Partying with the The Hudson River Fellowship

Erik Koeppel

Lauren Sansaricq and Erik Koeppel


I got a phone call the middle of last week from Nathan Sowa, a member of the Hudson River Fellowship. The Hudson River School fellowship is a yearly gathering of young painters, many from The Grand Central Academy in New York. The Grand Central Academy is highly regarded as the most elite of the new ateliers training young artists.

http://grandcentralacademy.blogspot.com/2012/07/hudson-river-fellowship-week-2.html


They submit portfolios and if selected spend a month painting in the field with a group of 30 artists. This year they worked in Jackson, New Hampshire. That is in the Mt. Washington Valley in the White Mountains. In the 1860's many of Americas greatest landscape painters summered in the Mt. Washington Valley. The guidebooks in those days called it the "Switzerland of America"

Nathan suggested that I come up and paint with them for a day, I jumped at the chance. I have known about the group for years and wanted to see for myself what they were doing. This year's Fellowship began with many of the students taking a ten day workshop with Erik Koeppel. Erik was written up in Plein Air magazine this month. I knew he had recently moved to New Hampshire and I was glad for the opportunity to meet him.

Erik usually does drawings outside as preparatory studies for paintings made in the studio, exactly as his 19th century heroes did, on the same locations that he is working.

Erik has spent years studying the methods of the Hudson River School painters. His paintings really do recall the work of that first generation of American landscape painters, artists like Thomas Cole and Asher B Durand. Erik has a DVD showing his methods that will be available soon. I will get a copy. I don't want to paint like a Hudson River School guy myself, but there is a lot to be learned here.
http://www.erikkoeppel.com/

 Erik's partner, Lauren Sansaricg also studies the Hudson River painters, below is one of her paintings.

On Thursday night I met my friend Jerome Green in Hyannis Mass. We went to a concert featuring Kim Simmonds, Edgar Winter, Johnny Winter, Leslie West and Rick Derringer. Those are all guitar heroes. I, of course, mostly went to see my friend Kim Simmonds, guitarist and founder of the legendary Savoy Brown Blues Band.

After the concert I drove back to New Hampshire, a several hour trip, and then slept for a few hours. On Friday morning I drove up to Jackson. That's on the other side of the mountains from mine so it is about a 2 and 1/2 hour drive. I arrived there and it was raining. It was my 60th birthday. I got to spend it teaching, I 'll take that!

This was their last night in the White Mountains and because of the rain there was little to do except have a party. There were about twenty or so of the fellowship hanging around at their rental house, so I went into my showbiz mode. I did a sort of mini workshop and lecture at them. I talked about landscape painting and making your living as a painter. They were also interested in hearing about my first teacher R. H. Ives Gammell, who is a famous figure to the classical painting revival. They asked me lots of questions and I did my best to answer them. They have had many teachers but have probably not known too many people who make their living painting.

We had dinner, take out pizza, and then I set up my easel and did a seascape demo in the corner where I was out of the way, but if anybody wanted to watch they could. It was not the best demo I have ever done. There was very little light.  I think my Rockport ways of working were very different from the measured approach they have all studied in the atelier. I was taught that way too, but I have long since developed my own less formal ways of doing things. They were probably shocked.

I guess their average age might have been about 22. They were college age , I would call them art students, but the atelier program they are in is far more demanding and structured than most art schools. They draw casts and figures, they study anatomy and work in mostly late 19th century technique.

They had good drawing skills and some of them seemed to have experience painting the landscape. Below is particularly fine effort by Zoey Frank. Isn't that  a fine painting? I met Zooey, she will be a fine painter before she is done.

Brian MacNeil working at his pochade (pronounced pochade) box. He is a Bostonian and is a both a tattoo artist and a painter. I asked him if he would please quit putting tattoos on women, but he told me that was the best part of his job. Below is one of his paintings of the Wildcat River above Jackson. I have painted there many times it is a spectacular place to work.

Below are some studies also done on the river by Nathan Sowa. Nathan arrived from an extended stay in Sweden and has taught for the Florence Academy of Art, another classical atelier.

The fellowship had done an  exhibition, that was well received, the night before in Jackson and there were many sales made. That which didn't sell was stacked all over the tables and around the house.This was the last night of the fellowships stay in Jackson. I missed meeting a few students who had already departed.

Nathan Sowa

The revival of interest in classical painting means that there are again young students working to learn the skills of a traditional painters craft. When I was studying in the mid 1970's almost no one had any interest in doing this kind of art. Today  dozens of ateliers train young artists in classical painting. They seldom have taught much about landscape though. Usually they confine themselves to figurative and still life painting.But the atelier training is an enormous asset for the would be landscape painter.Of course landscape painting is its own thing and after studying in an atelier few of these students will choose to become landscape painters. But those who do will be well prepared. Landscape painting has it's own set of skills. A painter is always a student.

Above is another painting of the Wildcat River by Connor DeJong. This artist is 19 years old. I have shoes older than that. I really enjoyed meeting these young artists. You would think that I would meet lots of young painters but I haven't. Until recently there weren't very many young people interested in classical painting. I sat in a gallery in Rockport, Mass. for 14 years and never had an art student express any interest in what I was doing, in the entire time I was there. T.M. Nicholas and I set up our easels in Savannah once and painted 30 by 40's a couple of blocks from the famous "name brand" art school there. None of the hundreds of students passing by with their portfolios under their arms bothered to walk the few paces out of their way and see what we were doing.

