water. Photo courtesy of Elizabeth Coghill.

My favorite places to paint are harbors. I love boats of all kinds, I love the rise and fall of the tide, I love the work that goes on in them. Set into the mouth of the Passagassawakeag River, Belfast harbor is as lovely as any harbor on the coast. It is Newark to Camden’s Manhattan: it’s more industrial and less gentrified.

This is Stacey's second-ever painting, of the tugboats themselves. Whew, what a lot of drawing!

Marjean ran to the art store and bought herself a palette knife at lunchtime. Since it was new, she used it to cut the cheese before resuming painting. 

But boats are not easy to draw, let alone paint, and I have three absolute beginners in this workshop.

Brad floating on the dock.

I have two youngsters with us who are not properly part of the workshop but who are still painting. Here's Ilse amid the foliage. Photo courtesy of Elizabeth Coghill.

A man and his son stopped to see Marjean and were dumbfounded when she said it was her second day painting. “She’s a ringer,” said the father. We laughed. Marjean has painted walls and windowsills and furniture, but never a painting.

And here's Sophia with her grandmother, Virginia. Both girls are great young artists. Photo courtesy of Elizabeth Coghill.

This is Marjean's second-ever painting, of the boats in the outer harbor.

But as I told him, painting is a learned process, not some kind of magic trick. If you can break down the process into manageable steps, your students do a lot less fumbling. The process differs in different media, but is remarkably similar in different styles. The same rules apply whether the end result is abstraction or fine detail: if you want the paint to stick and the composition to work, you approach painting in a methodical way.

Cecilia dealt with the comings and goings of boats by working on two paintings. When one boat disappeared, she picked up the other canvas.. Photo courtesy of Elizabeth Coghill.

Bernard attempted to recreate his missing boat from memory. Photo courtesy of Elizabeth Coghill.

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Where we meet the tide, and win (at least for yesterday).

Janith expresses my feelings exactly.

We started our painting week at the mouth of the Duck Trap River, which gave us several iconic Maine vistas—a rocky promontory, a shingle beach, small boats swinging on their lines, and a lovely old concrete bridge. The weather was superlative.

Nancy's painting of Howe Point.

Marjean's beautiful hat.

The first day of any workshop is dominated by questions of set-up, where new ideas meet old kits, or new painters learn to use their tools for the first time. This was exacerbated by having so many new painters in the group, but Sandy Quang is my monitor, and she helped get them all set up and working. I consider a first painting to be a success if the paint gets stuck to the canvas in a sensible order; everyone did that and much more.

Brad's painting of the bridge and the Duck Trap River.

It's very rare that I demo at the beginning of a workshop, but with so many new painters in the group, it made sense.

The tide presents questions of painting (as objects appear and disappear, and angles change) but the supermoon meant a supertide, and it was a thief. First it stole Hal’s belongings. Lyn went in after them, and rescued everything but his shoes. A team of friendly canoers kindly raced around the bar and saved his shoes. Then my umbrella went aloft and ended up in the drink. Hal returned the favor by diving in after it. My fault: I’ve already lost that umbrella once; in the Rio Grande, and I should have known to check that it was tethered. And the tide lifted two stuff sacks from Janith's kit, too.

Dinghy, 8X6, oil on canvasboard, by me.

Critique session.

It’s a beautiful foggy morning today; my favorite for painting in harbors. And today we’ll be at Belfast’s public landing, so it is all working out perfectly.

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I must be out of my mind

Painting by the light of the moon in beautiful Belfast.

Next time I schedule a full moon, it’s going to be during midweek in my workshop. We tried, we really tried, but we were too befuddled by travel and packing and unpacking to paint last night. Still, it was a lot of fun wandering down to the beach and watching the moonlight sliver the waves.

Bernard Zellar's watercolor.

Our biggest problem was battery failure. Stacey was using the flashlight app on her cellphone (an app which always cracks me up) and it killed her battery. Nancy’s flashlight battery died. My two halogen flashlights—which never run down their batteries—both went for an amble.

Ain't it lovely?

Still, I know the position of my paints on my palette, so how hard could painting in the pitch dark be? I blocked in a lovely soft blue-black for the night sky. Someone danced by with a light, and I realized it was actually bright violet.

On top of traveling all day, we'd had a few glasses of wine on the deck. What a fantastic group!

“Sandy, why don’t you finish this for me?” So she did—also without a light. By 9:30 PM we were all ready to call it a night. Tomorrow is the official first day of painting, and we want to be fresh for it.

Message me if you want information about next year’s programs. Information is available here.