This is the time of year I have a love/hate—with the balance a bit more tipped towards hate—relationship with my garden.

Later in the summer, I will be head over heels besotted with my flowers and vegetables, fruit and herbs, all at their peak of good looks and ripe abundance and providing an endless bounty of delicious meals and beautiful bouquets.

I’ll receive sheer pleasure from the little Eden I’ve created for my family and the birds, butterfly, and insect friends that share the garden with me.

But right now at the end of May, I find myself resenting my plant obsession and the long hours of physical work it takes to bring to life the vision of abundance I hold in my head.

By the end of a morning of shoveling compost, raking beds, mulching paths, and transplanting the baby sunflowers, melons and lettuces I’ve coddled along from seed, I’ve had it with my gardening love affair.

On a lovely spring afternoon that I could be spending out in the field with my French easel mixing the colors of a sky full of cumulus clouds, I’m shoveling chicken poop on to the cabbage patch.

I ask myself, “Why am I putting all these hours into digging in the dirt and hauling a wheel barrow around the yard when I could be painting? What am I, a menial laborer or an artist?“

The answer, I know, when I’m being honest with myself, is both.

And the next day when the morning comes, I feel better. I can move again without aches and pains and am ready to head outside in the cool of early morning to dig and plant.

“But just until lunchtime,” I promise, “and then I am going to my studio.”

I tell myself that this intense time of creation in the garden is short and soon I will just be in the maintenance mode of weeding and harvesting and enjoying.

I remind myself what the great Pablo Casals said: “I am a human being first, a musician second, a cellist third.”

A human being first, an artist second, a painter third.

For me, part of being a human being means growing some of my own food, partnering with nature, doing physical as well as mental work.

For gardening artists like me, designing with plants is much like designing a painting.

We select our varieties of flowers and even vegetables with an eye towards how their colors, sizes, and textures will interact, how the parts will become a whole.

We think of varying textures, of using both complementary and analogous colors, as we select a living palette at the nursery.

Yellow and orange calendulas? Let’s mix in some purple delphiniums and blue bachelor buttons—and the pollinating bees will be happy, too.

Some artists crave the connection to nature that creating a garden provides.

Painter Alan Gussow was a passionate gardener and environmentalist and he and his wive Joan (who wrote the delightful memoir This Organic Life ) shared a passion for growing as much of their food as possible.

Gussow’s love of the experience of working outdoors among the shapes and colors of the gardens he knew so intimately inspired many of his abstract watercolors and oils.

Emil Nolde and his wife Ada were also passionate gardeners. Nolde painted luminous watercolors inspired by the purity and intensity of the flowers they grew.

After the end of the Nazi rule in Germany which had banned him from exhibiting, Nolde painted bright red poppies to help him get accustomed to using color freely again.

Georgia O’Keefe cultivated a garden at her ranch in Abiquiú that kept her supplied with fresh fruits and vegetables throughout the year. She hired gardeners to help but was intimately involved with day to day cultivation, including getting her hands dirty planting peas in the spring.

She felt what she described as “an intimacy with the soil,” and said, “I wish people were all trees and I think I could enjoy them then”—a sentiment that I and maybe you can relate to!

Her garden is still in operation years after her death, now as a partnership between the O’Keefe Museum and local schools. Here’s a webcam live stream for you O’Keefe lovers out there.

Are you a gardening artist? I’d love to hear how you balance your studio practice with the demands of your garden this busy time of the year.

I’d also be interested in hearing how your art and your garden have influenced each other.

Please feel free to share in the comments below!

The first eight years of my life our family lived in a brick bungalow on a narrow street, with a median strip separating our small house from a four-lane highway.

In my earliest memory, I'm standing on that median strip looking at flowers with white petals, yellow dots in the center and long green stems.

I don’t notice the trucks roaring by or the cars parked in a long row in front of each identical house. The flowers on the median strip completely absorb me. I’m happy.

My second memory is of standing in the gutter next to the median strip after an evening rainstorm. The air smells damp, the last of the sun peeks out from behind clouds and warms my shoulders.

I’m looking down at oily patches that reflect the pale blue and pink of the sky and I’m moving those patterns of color around with my red rain boots. What fun to make the colors come and go, mix and dissolve!

More memories from the empty lot next to our house: In spring sitting invisible inside the big branches of a forsythia, in summer walking through tall grass searching for wild onions that I’d smash on a flat stone into little cakes, like an Indian girl on the prairie.

In warm weather, sitting on my front steps I’d hear a soundtrack of chain saws with their high-pitched whine and children calling to each other up and down the street.

In winter while I trundled through the side lot’s snow, I’d listen for the clack clack clack of cars with snow chains on their tires moving slowly along the highway.

Not too long ago, on a trip back to Washington, DC I drove down the access road and by this house to show my husband where I'd spent my earliest years.

Of course, it was all changed. The grassy empty lot now had a building on it, my hide-away forsythia was long-gone, there were no daisies on the median strip.

And everything was so much smaller than I remembered it, my kingdom of meadow and forest and stream miniaturized down to a reality that was hard for the adult me to even recognize.

I’m well past my childhood years but somehow have retained the sense that an ordinary place—even a dusty median strip or empty lot—can hold some magic and be more than what it seems.

Any four lane road, daisy patch, or forsythia bush that I look at today, every chain saw or snow tire I hear, is still filtered through my childhood imagination.

That potent mix of memory and imagery lives on, and I believe that, more than anything else, is the reason why I (and maybe you?) paint.

Your comments are welcome below!

I’m guessing that most people would say that the words “art” and “business” don’t belong in the same sentence. The view of the man on the street is that artists are the opposite of business people and that our heads are somewhere up in the clouds with no bookkeeping, marketing, or file cabinets in sight.

The truth, as any self-employed artist will tell you, is just the opposite. Artist have the same concerns and tasks as any small business. I know this sometimes challenging fact from my own experience over the years as a “sole proprietor” visual artist (as the IRS terms us) and if you’re in the field, you know it, too.

I was reminded just how much business work we painters need to do when I taught a seminar recently on professional development for visual artists. For eight hours I blasted the class with a firehouse of information about all the office work, from record-keeping to marketing, in this field—and by the end of it, I wouldn’t have blamed students if their reaction was, “Thanks for all the art biz info, but painting as a hobby sounds just fine.”

Of course, being a self-employed artist also has tremendous benefits and joys; otherwise we wouldn’t put up with all of the stress and labor involved. I’ll talk about those aspects in other posts. But here let’s explore—both for those who have no idea what artists really do and for those of you doing all of this and who need to give yourselves a pat on the back—the similarities between being an artist and running a small business.

1. The Physical Plant

People who make things need a place to make them. We visual artists need a dedicated space to keep our supplies, decent light to see what it is we’re doing, and some privacy to do it in. Out of necessity, we are often inventive about our work spaces; in my life they’ve ranged from a rented room in a neighbor’s home to a dusty suite above a porn shop to moving a barn so that I could build a studio addition on my home (Here’s another post I wrote about artists’ studios.)

2. Inventory

Who in the world calls art work “inventory?” It sounds so crass—and yet, that’s what these canvasses stacking up in our studios—hopefully on their way out the door to clients and galleries—in reality are. If you have an active art business, you need inventory to meet demand for your product. (Product?” I know, that’s also crass, and I promise to never say it again….)

3. Presentation

The digital life our work takes on is now almost as important as its physical life. We present our art to others via jpegs, tiffs, printed photos and videos, and all need to be produced according to industry standards of accurate color, focus, cropping, and exposure.

How we present our actual work also matters and usually includes framing, and to do that well takes some time, taste, and money.