There is a tide flowing in the art world. It is ignored by the museums and the art schools but hundreds of young people are learning traditional painting techniques. I am certain that it will have an effect on our nations art. Some day one of them may actually get to show one of their paintings in a museum, besides the Alex Katz portraits and Damien Hirst seafood under plexi aberrations. It is glacial, but a shift is slowly occurring. These are hip, smart, beautiful young men and women who will be the artists that will live to see traditional painting accorded some attention by the official  art institutions. I am 60 now, I  don't believe I will live to see it, but they will. This has been generations in the making. My own teacher R.H. Ives Gammell began training young people in the 1950's hoping to preserve some of the accumulated knowledge of our culture before it was forever lost. In his day perhaps dozens of young people were working to learn this art, today many hundreds are.

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I am lining up a number of workshops for the fall, more than in previous years. They seem to fill and I enjoy teaching when I can do it in 3 day spurts and then go back to my own painting. I have a bunch of workshops coming up.

ANNOUNCING A MINNESOTA WORKSHOP!

Several people have asked me if I would do a workshop in Minnesota. The workshop will start on September the 15th and run though the evening of the 17th in (well, near) Stillwater,  Minnesota. Stillwater is an easy drive from the cities so participants can commute, or stay in one of the many motels or inns in this historic river town.
 There should be some autumn color and the greens of summer will have burnt off some by this time. This is getting into the best time of the year to paint outside. Woods and fields are a great subject at this time of year. Minnesota has lots of oaks that look real good in the late summer and fall. I grew up in Minnesota and will enjoy painting that landscape again. I am going to bring in some special guest stars to teach a little too.. I will tell you  a little more about that soon.

I will do the Stapleton Kearns show. So come out to Stillwater and join me. I can save you years of screwing around! The link to sign up is below.


http://stapletonkearns.blogspot.com/search?q=Minnesota+Workshop+Fall+2012


Here is the link to sign up for my fall workshop in the White Mountains. This is a total immersion program and I run the class about 12 hours a  day. I do an evening lecture while we wait for dinner to be served.The fall color in the White Mountains is legendary and people come from all over the world to see it. In the 19th century all of the great Hudson River painters made a point of being there too, just a few miles up the road from the inn.Sign up here;



http://stapletonkearns.blogspot.com/2012/05/workshops-for-sale.html

The historic use of molybendium in ancient cultures of the Euphrates

Frank W. Benson, Eleanor

I ran into this quote from Frank Benson online:

"This was to emphasize, again, the fact that it is the composition, the design, the creation of the artist's mine, which is important, not the representation of objects with paint. "I grew up with a generation of art students who believed that it was actually immoral to depart in any way from nature when you were painting. It was not till after I was thirty and had been working seriously for more than ten years that it came to me, the idea that the design was what mattered. It seemed like an inspiration from heaven. I gave up the stupid canvas I was working on and sent the model home. Some men never discover this. And it is to this that I lay the fact of such success as I have had. For people in general have a sense of beauty, and know when things are right. They don't know that they have but they recognize great painting. And design is the ONLY thing that matters."

Aldro T. Hibbard Retrospective      October 5 ~ November 11

The Rockport Art Association in Rockport, Massachusetts will be presenting an Aldro Hibbard retrospective this fall. I am a big fan of Aldro Hibbard and have presented his work many times in this blog. There will be a huge number of Hibbards, more than a hundred. This is the second Hibbard show the art association has done, the last was over than ten years ago. I  saw it every day it ran. There will be an illustrated catalog available for sale at the show. Hibbard was one of the founding members and was a president of the Rockport Association. He is the best known of the historic Rockport artists and I am looking forward to the show excitedly. I will be speaking and leading a tour of the show shortly after its' opening.

OK, I guess I should throw something useful in here. 

I just taught a workshop in Nashville, I had a big group, about twenty students. I was again reminded of something I see a lot when teaching. It wasn't particular to this group and I see it in every workshop I teach. Learning painters when working outside want to jam the whole painting into the lower, or lower and middle range of values. Often the whole scene is presented in three or four values from the middle of the scale.

When you have a painting  is not going well , get your contrasts up and running again. This happens to me too, I look at a painting I have been working on and realize it has become mushy, with the values that were initially clear and well stated blunted, and tentative. As we work on paintings it seems there is a tendency to lose the big pattern of light and dark. Often this happens as we add details and information and lose the big shapes that make a design go.

When your painting gets "stuck" or starts to get worse instead of better, boldly restate your darks and lights. 

Information is often the enemy of design.

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 If you would like to know about the upcoming July workshop in New Hampshire please
click Here. I have included the cost of the workshop and information on the location in the White Mountains. I can teach you a whole lot, and probably save you years of screwing around. Why torture yourself ? Don't get left behind! You are worth it! Everyone's doing it. Act now.


I have been developing a series of painting exercises to teach root skills. I have a bunch of them now and am adding them into the workshops. I set my easel up in front of the class and lead them through a painting exercise that will clarify either a skill, technique or principle. I will be presenting one of these each day at the July workshop.