4. Marketing

I think a good rule for the professional artist to live by is, “Do the best work you can and tell the most people about it.” That’s where marketing comes in, which can be as simple as having a postcard printed with our website address and an example of our art, to an elaborate venture like the publication of a book.

Also helpful for spreading the word are magazine and newspaper articles, catalogues, TV and radio interviews, blogs, newsletters, and of course Facebook and Instagram. This shameless self-promotion is a job unto itself.

5. Sales

Now we are getting to the nitty gritty of it all—just ask Van Gogh for his opinion on how important this aspect of being an artist is. (“Very” he would say—though never selling a painting didn’t keep him from being an heroically productive, transformative visionary.)

Who will sell our work, and how? It could be commercial or co-operative galleries, festivals and fairs, we ourselves via social media, or some combination of these. There are pros and cons to any sales mode; but unless their model includes frequently taking a loss, this is one topic that a small business can’t ignore.

6. Record Keeping

What a boring topic, and who among us does it well? But still, we need to know what we spend and what we earn, what art we have on hand, where the paintings are that we’ve sent into the world, and who bought what.

Edward Hopper had a simple, elegant inventory system: an ink drawing of each painting, with all the details needed to be on top of his record keeping—which I never am.

7. Investing

We artists need to invest in ourselves. There’s no way to run an art business without spending money on frames, photography, shipping, art supplies, office supplies—on and on I could go. And we need to keep track of these expenses, or “deductions” as the IRS calls them, or we get terribly walloped at tax time.

Sometimes an investment in our art business may seem like a luxury to others—but we may know for a fact that the expensive art book, bigger canvas, better grade of paint, or trip to Paris is necessary if we are going to grow.

8. Planning

Here’s another category that the lay peson probably think artists suck at—and many of us do. But I think some artists are also quite strategic at thinking ahead about where they want their art to go, and how they are going to get there.

It’s true that we can’t always plan our creative work, which often has a life of its own and seems to change and evolve without much input from our conscious mind. But what about that other kind of planning that is more like a dream for ourselves, a dream of our efforts being seen on a larger stage, shared with a wider audience, with more rewards returning to us for all of our hard work? What small businessperson, or artist, hasn’t had those hopes?

Your comments are welcome below!

I’ll often pick as the topic for a workshop that I’m teaching something I myself want to learn more about. This is true of my upcoming Figure and Ground class.

Though like most painters I work with this concept in an intuitive way, it’s been fascinating to take a deeper dive into the history, meaning, and application of “figure and ground.”

I’m discovering that figure and ground is both a simple and a complex idea. The simple part is that we humans need to make sense of the chaos of shapes that surround us in this world, and one way we do that is to differentiate between the stuff we’re interested in (the figure) and everything else that’s cluttering up the scene (the ground.)

This idea was articulated in the 1920’s as part of Gestalt Theory. Gestalt means “whole” and it embraces the belief that the whole is always greater than its parts. That makes a lot of sense to artists, as we’re always struggling with seeing the whole, the complete picture, and not just the details.

Another Gestalt principle is that our brain organizes stimulation by focusing on one thing at a time: either the object or the background. We do that because we have a hard time processing too much visual information simultaneously.

Interestingly, when we make the more abstract shape the “real” thing—like the faces rather than the vase in the famous example below—a different part of our brain is used than when we focus on only the object.

Painters know all about this flip between perceiving the “stuff’ and the “non-stuff.” The non-stuff, or as we call it, “negative space,” is a the most important tool we have to accurately see and draw.

Little children intuitively emphasize both figure and ground in their art work. Their imaginations are so engaged with the piece of paper they’re drawing on that it becomes a world unto itself, where every area of the composition is equally important.

That phase ends when kids get older and become more focused on cataloguing the things they’re interested—whether that be dogs, airplanes, or, in my case at age 10, ballet dancers.

As beginning painters we are usually all about the “stuff.” Until we learn to see negative space we tend to concentrate on the figure and forget the ground.

As more advanced students in life drawing class, we continue to focus on the figure and pay no attention to the environment around the model. By having that laser vision we learn about anatomy, and how to contour and shade.

But soon enough if we continue painting we’ll start working with both the figure and ground, and come to understand how interrelated they are. We’ll begin to develop a style in our work that emphasizes either the “stuff” or the “non-stuff”—or attempts to balance the two.

If you were a painter working during the Renaissance, or for centuries after, your paintings would definitely have been about the figure and not the ground. Painters then were skilled at using light, dark, proportion, and edges to highlight their subjects and make the background recede.

All that changed in the 1900’s when “figure and ground” underwent a revolution.

Suddenly, under the influence of many factors converging at once—art from other cultures, political upheavals, technological innovations like the camera and portable paint tubes, and changes in how painters made their living as independent agents rather than being supported by church and state—the ground began to overwhelm the figure.

All bets were off in painting composition. Figures were camouflaged, flattened, cropped, distorted, and rendered in every color under the sun. Painters deliberately made the ground as strong an element as the figure, and sometimes more so, to remind us that in art, design can be as important as realistic depiction.

Maurice Denis spoke for many artists in the rule-breaking early 1900’s when he said, Remember that a painting—before it is a horse, a nude, or some anecdote—is essentially a flat surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order.

If painters were excited by this new freedom to subvert the primacy of the figure, viewers could be confused by the results. They wondered what they should be looking at and even what the point of the painting was. They were accustomed to seeing objects set apart from the background, not hidden within it.

A painting that balances figure and ground demands much more from us, and uses parts of our brain that we aren’t used to exercising—just as the “face/vase” optical illusion does. This is especially true in our Western culture, where there is little tolerance for ambiguity.

Contemporary painting continues to explore “figure and ground” possibilities, sometimes emphasizing a monumental shape in a composition, sometimes creating an all-over pattern with no dominant shape at all, and sometimes striking a balance.

Artists like Sol LeWitt or Richard Diebenkorn explore this tension, seesawing back and forth in approaches so that the struggle between the two becomes part of the content of their work.

More traditional realist painters use pictorial devices like strong light and shadow and a toning down of color to simplify backgrounds, harkening back to “pre-revolutionary” compositional approaches. These artists make the ground less important in the narrative, and in doing so simplify the visual story down to one that’s only about the the figure.

All this thinking about the meaning of figure and ground has me excited to experiment in my studio with some different ways of composing my paintings—and also has me looking forward to seeing what new approaches my students come up with.

I’ve recently begun a painting series I’m calling “Family History,” and like most times I’ve started a new direction, I’m not entirely sure where the idea came from. One minute my husband was retrieving from a closet a photo album filled with tiny black and white pictures of his parents’ relatives, and the next I was at my studio painting a watercolor of his sister, mother, and grandmother.

I know that part of the inspiration for “Family History” is my interest in how figures interact with each other, and with their surroundings. Do they touch, do they keep their distance, bend down to the ground, stand upright, move alone, or in groups?

How do figures connect to the space around them and to each other, and what does this say about their relationship to other people, and to the earth? These may sound like questions for sociologists, but painters also find such ideas endlessly fascinating to explore.

Giotto was one of the first painters to place figures in a realistic space. He creates an intense emotional narrative by overlapping the figures’ forms and by focusing their gaze to make a web of relationships, and a powerful story of connection and betrayal.

In this “Descent from the Cross” by Roger van der Weyden, the figures collapse, hold, lean in, bend, touch. The connection of one to the other tells a story of loss, grief, and the gift of support.

If you’d like to explore how figures connect within a composition, try looking carefully at a painting and making a quick sketch that focuses on the gestures of the main subjects. No details are needed, just the relationship of figures to each other, and to the space around them. I find this a wonderful way to really see what choices the painter made in connecting figures, and the emotional resonance those decisions create.