The Montana trip and some remarks on Emile Gruppes book and palette

Above, Emile Gruppe

I have returned from a week in Montana. I was a guest artist at the Western Rendezvous of Art. I met a lot of really fine painters that I had long heard about but never met. A few of the artists I met were, Matt Smith, Josh Elliot and Ralph Oberg, I also met Robert Lemler and John Potter. There were a lot of fine paintings in the show, and we had several large banquets together that provided an opportunity to talk to each other. One of the days was a paint out.

I stayed in Montana for a couple of days after the event and painted with two blog readers who had come a long way to meet me. I took them each out for a days lesson and painted myself too. I really enjoy meeting, and when I can helping the readers of this blog. I am used, therefore I am useful!

One of you contacted me and asked if I was going to do a fall camping workshop in Acadia this year, I dunno? Maybe I should, any interest out there? If you are willing to camp, this is by far the cheapest way to take one of my workshops as camping is very cheap. I like the camping part of that workshop. We hang out till late at night and drink tonic.
There are motels nearby too for the fainthearted.

A reader wrote
Hi Stape,

I am reading Gruppe on painting. He explains that yellow is warm, red a modifier and Blue cool.

In his palette he has a cool and a warm for each primaries. He also says to not introduce a warm yellow into shadows. Until then I have no problem.

My understanding will be to use the cool primaries for the shadows and the warm primaries for the light and never mix a cool primary with a warm primary but ...

When he shows how he creates complements with his palette (see attached) I start to be confused. For the green he uses phthalo blue with lemon yellow but lemon yellow should be the cool yellow. But I can understand that any yellow can be considered warm .... I guess. He goes on with umber and that is confusing. He mixed the cool purple with madder or cad red or cad orange ??? Cad orange has a warm yellow in it ! ??? (but maybe it works because red a modifier)

If I had to do cool umbers I would use ultramarine, madder and lemon yellow (cool yellow). And for a warm umber I would use phthalo blue, cad red and cad yellow.

How should I think to make Gruppe's palette work ? HELP !!!! Thanks !
....................Larry Mantlebiter Jr.

Larry;

Whoa! you are losing me. I think I will just talk about the Gruppe palette a little and offer one possible answer to your dilemma.

Emile Gruppe ( 1896-1978) was one of the best known painters of the Cape Ann school. He kept a studio in Gloucester for many years and was known for his rapid style of painting. A major influence on many New England landscape painters, Gruppe is best known for his harbor scenes with fishing boats.



As you can see from the chart above, Gruppe used a relatively small chromatic palette. That means it contains only pure colors, no earth colors. I have used this palette a little in the past, but not extensively. This palette contains a warm and a cool pigment in each of the three hues, red, yellow and blue. If you want punch in your colors, this palette will help. If you have been using a three color palette, this might be an interesting way to expand your choice of colors

I think you should chart your colors. Richard Schmid explains how to do this in his book "Alla Prima". Here is a basic description of how to do that. On a piece of Masonite or canvas about the size of a place mat, lines are drawn to divide the surface into as many columns as you have pigments. Here is a link to a blogger who has written about that and explains it well.

If you "chart" your colors you will then know all they they can do and I think it will answer your question and any others you might have. With a relatively small palette such as this charting it should go more quickly.

There were once three Gruppe books. I have them all, but they are out of print except for one. I have posted a link to the one that is still in print below and a link to a used copy that is affordable. These are excellent books.

Gruppe talks about mixing "umbers" from this palette.He does this by mixing compliments together. He believed that making your own "umbres" gave you more interesting and varied grays and taught you more about mixing than actually having dulled earth colors on your palette. I don't use umber, but I would miss my earth colors. If I had to choose:

I WOULD GIVE UP MY CADMIUMS BEFORE I WOULD GIVE UP MY EARTH COLORS.

The Gruppe on Painting is a restrike and while its quality is acceptable and you can learn from it, the older original book like the one above it is a better printing. The Gruppe books contain a large assortment of his paintings and even if they were not excellent as art instruction they would still be valuable on that count.

Elected juries

Trial by combat, man vs. woman.

In my last post I discussed using previous winners as the next jury. Tonight I think I will lay out the moist conventional system for art juries, those elected by the membership.

The strongest argument for an elected membership is....well, they are elected. The artists who will be in the show decide who will be the judge. What could be fairer than that? Here is the usual process.

Most all art associations are governed by an elected board, who hire a director to actually run daily operations. Every year there is an annual meeting and the nominees for the juries are voted on by the membership at that meeting. But the process starts before that. The president, somebody on the board, or the director is detailed to call individual members and ask them if they would accept the nomination to the exhibition jury. If you intend to have a jury of, say, seven you need eight to ten nominees. If you don't have more nominees than positions on the jury it is hardly an election. That's third world dictatorship stuff. You simply have to have some nominees for the members to reject. Getting ten people to pledge their time, that are actually qualified, can be a lot of work. Many people turn down the responsibility, or served the year before and should are often eliminated from the jury pool. So being the guy who has to secure the nominees can be a big job, besides having to ask people to give up their time and possibly make a few enemies.