When I travelled in India I was struck by how the people there relate physically to the earth, and to each other. Sitting on the ground, squatting, bending down are normal postures there. Indians stand closer to each other, touch each other more, watch each other intently in a way that we in the United States would consider impolite, or even threatening. But in India the result of all this physical contact seemed to me to create a feeling of community, of connection to place and to each other.

Not all figures in painting—or reality--connect. Sometimes they are like atoms, separate and distinct, on the alert and keeping their distance, dwarfed by their environment.

In cities we keep our distance with upright posture and purposeful gait, maintaining around ourselves a zone of privacy . A city environment is also upright, all right angles and unyielding surfaces.

Unless you are homeless and sleep on the street, in modern cities only your feet touch the ground.

Our wealth, or lack of it, can determine our physical connection to both family and the strangers around us. The poor can’t afford to keep distance in a home or a city, as George Bellows showed in his paintings of New York tenement kids. Individual figures become one mass of light values and warm colors in his painting “Riverfront”.

All through the history of art, painters have wrestled with the theme of figures in a landscape. A favorite subject, revived by Paul Cezanne in the 1800’s (though out of fashion now) is the Arcadian idyll that features idealized figures in a bucolic setting.

Resting or dancing, grounded and comfortable, their postures communicate peace and connection.

In the idyll, human and nature are at peace and as one. Landscape and figures share the same shapes, light, and colors, and it’s difficult to tell where one ends and the other begins.

Figures in a natural setting can also be delineated by the shapes between them, or what artists call “negative space.” Negative spaces are as flat and definite as a jigsaw puzzle piece, and because they are abstract and engage our “right-brain,” are a huge help in drawing the figure.

In Fairfield Porter’s painting “Tennis Game,” the negative shape of the tennis court pins the figures into separation, and into a relationship very different from the connection shared by Cezanne’s and Bellow’s bathers.

For visual artists, the shape of the negative space between figures is a precise calculation.

Whether two figures merge, or are defined by the shape between them, tells us either a story of separation or connection.

Maybe saying “tells a story” is too definite for visual art. I’d do better to say that the artist’s choices “ask a question” about separation and connection.

Painters can use their skill to create something in-between isolation and connection that’s very much like life.

A painting can remind us that our relationships with others, even those closest to us, hold mysteries.

Which brings us back to family, and what painting, with its language of shape, light and color, can say about a family’s connections, and to the place that family calls home.

I don’t know the answer, but I’m looking forward with my “Family History” series to exploring the question.

To see new “Family History” paintings, please follow me on Facebook and Instagram.

Your comments are welcome below!

Every morning when I wake up, I have the chance to live my perfect day: take a walk with the dogs, write in my journal, paint through the morning and afternoon, eat a tasty dinner with my husband, read a thought-provoking book for an hour, and go to bed planning to do the exact same thing tomorrow.

However, my “perfect” day and my “normal” day aren't always the same thing--not with the demands of running an art business, errands and appointments, a house and garden competing for my attention, and a news cycle that never quits.  And “perfect” and “normal” are especially not the same thing when resistance rears its ugly head.

It's easy to understand how the demands of day-to-day life can get in the way of creative time--but "resistance"?  Is that a real thing, even? What if you’ve been an artist for decades and are firmly planted in your creative medium, would you still sometimes resist doing this work you love?

Yes. I do, anyway. I find myself fighting resistance every day.

When I'm back in my studio after a few hours at the dentist, and I've answered the last email from students and galleries, and yet I'm still not walking over to my easel and picking up a brush—I know the force field of resistance is at work.

Resistance keeps me doing the same safe thing longer than I need to, because doing something different means change, and change requires risk, and risk invites fear. When I drag out finishing a painting over weeks instead of days, that’s resistance.

The painting is never quite as perfect as what I’m seeing in my mind’s eye, and not finishing means I don’t need to accept that difference between the here-and-now real and the unattainable ideal.

Resistance caused by fear is a powerful enemy. It’s sneaky, persistent, and shrewd. It's the little voice in my head that, when the moment comes to get to back to work, whispers, "This is too hard for you." It’s the voice that says, “That’s a great idea you have, let’s keep thinking about it, we’ll start tomorrow.”

In his insightful book “The War of Art”, Steven Pressfield examines the inhibiting and even damaging role resistance plays in the lives of creative people (which we all have the potential to be.)

Pressfield writes, “Procrastination is the most common manifestation of Resistance because it’s the easiest to rationalize. We don’t tell ourselves, I’m never going to write my symphony. Instead we say, I am going to write my symphony; I’m just going to start it tomorrow.”

He also says that fear is something we need to embrace:

“Are you paralyzed with fear? That’s a good sign. Fear is good. Like self-doubt, fear is an indicator. Fear tells us what we have to do. Remember our rule of thumb: The more scared we are of a work or calling, the more sure we can be that we have to do it.”

Over time, I've learned that the only way to silence the negative voice of resistance is to hear it for what it is--a free floating fear of failure. The best thing I can do is ignore this bully who is always ready for a fight and go about my business. Resistance is a powerful adversary when empowered by our emotions but dissolves like the Wicked Witch as soon as we face it down.

I need to just show up, face the fear, and maybe even embrace it. Schedules, routines, goals, sharing what we do with others: all of these strategies can help create enough momentum to overcome inertia, fear and resistance.

"One more time" is also a good motto to tape up on our studio walls:

If, this one more time, I can pick up my tools and the strand of yesterday's work, and just get going again, I'll be fine.

Check out these related posts:

Compare and Contrast

Monkey Mind

Your comments are welcome below!

I've noticed a pattern in the biographies of male artists: their fathers often expect them to enter a "serious, manly" profession like law, medicine or business, and are dead set against their sons pursuing a life of “fooling around” with paint on canvas.

Claude Monet, Paul Cezanne, Edward Manet, Paul Gauguin, and Henri Matisse are just a few in a long list of men who defied their fathers and became painters. The stakes were high for these artists, and they threw everything they had into succeeding.

If they failed at their work, they would be nothing in the eyes of society--or perhaps worse, in the eyes of their fathers.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the gender spectrum, the mothers of these fledgling artists often exhibited the exact opposite behavior--they supported their sons’ artistic interests. These moms may have worried that their wayward children would starve in a garret, but they didn’t stand in the way of their young devoting themselves to an uncertain profession.

Some of these mothers were amateur painters, and gave their sons their first lessons in drawing. They offered them their first praise, early patronage, and lasting support.

I was lucky to have both a father and a mother who encouraged me to follow my love of painting, and never said I should pursue a more "practical" profession. Their belief in me meant one less self-doubt to struggle with.

A supportive parent is a gift for a young artist—but not a necessary gift. Artists can, and do, persevere with their training and their work in the face of parental disapproval. They often find the strength to forge ahead without any family support, because they have no other choice. They know this is the only employment they’re suited for, come hell or high water.

Like young law clerk Matisse and stockbroker Gauguin, whose misery in their “respectable” jobs were impossible options, a foolhardy few turn their backs on parental expectations to take the plunge into a life of creative work.

These budding artists need to be stubbornly single-minded in their focus, and to pursue their obsession alone, sometimes into difficult places.

Over time those who have made their way without the support of their mother or father may be lucky enough to find new families created from like-minded friends or an encouraging partner, and within that framework build a life centered on a deep commitment to their art.

This isn’t an easy journey. If your childhood self heard, "No you can't" from your parents, rather than, "Go ahead and see if you can," it may take many years to quiet that disapproving parental voice in your head.

I’ve had many students, mostly women, who wanted to study art and were told by parents that wasn’t an option, that they needed more than anything the ability to make a living. So they made careers in other fields, and when nearing retirement renewed their interest in painting. Their self doubt may still be there, but so is their passion, and the opportunity to pick up a brush again feels like a gift.

When we’re finally in our studio alone, hearing not mother’s or father’s but our own voice, we have the chance to really begin. Now the challenge is to forge an accepting and compassionate relationship to our artist self, and become the nurturing parent to our creative work.

I was lingering not too long ago in the Small French Painting rooms at the National Gallery in Washington, DC when I overheard a man say to his wife, "Our granddaughter could have done that!"

This was accompanied by a snort, so I knew it wasn't a compliment to the painting they were standing in front of, Pierre Bonnard's "Table Set in a Garden.”

I resisted the impulse to grab the gentleman by the lapels of his well-tailored suit, and tell him just how wrong he was.

I could have given him a point by point explanation of what a sophisticated little painting Bonnard had created, and gone on at some length about complements, diagonals, value design, and color composition.

I could have asked how his granddaughter was enjoying the immensely productive painting life she had made for herself in the south of France. I could have noted, with admiration, her sixty year dedication to a  life of art, and all the sacrifices she had made along the way.

But I’m trying to be a better and less sarcastic person, so I stared instead at a wonderfully awkward portrait by Renoir, and held my tongue.

Thinking back with a cooler head to that non-painters reaction to “Table Set in a Garden,” I can understand why he said it could have been created by a child. Bonnard's paintings often have that quality.

You can see the brushstrokes in his work, and paint sits on the canvas like paint, rather than becoming an illusion of tree or sky.

Bonnard is more interested in decorative than realistic color, and will often stress pattern over form, which gives his painting its flat rather than three dimensional look, and helps account for its “childlike” quality.

Bonnard's paintings are "not smooth or graceful", which is the dictionary definition of awkward.

Compare this Bonnard figure painting below:

to this one by an artist working at the same time in the more traditional “academic” style of the day:

Did Bonnard have the training and skill set to paint “Odalesque”? No, he did not.

But Bonnard also didn’t want to paint that figure, or paint that painting. From Cezanne and the Impressionists onward, painters were rejecting the idea that illusion was more important than invention, and that gracefulness as defined by art authorities was more important than honesty.

Edgar Degas was a master of the awkward. He painted naked figures rather than nudes, real in their poses and purpose whether combing hair, drying themselves after a bath, or examining their nails and feet like regular women do everywhere.

Degas could have painted Aphrodite with all the skill of a Renaissance master, but choose to paint in a way that was considered ugly by many of the critics of his day.

I find that I have come to prefer awkwardness, and even sometimes ugliness, over prettiness in paintings.

 Why? Because I enjoy seeing signs of struggle. I like witnessing the indecision. I don't mind when paint, the physical reminder of the work involved, trumps illusion.

For example, Stanley Lewis's landscapes, which he works on over many months from observation, are more honest then beautiful. You can see his discarded decisions coming through layer upon layer of pigment.

That residue of time and effort gives Lewis’s painting a power that a more easily achieved image doesn’t always possess.

The British artist Frank Auerbach’s paintings also have a “hard won” quality that I find compelling.

Auerbach painted the same subject a hundred times--and sometimes on the same canvas, wiping down his day’s work when dissatisfied, and beginning again with the same subject the next morning.

The result is sometimes dense and difficult to read, but for me it always carries a conviction of rightness, as if someone looked, and looked again, until every part of the surface was locked into its rightful place.

John Constable‘s great landscape paintings also have this sense of being wrestled with. For Constable, emotion, light, the specifics of a sky were more important than generic attractiveness.

Constable talked about struggling with a painting, and not being sure who would come out on top, him or the canvas. I love that image of a fight to the finish in the studio. . . .

Sometimes rather than through long engagement, an awkward authenticity comes from speed and risk-taking. I’m thinking of Van Gogh, for example, who painted his legendary body of work in less than ten years.

His marks aren’t polished and shapes aren’t refined, but no has created as passionate an evocation of place as Van Gogh does in these Provence landscapes.

In my own painting, I’d like to be less afraid of the unlovely, and more open to awkwardness. I’d like to be willing to show less skill and more struggle, more vulnerability and less polish.

I’d like to care less what that man in the gallery would say about my painting, and more willing to share with the world the struggle that got me there.

Other related posts:

Van Gogh’s Methodical Inspiration

Compromise

Your comments are welcome below!

The grey sky of an autumn day here on my hill, the chill in the air and scent of dry leaves underfoot, take me back to the Luxembourg Gardens on an October afternoon.

I’m thinking of long walks along quays and boulevards with a sketchbook and museum pass in my pocket.

Or lingering in a bistro over a glass of vin rouge and in a cafe over an espresso and almond croissant. Sigh.

I first went to Paris when my son (now thirty) was five. I was an artist who loved French painting and who had never been to France, and I was tired of feeling bad about that. So I packed up Colin and his Legos, found a cheap hotel on Rue Gay Lussac, and together we spent two months exploring the city.

In the dozens of times I’ve returned to Paris, I’ve never been back to the Army Museum, the McDonalds on the Champs-Élysées, or to the top of the Eiffel Tower, all places Colin and I went to and that were more exciting to a little boy than me.

But on that first trip I did fall in love with the things that attract everyone lucky enough to visit this most beautiful of cities, and those are the Paris places I’m missing now:

The Seine

The Seine is a ribbon of light that runs through the middle of Paris. The river reflects the colors of the sky, and lends its luminosity to the grey buildings that line its banks. It orients you as you move, always to your left or right, keeping you on track.

The Seine is the heart of Paris, and artists like Marquet, Jongkind, Matisse and Pissaro have painted along its banks from the beginning of plein air painting in the 1800’s to today.

Colin and I enjoyed taking “boat taxis” up and down the Seine, and that’s something I still like to do. The city from the vantage point of the water looks strange and unexpected, full of surprises.

Bridges and Quays

Bridges span the two banks of Paris, and each bridge has its own character. Some are solid stone monoliths that are firmly rooted in the founding of the city, some are over-the-top Baroque, gilded and ornate. The more modern ones with their four lanes and straight lines are more for cars than people, but they do their job of uniting the two very different sides of the city.

Quays provide access to the water. These walls and walks are both private and public. You can sit, stroll, and smooch on a quay. You can fish from a quay, sunbathe, chat, picnic and, best of all, paint.

Markets

Food markets, stamp markets, flea markets, flower markets, bird markets, fabric markets—it’s a pleasure to wander the "marchés" of Paris. You can find anything you want in an outdoor market here, from an antique chair, to oysters on the half-shell, to discount shoes.

I don’t buy much in markets, but it’s still great fun to wander and keep my eyes open for a little bric-a-brac for a still life, or the makings of a picnic of cheese, bread and fruit. And sketching in markets is great fun, too. The trick is to tuck into a corner out of the action, so I don’t bother the busy merchants and serious shoppers.

Parks

Paris parks are the outdoor rooms of the city. The are groomed and designed, clean and colorful, formal and comfortable.

You don’t play frisbee or loll on the grass in these neighborhood gardens, but you can sit on a stone bench or stylish metal chair, and eat your baguette, read your book, watch children sail their boats in a fountain, or take a nap in the sun.

Paris parks are civilized places. Even when crowded, they’re quiet enough to be alone with your thoughts.

Parisians

Parisians have a reputation for being rude, but I wouldn’t know if that’s accurate since I don’t speak French well enough to comprehend if insulted. I have found them to be helpful when I’ve been standing on a street corner staring at a map. It’s true that they are more reserved than we chatty Americans. But the French are polite, and “merci” and “s’il vous plait” are your most important vocabulary when moving around town.

What I enjoy about Parisians is looking at them. They dress with style, and move around their city with confidence. I love to draw Parisians in cafes, on the street, on the Metro and in buses. Often I can do this on the sly, but even if they notice me studying them with a pen in my hand, they don’t seem to mind. Paris has a long history of accepting the admiring gaze of artists.