This system is not immune to being captured by a subgroup either, but it is less likely, unless that subgroup has critical mass at the annual meeting to outvote the rest of membership. Remember though, every year some people are going to be juried out. They will form a disgruntled cadre of rejected artists working to change or control the system. Sinced that seems to be automatic, when I hear that a jury is corrupt incompetent or blind I always remember that this is a constant in the system. Maybe the jury was corrupt and blind, maybe not. Every jury is accused of that
I have sat on many juries and overseen a lot of them. I have never seen a corrupt jury.

I have seen juries deliberately balanced between devotees of the traditional and acolytes of the avant-garde, to be "fair". Those juries often work this way, Real modern art won't pull vote from the traditionalists and extremely traditional work won't pull the needed votes from the moderns. You get a show full of Cuisinart fauve, things that straddle the boundaries of both schools without really exemplifying either one. Often these juries are flabbergasted at the shows their voting produced. No individual on the jury would have chosen that show.

Many organizations prohibit or at least discourage conversation about the pieces being juried. The work is placed before the jury, they vote and the next work is displayed to them. Very seldom have I seen an argument or anger during a jury. When I have, it was by a juror who was characterized by such behavior. Juries show up, and try to do a good job, generally. They are proud to be on the jury, it is an honor, so they want to pick out as good a show as possible. They will be judged by that. Most jurors try to select a broad range of work besides what they do themselves , believing they can reward quality in different sorts of painting. They almost never have it "in" for a particular artist. If you were juried out of a show, it truly happened because they thought your painting was weak. Maybe you should have a look at how you can improve your art by the next exhibition, instead of jiving yourself that the jury is blind or biased.

More about juries

I have spent the morning working on an illustration for the blog about oblique recession in drawing and it is still not ready. So I will write again on juries as I have further thoughts.

So, I think bringing in outside juries is inappropriate for an elected artists members organization. A one time show or art center will often have no choice but to do this, as they lack a sufficient "in-house" pool of informed jurors, or a least peers to the juried.

There is an odd difference between an art jury and a civil jury. On an art jury I think it best to have people with great expertise and discrimination. In a civil jury the best choice might be a reasonable "everyman" bringing no specialized expertise to the proceedings and representing all of society. The art juror represents a group of artists who can't all be there to make aesthetic decisions for the institution. There are more pictures clamoring for wall space than there are walls, not everything can hang, and some things are not of a quality that the other members would want to hang alongside so some pictures can hang and some cannot. Someone has to decide which is which.

Here is one solution to the problem . This would fit plein air events particularly well I think.

THIS YEARS PRIZE WINNERS ARE NEXT YEARS JURY

You win one of the top prizes, you are on the jury next year. This has a number of advantages. They are;

• Since they won a prize last year they have been singled out, at least this one time as having done excellent or the best work in a given show. This plus the vetting they received when becoming a member argues for their expertise.Doesn't prove it, but places them in as a reasonable choice to make good decisions.
• It removes last years winners from the prize pool this year. Jurors judge shows but are excluded from winning prizes. That gives others a chance to win a prize that year. A few extremely talented members can take all of the prizes year after year. I don't think that is desirable either. They can't do that if they are on the jury every few years.
• There is now a payback to the organization by the prizewinner who can return the blessing that has been bestowed on him, by serving for a morning to help the organization do that for other members. With the prize comes a duty.
• This is a real open system. People will become jurors based on their merit ( at least more often than not) not many surprises and not many ways for small cabals of the mediocre to manipulate the system for their own benefit, again a constant problem. To control the juries you have to make excellent work. Spiking the nominations won't do it.
• It eliminates "spiking" the nominees. In many institutions some poor sadsack gets the job of calling around to members and asking them to be on the juries. It can be a drag because often the prospect will tell you no. Sometimes with a rude reason why. It is easy just to call your friends. When the membership receives the list of nominees for the jury about half of them are from the same circle of friends or amateur watercolor class.Unlike a slate of nominees from some one individual member or the president of the organization or harried director, the line of succession is clear.
  

A little trip to Cape Elizabeth

This weekend I went to a plein air event in Maine. It was one of those one day wet paint auction affairs that seem to be all the rage now. I have done a few in the past but it is not really my preferred sector of the art market, I would prefer to continue to operate at retail through galleries. I decided to do this one partly because I knew it was a spectacular area on the Casco bay. I know the next great bay above the Casco very well, thats the Penobscot bay. I have lived up there. I haven't "worked" the Cape Elizabeth area, well, I painted the light house there once with my friend Stefan Pastuhov about fifteen years ago.

I also like to do the land trust events. I have spent an enormous amount of my life painting on properties owned by land trusts. The owners who have great sweeps of wooded hills or pasture don't want to sell it for fear it will be cut up and built over, instead of continuing in it's rural, beautiful and often historic state (this is New England). In return for allowing the public access to the land, almost like a park, the owners get a break on their taxes so they don't have to sell the property, which seems inevitably to lead to construction of expensive vinyl homes . An awful lot of the quiet old New England nooks and crannies and unspoiled places are on these trust properties. You don't have to join a club or pay a fee, just set up and go to work. They usually love seeing painters around.

The artists and staff of the CELT (Cape Elizabeth Land Trust) met at about 8:00 in the morning at their headquarters where they handed us box lunches, maps of the area, guides to local something or other, and pages of instructions. I had chosen a location at the light house early in the process because I knew it was a fabulous view. The 25 or so participating artists were spread out around this small cape. There was a published guide to our locations with explanatory material.