Here’s an animation of my Paris sketches, I hope it brings back good memories of Paris for you, or plants the longing in your heart to make your first visit, when we can travel again..

For more posts about Paris:

A Walk Across Paris

A Paris Palette

Your comments are welcome below!

When we’re beginning as visual artists, it’s all we can do just to learn our craft and figure out what we’re trying to say with our medium. As our confidence in our work grows and we start to share it with the world, some of us wonder, “Can I actually make my passion my job, and make a living as an artist?”

That’s a hard question to answer. The field of art is opaque and mysterious when you’re looking in from the outside—and even when you’re trying to figure it out from the inside. Art doesn’t play by the clear rules of other careers. As self-employed artists, we’re tasked with the effort of both making a product and figuring out how to sell it. That’s a lot to handle.

So how does one begin to juggle all of these moving parts, and make the daunting transition from student to working artist?

Speaking from my own experience, and a few decades into paying taxes on my art business, here are the five steps I would recommend for someone trying to make the jump from amateur to professional:

1. Feel competent in your medium.

Take the time to learn your craft. It’s not unusual for visual artists to have seven years of formal education in painting, sculpture, conceptual art, whatever medium they choose. You don’t need to get a BFA and MFA to be a professional artist, but you do need to study with teachers whose work you respect, and allow yourself time to experiment and practice.

I don’t mean you need to enter your professional life feeling like a master of your medium—the truth is we never stop learning—but you do want to feel competent with your tools and skills.

2. Build an inventory.

It may sound crass to call art “inventory,” but when we’re trying to sell our creative work, that’s is an accurate description of the paintings piling up in the studio corner. The fact is that once you’ve launched a professional art career, you’ll need a steady stream of new work to supply galleries and clients.

How do you meet that demand?

Keep to your daily schedule for creative work. Don’t try to do everything—framing, photography, shipping, record-keeping—yourself. Don’t be a perfectionist.

Work in series rather than one-offs (see below.) I find that having painting projects rather than approaching each painting as an individual effort helps me to be less of a nitpicker, and less likely to get bogged down in the details.

3. Create a series that shows a unified style and point of view.

When we start out as artists, we want to show everything we can do. “I paint in watercolor, oils and acrylics, make sculptures, do abstractions, landscapes and figures!” That range may seem like a strength, but it’s better for your artistic and professional development to have an identifiable image and style in your painting. By limiting our possibilities, we become more focused.

How do you get started with building a series? Look at the different styles, subjects and mediums you’ve used, and ask yourself, which is most compelling to you? Which is most uniquely yours, which the most challenging?

Then try five pieces with that approach you’ve selected. When you finish, evaluate what you have and try five more. Consider picking a specific format (horizontal, vertical, square) for your series, or one size.

Narrow down your subject—not just “still life”, but still life with a particular kind of prop, color sense, painting technique. Limitations that force us to hone craft and meaning are how we grow as artists.

3. Have a dedicated work area for art.

When I ask students where they do their art work, many say they take over the kitchen table or an office desk for their creative work time. That’s a set-up for failure. You need a dedicated studio space if you are going to grow as an artist.

A studio doesn’t have to be big or fancy, but it does need a door you can close for privacy, a place to store equipment for easy access, and adequate lighting. Think about which room in your house (guestroom, grown child’s bedroom) you can take over for work.

Maybe there’s an attic or basement space you can fix up—or perhaps you’d do better renting a room in someone else’s house as a studio, or finding a space in an artists’ building. Think creatively. There’s some place out there, or at home, that will work for you.

One of the most productive periods I’ve had was in a funky room in a decrepit office building above a porn store. It was cramped and dusty, and minimally furnished with the big drafting table and desk lamp I needed for large watercolors. But it provided the most important thing I needed at that time in my life—peace and quiet, a private place to focus only on my art.

5.Feel enough confidence in your artwork that you’re ready to share it with the public.

Notice I said “enough”. Confidence builds slowly, and is never completely secure. Artists judge themselves against the best in their field and the best in art history, so we often feel less than completely confident. In fact, we often struggle with feelings of inadequacy.

But we do need to be confident. That means we are proud of our work, we believe in our abilities, and we look forward to sharing our art with others.

What if you don’t have the confidence to show your art work to the public?

Go back to Step 1, and study and practice your medium and skills enough that you feel more competent.

Try Step 2, and create a series. That alone is guaranteed to help you build confidence.

And at some point, when you feel competent but still not confident enough to share your work with the public, you may just need to climb to the top of the high dive, and jump! Taking a risk is also a necessary skill for artists. . . .

Here are some other things you’ll need in your tool kit as you transition into professional art:

—A business card and postcards that show images of your artwork.
--A website with a portfolio of at least ten related paintings (your series,) a short biography, and a way you can be contacted.
--An account on Instagram and/or Facebook that presents your art.

--A mailing list stored in a database that you can use for sending announcements, invitations, and newsletters about your art activities.

--An art resume that you’ll continue to build by getting your art out into the world.

Check out these related posts:

A Studio of One’s Own

Portrait of the Artist as Sole Proprietor

What Painters Do

Your comments are welcome below!

Like just about everyone else in this new age of Coronavirus, I’ve been practicing physical distancing for the last few weeks. For me that’s meant staying inside my home and studio around the clock, with occasional walks in nearby woods and fields—which is a daily routine not too different from the way I usually live.

One big change has been the cancellation of all my travel plans, including three workshops I had coming up this spring. Like many teachers, I’ve taken to the internet and am now offering online painting instruction and art mentoring, and I’m really enjoying working with students from all around the world.

Long distance teaching means that I also need to do some long distance demos, so in this post you’ll find my first-ever instructional video. (I’m trying to follow the same advice I give to students, and not paralyze myself with perfectionism while trying to learn a new skill—so that explains any production shortcomings!)

Which brings us to wet-in-wet watercolor washes, also a technically difficult endeavor that can bring out the perfectionist in us. Any of you who have tried it know that watercolor is a fickle and difficult medium. That’s because watercolor is all about water, and water doesn’t easily take to being controlled.

And watercolor is unforgiving of our mistakes. Because of its transparency, its way of floating like mercury and drying like stained glass, in this kind of painting there aren’t many places to hide.

Drawing mistakes in watercolor are permanent, unless they can be painted over—but painting over one color with another always darkens and never lightens in this medium, because it lacks the opacity of oil or acrylic paint.

Correcting an error often means going down the slippery slope of ever-murkier color, into the manure-like hue that we in the trade call “mud”.

So why would a painter put up with a way of working that presents so many pitfalls? The answer is that watercolor’s vices are her virtues. Her very unpredictability and unwillingness to be controlled make her endlessly seductive and engaging.

The water we try to manipulate forces us to stay in the moment, the pigment that drives us crazy by drying in unpredictable ways also keeps us guessing and adapting to whatever happened on the paper a moment before.

Watercolor. like every other medium, creates an image, a still life or landscape or figure painting with forms we feel we could touch, and space we can imagine entering.

But more than other mediums, watercolor is about what happens on the surface—for example, the way the colors can mingle and settle on paper like quicksilver in a rain puddle.

That technique of wet-in-wet, of mixing color with the brush on paper, presents watercolor at both its most difficult and most lovely. Although not all watercolorists use wet-in-wet, those that do can’t imagine not having it in their arsenal.

The key to becoming more confident with wet-in-wet is practice. Getting a feel for how much water to have on your brush and how to interplay the colors on the paper takes time and repetition.

So pour yourself a glass of wine, turn some old paintings over so you can practice on their backsides, and try wet-in-wet.

Start with just two colors. Transparent pigments are easiest to blend, so a good practice pair is Ultramarine Blue and Burnt Sienna. I demonstrate in the video below.

Wet-in-wet is very useful for painting spheres, cones and cylinders, which as Cezanne said are the most common forms found in landscape, still life, and the figure.

In the watercolor below, I’m using a triad of blue, red and yellow to turn the cylinders of the drape, and create light and shadow on the sphere.

Wet-in-wet with this primary triad of red, blue and yellow is especially useful to practice. The red and blue mix to purple (or “purpleish”, depending on which red and blue you use) and purple is complementary to the yellow leg of the triad.

When you mix complements like yellow and purple, you get a neutralized color, but with hints of the pure colors of the triad.

This creates a “glow” in the watercolor wash that you don’t get when you paint one layer on top of another.

And the wet-in-wet triad also helps to create a movement of color around the composition.

After decades of attempting wet-in-wet watercolor, when I put brush to paper I still never know exactly where I’m going to end up. After all, water is an element with a mind of its own.

I like to think I’m in charge when I’m moving pigment from here to there with my sable brush—but I’m really just keeping up, one step ahead of the tide, with a headstrong, beautiful medium.

Your comments are welcome below!

My first stop on my first day in London is for buttered naan, dal, tandoori cauliflower, and a pale ale at an Indian restaurant near the National Gallery. My second stop is inside the National Gallery, where the traffic flow deposits you first into the Early Italian wing.

Three hours later, I’m still there among the Giottos and Masaccios. What is it that I love so much about these paintings, when the work of the high Renaissance can leave me cold?

I’m sitting writing this in a cafe because there’s no wifi in my flat, and the sun just came out, and I’m eager to get back to a museum this afternoon. So I’ll keep my wordiness at a minimum today, and just say a few things about these paintings of the 14th and early 15th centuries that draw me like a magnet.

First, their “thingness,” the way these paintings are both are both sculpture and image. They grew from icons, and they still carry some of that power of sacred object.

Second, I love these paintings’ tension between space and flatness. It’s exciting!

Third, the color is wonderful. When painters developed a scientific interest in light and form in the later 1400’s, color took a back seat to values. There’s no right or wrong here, but I can’t help preferring the deliciousness of the pinks and blues and greens used by these earlier painters.

The use of decorative pattern is another wonderful thing here.

But all of this color and decoration is never at the expense of emotional power. The story comes first.

And then there’s the weirdness, who does’t love that.

I’ll close with a few pictorial quotes from a painter who should have made my “Five Greatest” list, Piero della Francesca. The color, design, weirdness, and beauty of his work speaks for itself.

And now I am going to eat my plate of eggs and baked beans before they get any colder!

The sun finally broke through the clouds yesterday, and I celebrated with my two dogs Ita and Roscoe by taking a long walk in the woods. My feet and my mind wandered from here to there as they are wont to do, and I found myself thinking many random thoughts, including, "Who would I rate as the greatest painter of all time?"

I followed that up with "That's ridiculous. How could I ever judge the greatest painter of all time?" Then I broadened the question to one that is still ridiculous, but provokes lively discussion, even if I'm only talking to myself: "Who are the five greatest painters of all time?"

What would a painter need to do to make my highly arbitrary and completely subjective "Greatest of All Time" list?

They would need to do a few very difficult things very, very well, such as: Design paintings that don't allow you to look away; manipulate paint beautifully; see the world in a new way; and (most importantly) say something profound about what it is to be alive. Any one of these is a tall order that most painters, myself included, can only aspire to.

These five painters are not necessarily the ones who fill my artistic well, or who I've learned the most from, or whose work I look at with the deepest pleasure. To my way of thinking, they are simply the most awe-inspiring, the gods on high.

Read on to see why (at least for now) these five artists inhabit my personal "Painters' Pantheon," and let me know if you agree.

Giotto (1266-1337)

Giotto, like the other painters profiled here, created a transition from an old to new way of seeing the world. Before Giotto, paintings were gilded, carved, decorated, and worshiped as religious objects. Giotto kept the spiritual power of painting intact through his ability as a storyteller, but he also developed a new sense that a painting was more than an icon, it was a window into the world.

Giotto looked at space, light, and the human form as hadn't been done since the lost art of the classical age.

From his study of the world around him, Giotto built paintings that have both a highly refined elegance, and deep emotional drama.

If Giotto's "Massacre of the Innocents" doesn't make your heart ache, you're made of sterner stuff than I am.

Nicolas Poussin (1595-1665)

Poussin moved to Italy in search of a deeper art than he could find at the court of King Louis XIII in his native France. Political and cultural power had shifted to Paris, but the greatness of Italian art from ages past meant that Rome was still the mecca for painters.

Poussin fell in love with the ancient Roman civilization that was being unearthed under the pastures and cobblestones of his adopted city, and he became an expert in the architecture and culture of the classical age.

Poussin was a genius in the formal aspects of composing a painting—but he also had great empathy for the characters he painted from history, mythology, and the Bible.

Poussin (along with his friend Claude Lorrain) is responsible for taking landscape painting from the insignificant role of being a backdrop for figures, to a respected independent genre.

Poussin's painting may seem hard to access to our modern eyes that have lost the patience to read a complex pictorial narrative. But his life story is a modern one, and inspiring.

Poussin was one of the first independent artists, painting what he wanted to for a small group of collectors who respected his skills and understanding. For me, he's the ideal of a painter who possesses intelligence, feeling, and integrity.

 Caravaggio (1571-1610)

Caravaggio was a painter rock star, who, in the classic style of that profession, lived hard and died young. Somehow alongside the sex, drugs, and arrest record, he managed to revolutionize Western painting.

His innovative style influenced a generation of European artists, including Rubens, Hals, Rembrandt, Vermeer, and Velazquez.

Caravaggio's paintings introduced a dynamic way of composing with extreme contrasts of light and dark. This dramatic "chiarascuro" replaced the subtle shading and delicate coloration that had been the hallmark of Renaissance figure painting.

Caravaggio also developed a radical realism, posing the thieves, beggars and prostitutes he knew from Rome's streets as Jesus, Mary, and the Apostles.

His huge, virtuoso compositions were scandalous to religious authorities, and thrilling to young painters.

I didn't understand the power of Caravaggio's work until I saw his painting in the flesh. When I stood in front of "The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew" in a dim church in Rome, the grand scale of the composition, the orchestration of light and dark, the "thereness" of the figures, pulled me directly into the tragedy and violence of this story.

Simply put, Caravaggio was a wizard, and his magic is still unique, powerful, and impossible to fully understand.

Paul Cezanne (1839-1906)

Every now and then someone comes along who is as much a scientist as he or she is a visual artist. They have a new way of seeing that's based on their own unique understanding of the structure of nature. When translated into pigments, this new way of seeing creates a new way of painting.

Cezanne falls into that category. He was an unlikely genius, a country boy with a chip on his shoulder from a nouveau riche Provençal family. He had a hard time fitting into the Paris art world.

Cezanne's work stabilized when the kindly painter Pissarro took him under his wing, and led him outdoors with a French easel. Pissarro  counseled Cezanne to quit painting from his dark imagination, and instead study the light of nature.

From then on, Cezanne devoted himself to "perceptual painting," that is, the direct observation of landscape, objects, and figures. These varied subjects were united by his rigorous recording of color and form, and his supremely self-confident belief in his own way of seeing.

Cezanne's emphasis on "tache," a patch of pigment that’s a direct translation of the observed color in nature, flattened the pictorial space that had dominated painting for centuries. Unlike Monet and the other Impressionists, his work echoes Poussin in its focus on form rather than light.

Cezanne showed the way for a new emphasis on painting as a flat, two dimensional surface, rather than as a window into a three-dimensional world. In doing so, he brought art full circle, back to “painting as object.”