I met old friend Caleb Stone in the parking lot and we drove to the big state park where Portland Head light is. It really is an unbelievably spectacular location. It would make a good Bierstadt or Moran subject. From the moment we got to the light house we both started back pedaling away from it . We backed up as far as we could, a couple of hundred yards until we were at the edge of the park, backs to a cyclone fence where private land began. We walked out a narrow goat path through dense fields of poison ivy till we emerged on the ledges overlooking the light house. This location, though hard to get to, allowed us to look up the coast at the light house, rather than at the light house with the sea behind it.

Caleb and I set up our easels by about ten, I guess, and worked in the sun nonstop until 3:30, when the "rules" said we had to return to the great tents of opulence with our paintings to be previewed prior to auction.
We put our easels up and put our wet paintings on them with no frames in a huge tent Brutal.The tent complex was enormous, here is a picture of that.

This is a very wealthy area and the estate on which the event was held was vast, elegant and looked like late 19th century New England with open fields with stone walls and mature hardwood trees, weathered barns and dirt roads.I know many people think of that stuff as sentimental but I love to paint it, and somebody ought to, because it is going away fast.

Me and a fine box pressed maduro with a 52 ring size moved up to the parking lot to watch the arrival of the "swells". The fields quickly filled with lines of expensive foreign cars and SUVs from Detroit. I thought the lot looked pretty good. I like to see all those fine automobiles it bodes well in these things.

I returned to the event through a gantlet of greeting women with elegant black evening dresses on. Of course I look nothing like the invited guests. They are all in jackets and ties. I am wearing a paint splattered jean and T shirt combo and have been baked in the sun since breakfast.I tower over everyone else and I have shoulder length hair. I stand right out. Its kind of comical. All the other artists are dressed as they have come from the field so we are readily identifiable to the paying attendees. I still have the cigar.

I take my gift bag and then one of the women hands me a little foil package, and I smile and keep moving with the now gathering crowd surging on up the hill to the great tent. I thought, did she really give me a condom? I can't imagine I am going to need one. On closer examination (which I had to do kind of surreptitiously until I knew what the mystery thing was) the little foil package contained a tiny, folded cloth soaked in insect repellant. The CELT organization REALLY does things right, they are well organized and with great style. This is the third year they have done the event and it is obviously growing.


Here is a view of the back of the tent with the auction beginning. We had about an hour and a half of wine and great spreads of food . I stayed out of the wine, it makes me fall down. I am talking to all the people and generally being 32 feet tall. I have done a lot of the meet and greet and am very comfortable in the artists role there. I think all the years in retail made any fear of strangers go away. I am not shy.


Here is the one shot 18 by 24 that I made. It was a morning and noontime picture. I shot the photo at the top of the page as I was leaving so that is why it has different light. Well part of why anyway. I had to paint like a madman to get all of that onto that canvas in the allotted time and make it finished enough that I could walk out with it signed. That's not really my thing. I want to make and sell paintings done in 30 hours not 3 hours.That is my usual practice. But that was the days assignment.

Various things

Baby Goats

OK, here I am at the helm again. I am in my studio and hopefully I can get back into a paint-blog-sleep mode again. I am done traveling for a while, well actually not quite. I will be on Cape Elizabeth for a wet paint event on Sunday, July 17. But that is a one day affair, and not a massive road trip.

Above is a picture of the garden I have been fooling with, I showed in a previous post how I made a little template out of masking tape with pencil drawing on it for a bird house. I managed to throw another afternoon at it the other day and got to this point below.

I have a ways to go yet, I will have to repaint the flowers around the birdhouse and extend the pole on which it stands. Hopefully I can get it to take its place in the unity of the painting. Stapleton Kearns, the artist who actually lets you see the struggle. Everybody else makes it look easy, I pull my hair out and make faces. I am working round-robin on a gang of half finished paintings stacked around my studio, when I get another whack at this one I will post it and you can see my progress.

I got this question the other day;

Dear Stape
Can you explain the ideas, methods and practical
techniques that you think are most important in making a luminist
painting? Any information you give would be well appreciated.
..................Fissure Cutbait

Dear Fizz;
Your question points out a shortcoming of the blog format , at least the way I am doing it. I have written extensively about luminism and tonalism and wrote for weeks on Inness. But only long term and constant readers know that. There is a search box on the upper left and if you type query words into it you will get to lots of material that should help. This blog has grown so huge (933 posts and counting) that even I don't remember all that is on it, or how to find it all. It is a massive labyrinth. I really should figure out an index and make that available somehow, but the thought of indexing almost a thousand entries, while continuing to write others, seems daunting. I need staff.

The first 500 or so posts were almost all art instruction. If you are learning to paint, I suggest you go to the beginning of the blog and read forward. The first half of this blog is like a textbook. After that it grew more baroque and floral. It is now starting to seem more like writing a periodical or a magazine.

I want to do some more of the Encyclopedia of Dumb Design Ideas posts , I have some ideas for those. They are a lot of work, but fun to write and I hope informative. You also get a little story, a soap opera- Pilgrims Progress- distopia on the Zuider Zea.