Matisse said this about Cezanne's Three Bathers," which he purchased when a struggling young artist: "In the thirty-seven years I have owned this canvas, I have come to know it quite well, though not entirely, I hope; it has sustained me morally in the critical moments of my venture as an artist; I have drawn from it my faith and my perseverance. . . ."

Such is the power of Cezanne’s work. Beyond the beauty of his color, the geometric complexity of his compositions, his deep exploration of a specific time and place, is something even more: Cezanne's single-minded building of a universe of images that are completely, uniquely his own.

Richard Diebenkorn (1922-1993)

"Protean" is the word that comes to my mind when I think of Richard Diebenkorn. Over the course of his long studio life, Diebenkorn’s work shapeshifted from landscape-based abstraction, to abstraction-based landscape; from small-scale observed still life, to large-scale minimalist inventions; from graphic black and white ink drawings, to lushly colored gestural paintings. 

Some artists change style to follow trends and increase sales. The opposite was true for Diebenkorn, who often found himself out of step with what was fashionable in the art market.

Diebenkorn followed only his own inspiration on his journeys between realism and abstraction.

He studied, borrowed, experimented, and then dug in and took a series as far as he could, until another idea took shape, and then he followed that one to the end.

Each of Diebenkorn's bodies of work is complete unto itself, but grows from the images that precede it. Each series emphasizes color that's by turns subtle and unapologetically decorative. Each cycle is rooted in a specific place and light, from the early abstractions painted in New Mexico and Indiana, to the later compositions inspired by the California landscapes he made his own.

With his last body of work, the grand Ocean Park series, we're right back where we started with Giotto. Art that is based in spirit—and also supremely, wonderfully, about the physical beauty of paint.

Richard Diebenkorn was, by all accounts, that rare kind of genius who is kind, generous, and a well-loved family man.

He followed his own muse, and I get the feeling that if fame and fortune hadn't tagged along behind, he would have been okay. His life’s work was to grant himself the freedom to follow his imagination with his hand and eye, and that he accomplished beautifully.

So yes, there is a silliness to this “Five Greatest Painters” exercise. It’s completely personal, temporary and idiosyncratic, but we all need our heroes, right?

I have my list of runners-up—but maybe they’ll be on your “Five Greatest” list. Feel free to share your own personal pantheon in the comments.

Working with our hands is a skill that often begins in childhood. If you interviewed a group of visual artists, you'd find that most grew up making things, all kinds of things, just for the fun of it.

They nailed together toy furniture, glued model airplanes, cut paper dolls, or wielded needle and thread to decorate a tea towel.

The child me was always making things, always busy--and so was my mother, Ruth Abbott. She worked nine to five as a meticulous bookkeeper, kept our home running smoothly, was a political activist, and always had a delicious cooked-from-scratch dinner on the table at 6:30 sharp.

But Mom also made time for her own interests, which included handcrafts. And when I showed an interest, she patiently taught me how to knit, crochet, make potholders, embroider, and sew my own clothes.

 Though my father was an artist and got me started with felt tip pens and watercolors, it was from my mother that I learned a love of working with my hands.

My mother, besides being a busy person, enjoyed napping.  She was, in fact,  a world class napper, and therefore, once I became obsessed with drawing, a great model.

I have sketchbooks full of her enjoying an afternoon siesta.  And if I snapped, "Don't turn over yet, I'm still working!", she was always willing to lie still and hold the pose for another half hour.

I'm thankful that my mother modeled for me--not just during her many hours of obligingly napping, but also modelling the joy she derived from using her hands to create.

That making of something out of nothing is what artists, as well as mothers, do.

When I grew up and became an artist, I realized that a painting is more than just an image. A painting is also an object that’s made of wood and fabric, of oil, solvent, and pigments. The work we do in our studios is physical, as much as it is visual and conceptual.

And I'm happy that's so, because the child in me wants to keep on making things, just like Mom.

I hate flowers - I paint them because they're cheaper than models and they don't move. Georgia O'Keefe

They may be small and fragile, but flowers can provoke big, powerful feelings among artists, as you can see from the quotations above. And many of the feelings are negative.

"Flower painter" is a pejorative in my field. Ask any MFA graduate or art critic to rank the most unacceptable subject a painter can chose, and "flowers" (unless painted with irony) would be at the top, followed closely by "kittens" and "sunsets."

Why does the art world's elite have this prejudice against painting flowers? One reason is the current bias against quiet, intimate subjects, such as a still life, and in favor of the loud and large, the eye-grabbing wall-size abstractions, or ear-numbing surround-sound video installations.

It hasn't helped that flowers have been a popular subject for "Sunday lady painters." Even Georgia O'Keefe, with her modernist pedigree and formidable personality, was criticized by the critics of her day for a "feminine" interest in flowers as subject matter.

“Feminine" is just three letters away from "feminist," but a world away in connotation for an art work. The first denotes qualities of "modesty and prettiness," just the traits we see in blossoms. To say flowers are "feminine" is to  imply they're easy to paint, boring to engage with, and intellectually unchallenging.

So, to quote a teacher of mine, "If you are going to paint flowers, you'd better kick some butt with those flowers." Especially if you're a woman artist.

This is a somewhat personal topic for me, because I myself paint flowers. I'm not sure if I kick butt. But I do observe those peonies, lilies, and anemones as carefully and honestly as I look at every other subject, from landscape to the human form, that I turn my eye to.  

What I want from flowers in a painting is something more rigorous than mere prettiness. They need to hold a strong pose, provide a note of color to the ensemble, carry some light to a dark corner, support the other players on the stage.

In other words, flowers are important to me for the role they play in my painting's composition, rather than because I want to make use of their automatic sweetness as subject matter.

I'll select a bouquet of peonies as a member of the cast in a still life composition for "formal" reasons: size, shape, value, hue. I want those peonies to command a certain place on the stage in relationship to all the other actors on the table.

They have a role to play in the painting, equal in importance to every object, and every empty space between the objects. Everything I see, flowers included, should fit together like a jigsaw puzzle.

But flowers are also something more than abstract shapes and colors. When you sit with flowers and study their faces, you see that each is an individual, and no two are alike. I wouldn't want to paint plastic fakes, no matter how much they might resemble the real thing.

I want to communicate with those living beings--because that's what those blooms, so easy to take for granted, are.

As you paint them, you notice flowers change. You watch them, hour after hour, open and close, breathe out their scent, drop their dew, then wilt, decolor, let go their petals. And when you've done observing, these flowers leave our studios, ready to return to earth.

If you grow flowers, you know that they bring pleasure, but also a sense of loss. Their beauty is gone so soon. In the same way, no matter what  art critics may say about "saccharine" flowers, the act of painting a peony, rose, or tulip can feel more bittersweet than sweet.

When I'm painting a flower, I'm always conscious that this delicate organism has begun to fade as soon as I cut its stem. I feel the pressure: I have job to do, and the clock is running.

I know that this flower, whose shape and color we humans respond to as instinctively as bees, deserves from me the best portrait I can make. In return, I have the pleasure of preserving her beauty, and sharing it with others, for at least a few more seasons.

For more on this topic, check out “Considering Flowers” from the excellent website “Painting Perceptions.”

Your comments are welcome below! To comment from email, please click” Read in Browser.”

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If the idea that we can "feel color" sounds like new age hokum to you, imagine this: You're in the hospital after surgery, and the nurse wheels you into a bright red recovery room. How does the color of those walls make you feel? Drowsy and ready to rest, or so agitated that you want to pull your tubes out, and run down the corridor?

Hospital rooms are painted pale green, and bordellos bright red, for a reason--to calm us down, or warm us up.