Tobin Nadeu of Take-it-Easel has a page online now showing the Stapleton Kearns Signature easel here This is an easel tricked out with the improvements on my own. This is the cadilac of landscape easels. The Chi-Coms made a copy but this is on a wholly different plane. Fine Vermont craftsmanship and maple construction make this a lifetime easel. I have used mine routinely for nearly 15 years. I don't make anything on this, like RGH paints, I want my suppliers to stay in business as I need them. I feel good having my name on this easel. It started out as a sort of joke, "The Stapleton Kearns Signature Easel" like a Gibson model with a guitarists name on it, but now it really exists.

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SNOWCAMP

Held in late January and early February Snowcamp is the flagship model Stapleton Kearns workshop. Set in an old wooden inn on a high ridgetop in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, the views from the property are unbelievable. With the inn there at your back, if you start to freeze, you can run inside for a cup of coffee and a warm up beside the fire. We eat in our own dining room at a big round table and talk about art and our lives in it. These two workshops will fill, sign up if you want to go.

More about the Cleavo- Heavo show.

I found this sign at the ferry terminal in Rockland, Maine. It means you won't be allowed in, but with a lot more attitude.

Below is another question from the comments on the Xanthippe Cleavage- Heaver show.

"I think she'd be smart to do at least 3 or 4 paintings on her scouting trip. Why waste time? Paint smart and fast... after all, you see what grabs you in about 3 - 10 seconds...then she can use the studies for some of the big ones she paints in her studio".

Stape sez.............

This is a possible show you could do and it might be very fine. But I am not a plein air, one shot and into the frame guy. Lots of people are and for them that might be the answer. I am not disparaging that, it's not what I would do myself. I in no way intend to tell this commenter or anyone else how they should do their show, but I , having done a number of shows have my own way I can reveal and some of you will find it useful. Some folks are quick to hear "You should do it THIS way!" when I mean only to describe how I would" do it" based on my own particular temperament, abilities and experience. This is an "opinion piece" and not Holy Writ. Bullets!

• I don't enjoy making small paintings as much as larger ones. I like the bigger canvas, I find it easier to think on. I enjoy working at least 16 by 20 and larger. I am very happy on a 24 by 30. I am not much slower at that scale either.
• I get something in a painting that I make on location, that I lose blowing paintings up from little studies in the studio. Enlarging studies does give an advantage in that I can apply a treatment or raison D'etre to the painting in the studio that wasn't in the study. I am probably going to end up doing just that for at least a few pictures in such a show, but it is also laborious and time consuming in the extreme (for me).
  
• If I am going to make a painting in the studio from a study done outside I would rather do that study 24" by 30". Here's why; If the study comes out real well, it's the painting. If it doesn't, I can either scrap it and try again (most likely ) or if it bears a fault that a redesign would cure, I might make a studio picture from it. When I do, I will have a full sized study to work with and not have the problem of enlarging a little painting, and the danger created by having to invent contents for the spaces that become empty and devoid of information as I enlarge the image.
• A majority of the 24" by 30"s I make will see a bit of work in the studio, some a lot. But then they will go onto the walls of the gallery (and rather efficiently), not anywhere near as quick as a one shot study, but relatively quickly. They will however have some of the immediacy that a painting done on location can have. That often isn't often in a blown up study. My brushwork will also have a better look if it is done on location. I can fake a passage or two in a painting but my brushwork is usually better outside responding to nature dancing in front of me than in my studio.
• Lastly, as you know, I do a bit of historicism in my painting and my heroes worked this way. When you go to a museum or gallery and see a Hibbard, Metcalf, Monet or other impressionist master, what you are looking at is the painting they made. It is not often the result of blowing up a little study. For the painters from a generation before, this would certainly have been the case, like Hudson River school work. But I do a more impressionist thing than that, generally.

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Snowcamp is scheduled, here is the information on that.

Held in late January and early February Snowcamp is the flagship model Stapleton Kearns workshop. Set in an old wooden inn on a high ridgetop in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, the views from the property are unbelievable. With the inn there at your back, if you start to freeze, you can run inside for a cup of coffee and a warm up beside the fire. WE eat in our own dining room at a big round table and talk about art and our lives in it. These two workshops will fill, sign up if you want to go.

Carvers Harbor

I don't know what this post has to do with art, nothing I suppose, but it is very New England and I sometimes stop to show you images of that. People reading this blog are scattered all over the map and enjoy seeing the "old" New England. I shot these today with my little pink camera ( a gift from my wife "you don't care if it's pink do you? I got a deal on it!")

I was on Vinalhaven today. That's an island about ten miles out from Rockland, Maine. It has a small town on it called Carvers Harbor. I have been here many times. It was foggy and all the photos are blurry but they look cool. Below is a corner of the harbor. The economy of the whole island centers around lobstering. There are a lot of very historic and hidden corners of New England, I like to go to a few of them, they are the sort of places I look for painting locations.

Below is the gray ocean itself. Vinalhaven doesn't get much surf, but here is a little. Monhegan, another island outside the mouth of the Penobscot Bay gets more reliable surf.

Here we are on Main street waiting for the 4th of July parade, please note the architecture.

And up the street come the Shriners in little race cars. There were actually fire trucks and people dressed as lobsters and marching veterans. However I liked the little racecars.

And then up the hill behind us; towards the gallamander.



And I love old headstones, this one is in a tiny cemetery on Lanes Island, connected by a little bridge to Vinalhaven.

An open letter to Xanthippe Cleavage-Heaver

Xanthippe Cleavage-Heaver excitedly opened the waxen seal on the letter from the Accreditation Commission For Conformity Assessment Bodies. The tiny crabbed printing in brown ox gall ink informed her that she was the recipient of the National Assembly of Compulsion grant for the arts. Her proposal for "The Bridges of the Hudson" had been selected for a show at the Great hall of Conformity at the University of East Delft!

Here are some things that Xanthippe is going to need to know. Bullets!

• You don't want to do a show like this on short notice. Three months is short notice. Sure you could do it, but that's a finished painting a week with no time to spare, that's every week, so you had better get a few ahead in case it rains or your back hurts. That sounds like a show of 8 by 10's to me. Also every one of the twelve will have to be used, there isn't time built in to reject a few weak entrants.
• In order to do the show I outlined for Xanthippe last night a year is a nice lag time. You aren't only going to work on this project this year you have to paint for a living in the meantime, getting all of those paintings done has to fit into your present life's schedule. You are going to have to keep at it though, you will be glad to have the lead time.
• I would restrict the paintings in the show to two sizes I like 16 by 20 for the small ones and 24 by 36 for the larger. Oh yeah, and two squares, hows about 16 by 16 and 26 by 29 (Metcalf square). Also some 9 by 12's for the reception area, maybe half a dozen.
• First you stretch up a big pile of canvasses those sizes, many more than you will need and stack those in one corner of your studio, ready to go at a moments notice.
• Can you afford to buy your frames today? Or will you have to wait for your income tax refund? I expect to average 300 dollars a frame, the big ones will cost more, and the 16 by 20's less, but that isn't a big budget for professional quality framing with closed corners. We can go cheap on the 9 by 12's later, but the 12 pictures in the show will cost about 3,600 dollars to frame. I would order them now, framing takes a while and something might screw up if this is on a tight deadline, so better call your gilder and get on that now. Then you can try the paintings as you make them into their frames to see how they look. Incidentally with canvas, paint and a few other costs like gasoline, you are already on the hook for at least 5000 dollars.
  
• One nice thing about having a year, you can have pictures from several seasons, rather than a whole show of only winter bridge scenes. I am assuming you are going to go to the locations and actually make these pictures and not work from the file photos at the Peoples Community Center. That's what most people would do, and it's quick, but it stands almost no chance of being a really great show, and you want that, because you want to have a career not just a show. This show needs to be great!
• Next weekend, you throw the rottweilers in the back of the International Harvester Travelall, grab a notebook and go visit the bridges. There are probably more than you can do in a day, probably that will take three days. At each bridge you find a location or two and scope out the best angles. Write those things down in your notebook, one bridge per page. Better get a picture of each possible view also.
• You better pick out two of those bridges for this months paintings too, if you can get the first half dozen done in the first four months, you might make that deadline. For sure you have to get ahead of the schedule a bit. You don't want to be in a position of having a show only three weeks away but you still need three paintings. That can't be done. at least not well.
  

Its coming, I swear.................

Still from the movie: "Down Country Roads with Stapleton Kearns"



Sorry, readers;

I have been traveling and now I am against a tight deadline on a piece that HAS to be done by the first. It has at least a months work in it. It is a big project and not a plein air piece. The painting is for the Northwest Rendezvous of Art in Helena, Montana. I am going to go there for the event in August.

Either way I have to work almost around the clock on this thing until it is right. The painting is proving very hard to make, they often do. I will get to the computer tonight and actually write something of value. Till then, I suggest you lay down with your arms at your sides and wait quietly.

More about the eyes that follow you and some slander aimed at perfectly nice people.

I believer I will talk about a couple of things today. First a little more about the eyes that follow you problem. I am traveling (again) and I carry a few photos of my wife and kids in my computer bag. I remember what they look like, but women always ask me if I have photos of my family and disapprove if I don't. Men, never ask.

So, I propped one of the pictures of my kids up against the desk lamp in my motel room and walked back and forth in front if it. The eyes in the photograph seemed always to follow me. I am certain that the camera didn't manipulate the images in some special way to make that happen. Nor did the camera employ some artifice or covert mathematical operation to secure the effect. Oddly though, people never remark about the eyes in a photograph following you around, at least I have never heard that. I think that backs up M. Guilmets explanation, and as I said earlier, it requires no special manipulation to paint a portrait with eyes that "follow" you except for having the sitter train their eyes on you as you paint them.

I think that a little of what is underlying this whole thing is a popular idea or need for the artist to be a shaman or possessed of some secret knowledge. The idea that a paintings eyes follow you around because of some little known contrivance appeals enormously to that. It reinforces the idea that the painting has been imbued with some special and mysterious "life" that is slightly otherworldly.

Most people, OK, not most, but a great number of people who I meet tell me that either they, or their mother is(or was) an artist. My standard reply is to show a warm and supportive smile as I ask "Cool! Maybe I have seen your work, where are you showing?" That always seems to sort things out. When it is Moms work they will tell me about, or if possible show me a portrait Mom did of the kids. As I look at it, I can easily tell it was made by copying a photograph by someone with no particular ability or knowledge because it contains no structure or form. That is, rather than the modeling explaining the planes and surface of the heads, the shading is like dirt on the surface or has cast shadows that fall randomly across the features rather than being arranged to display the features expressively. As I observe this I usually hear the proud relative saying "and the eyes actually follow you around the room"! That being presented as the final authoritative argument for the high quality of Moms art. See, Mom can do "it". The painting also "looks just like them".

I try to be supportive and move on to admiring their collection of unicorns or something, but it makes me feel foreign. I always wish that the people that I met knew more about painting, but it is obscure to them. After spending a lifetime honing my craft, it is always a little scary when you discover that most "normal" or educated people don't know the difference.

More about the eyes that "follow' you

Rembrandt (1606-1669) Portrait of Nicolaas van Bambeeck from artrenewal.org

A reader in the comments posted such an excellent explanation of the eyes following you problem that I am going to put it out front here under the proscenium arch. The following is by M.C. Guilmet;


This is not a phenomenon that can be observed by moving about in nature and is an illusion caused by linear perspective and chiaroscuro effects that set fixed points on the picture plane and set a specific point of view for that object permanently, no matter where any viewer stands. There are a few simple examples to better understand the illusion:
1. First, reverse the problem. Find a portrait that is painted where the eyes do not look at you. Then try to find any place to stand in the room where the eyes will look at you. There is no place. The eyes will never look at you. You are looking at an object where everything has been fixed to one point of view. So no matter where you move in the room that fixed point of view never changes. You could stand right in front of the painting, then move 12 feet to the right, and the picture will not change for you, the eyes will never look at you, it will be as if a phantom viewer is still standing directly in front of the painting and that is who the painting is playing to with eyes averted. Contrast this with ‘reality’. Stand a model in front of you. Stand directly in front of them and look into their eyes, now, move slowly around the model. Every step you take, your view completely changes. There is no pre-fixed point of view, there is no middleman. You are creating the pov with each step. You are looking at the front, now side, now back, etc. Each slight tilt of your head in any direction while viewing nature creates a different view to you, a different reality. From almost the moment you are born, your eyes start to take in every “snapshot” of objects in front of them and your brain starts to build a synthesized version of that object until you understand that object in its most “ideal” or generic state. This is Plato’s Heaven, the idea of platonic form. I’m getting off track a bit so...
2. OK, forget about faces entirely. Let’s say you paint a tree that looks about 50 feet away from the bottom edge of the frame. If you stand in front of the painting, the tree looks 50 feet away. If you back up 100 feet, the tree still looks 50 feet from the frames edge. The distance from the tree to the frame edge is fixed and never changes no matter where you go, even if you leave the room. Contrast that with standing in front of a real tree about three feet away. It looks three feet away. Back up 50 feet now it looks 50 feet away. Back up 100…and it looks 100 feet away and so on. Think back now to that painted tree 50 feet from the frames edge. Imagine that tree “looking” at you…see it’s face….and it’s “eyes”…no matter where you stand in the room, that tree will still be looking at you in the same way. The fact is, the whole painting appears to you in exactly the same way no matter where you stand. It is a slice of reality within your reality. For a portrait, the eyes... but also the lips, chin, hair, nose…..look at you in the same way. So this really begs the question, WHY do we notice this so much with a portrait and NOT with a tree…..?

http://www.mcguilmet.com/

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Today I am in Minnesota, I have been so many places in the last six months that I can't even remember them in order. I am going to try to make a demo painting today, and photograph it with my celluloid phone, if that works I will post that next.............Stape

Stape portrait by Garin Baker

Here is a portrait of me done by Garin Baker at yesterdays quickdraw event in Cranford, New Jersey. He did it in two and a half hours as that was the time limit given us. I painted a seascape.
Thise is a real fine piece of work. You know how sometimes those baseball players point with their sticks to the bleachers to show where they are going to hit the ball? Garin did that. The night before, he asked me where I was going to be painting and if he could do my portrait. He said I had a peculiar stance and he thought he could get a great picture of me out working. I'd say he did.

To do this is a matter of no little talent, not many people can do this, especially on demand. He was really on the spot there, and I think he knocked it out of the park. It won a prize in the competition. Below is his picture from the opening last night. Sorry it's so grainy but there was very little light.


Garin is a professional painter from Newburg, New York. Here is a link to his website, and to his mural company and lastly to his Carriage House Atelier.
Go check him out, this is an enormously talented guy, and funny too. Born and raised in New York, he has the confident swagger of the urban denizen, even though he has moved a few miles up the Hudson. I have enjoyed meeting the artists at this event. I think that it is so important to get out and know all of the great folks in this field. I don't usually do plein air events, but I enjoyed this one a lot.

Below is a picture I made of a green house and farm store in Cranford. It is a 11 by 14. I almost never paint small, but I did on this trip. It makes me feel boxed in. I like the freedom of a big canvas, but it was a special; event so I painted little "peashooters" as my friend T.M. Nicholas likes to call them.

This afternoon I am driving home to New Hampshire. I am looking forward to going back to work finishing my Texas stuff.