And there are ranges of emotion within those reds and blues. Imagine being in a room painted vibrant teal blue, then in one painted pale robin's egg blue. Which is more soothing? Color intensity triggers emotional intensity. I’d vote for the swatch on the right.

Which of these rooms invites quiet contemplation, and which makes you twitch? It’s all about the color’s temperature and chroma.

It’s easy to see how color affects our mood in interior design, but the relationship between the two can be harder to understand with visual art.

We can use color many ways in painting: to turn a form, make a contrast, create a harmony. But the most powerful tool color offers is the ability to communicate a sensation of mood.

Pure color, even when abstracted from form, can trigger our feelings as powerfully, and subtly, as sounds, tastes, smells and touch.

Temperature is one of the prime emotional cues of color. The color wheel divides between warm and cool, with the boundary line running between red and green.

This temperature difference in our palette colors is a powerful, but often overlooked, tool for painters. In it's simplest version, brown and blue can provide strong temperature contrast. (You can read more about the uses of those two colors in my blog post here.)

But painters have more than blue and brown in their temperature arsenal. They can also deploy a full range of hues on one side or the other of the color wheel to create a composition where warms like orange and chartreuse dominate.

Or where cool hues like violet and blue-green take the lead.

And the mood of the painting will be different, depending on whether yellow or blue is the major key.

What a pale cool green, intense violet blue, clean bright yellow, or deep dark red says to me is difficult, if not impossible, to put into words--but no less real for that. 

We don’t need to, and maybe we can’t, understand why, or how, a painting’s colors fill us with emotion. All we need to do is sit back, and enjoy the feeling.

Your comments are welcome below!

I returned a few days ago from my first ever trip to Alaska, and my head is still full of majestic snow-capped peaks, mysterious spruce forests, and wide open spaces. Since I was in coastal Southeast Alaska, which holds the world’s largest remaining temperate rain forest, my head is also full of watery images of rivers and sea.

I’ve never thought much about how artists have approached painting such a grand and forbidding landscape, but now that I’ve dipped my brush a little bit into these coastal waters, my curiosity is piqued.

On my trip I was fortunate to have an introduction to the Tlingit community of Klukwan in Southeast Alaska, and learn that the Native people of this area have lived in harmony with their natural home for many thousands of years. Europeans and Americans have been in Native territory for a scant three centuries, but that’s been enough time to have a disastrous effect on indigenous populations.

And yet, the original peoples of Alaska, the Aleuts, Inupiat, Yuit, Athabascans, Haida, and Tlingit, manage to hold on to their ancestral ways of living. They’ve integrated nature and art into their lives in ways we Westerners can only begin to understand, and that we have much to learn from.

When Russians and adventurers from the Lower 48 began trekking ever further north in the 1800’s, they had survival and making money on their mind, not art. Alaska would have been a perfect place for the Hudson River School’s grand, Romantic compositions, but no painters visited (although Frederick Church did journey to Antartica.)

No painters came until Sidney Lawrence in 1904, that is. Like so many others seeking a quick fortune, Lawrence ventured to Alaska to prospect for gold. When that dream went bust, he dusted off his Art Student’s League training, and became the state’s first successful professional landscape painter.

His paintings are in the “tonalist” European tradition, which sets nature up as a diorama of value gradations from foreground to distance. To our contemporary eye, Lawrence’s work may look predictable and formulaic, but to his contemporaries, his views of this grand landscape were thrilling, and helped define Alaska to the rest of the world as the “last great frontier.”

It’s hard to imagine a painter more opposite in approach to Lawrence than Canadian Emily Carr. True, they both wandered far from home to find subject matter. But Carr was a true maverick, unusual in her time for both her painting style, and how she lived her life.

Emily Carr (1871-1945) rebelled from her very British-style upbringing by venturing to France to study Fauvism, and then to the wilds of British Columbia to learn from the communities of Native peoples who still populated the old growth forests of its coast.

Carr's later paintings reflect her concern with the impact of mining and logging on both British Columbia's landscape and the lives of indigenous people there. Her focus on environmental degradation seems prescient now, given how that activity has accelerated over the last decades.

But Carr also found hope in the enduring power and beauty of nature. And her own life was a testament to endurance. It wasn’t until she reached her sixties that Carr became widely respected as a painter, writer and adventurer, and, finally, an icon of Canadian art.

Tom Thomson is another Canadian cultural icon. (You can learn more about his beautiful landscape painting at my post here.) His personal “far away” was the Ontario wilderness, where he painted plein air in all seasons, documenting the changing colors and moods of nature on small wooden panels. Thomson’s view was often intimate rather than grand, a close-up look at meadows and stream, trees and lake.

But he was also drawn to the awe-inspiring, and managed to communicate the mystery and grandeur of the great Northern woodlands on an 8” x 10” scale. In doing so, he awakened in Canadians a new pride in the wild beauty of their country.

When I was painting in Sitka, Alaska last week, I found my palette was different from the colors I would have used in Vermont, Provence, the Bahamas, or other places I’ve painted plein air.

Just two colors, Prussian Blue and Burnt Sienna, felt right for what I was seeing (with an occasional addition of Yellow Ochre to add a little brighter note when needed.)

In a month or two, where I was in Southeast Alaska will be a much greener place. But in the winter and early spring, blue, brown, and all shades of grey take the lead.

In his series of paintings of the far away places of the north, American painter Rockwell Kent extracted about the most one can from a tube of brown or blue pigment. Kent took an improbable journey to Alaska in 1918, where he and his eight year old son stayed for seven months in a cabin on a remote island near Seward. (You can read an interesting account of Kent’s time in Alaska here.)

As a critic said, “Kent’s paintings of Alaska have dazzling blue shades—azure, cobalt, and sapphire—as intense as those van Gogh painted in Arles; you can almost feel the solid ice sprawling over hundreds of miles under the ultramarine sky.”

After his time in Seward, Rockwell Kent moved to Arlington, Vermont, not too far from where I live. Over the next several years, he continued working on his Alaska series, expanding his plein air “impressions” into large-scale studio paintings.

He never got Alaska out of his head, and even his paintings of cozy New England often have a feeling of grandeur and sweep.

Contemporary painters are also drawn to the far away. Richard Estes, who built his career on photorealist New York City landscapes, has more recently turned to a series of paintings of glaciers he saw while on a cruise to Antartica.

Vermont painter Eric Aho paints the frozen north in a more gestural way. His compositions edge towards abstract expressionism, but stay rooted in the specifics of landscape, of weather and light.

His subject could be the farthest northern forest, or right near home in the Green Mountains, but you don’t need to know where his inspiration came from to feel the cold.

I hope to discover more about Alaska, its complicated history, spectacular landscape, and rich culture (including the art community) when I’m up there again before too long.

I’m already planning my next trip to the far away.

Here’s information about a new threat to Native culture from a proposed mine in the Chilkat River Valley of SE Alaska. And here’s a creative project environmentalist Elsa Sebastian and filmmaker Colin Arisman (my son!) are working on to help save the Tongass forest from new clear cutting threats.

Your comments are welcome below. If you have any favorite “far away” artists to share, please do!

I’m in Washington, DC this weekend teaching a “Traveling with Your Sketchbook” workshop, and it’s got me thinking about how important my travel sketchbook has been to me over the years. I canʼt imagine taking a trip without it. My sketchbook is my trusty companion when I travel alone, and my retreat for some needed quiet time when Iʼm on the road with friends or family.

In a later post I’ll talk more about the nuts and bolts of how to travel with a sketchbook, but first, let’s ask: How many of you have had the following experience?

“I packed my sketchbook but never used it, and now I feel bad. . . .”

So exactly what is the cure for this painful “unused sketchbook syndrome?” Here are the top five reasons I have identified for why a sketchbook comes home devoid of drawing and writing—and some remedies:

1. “My drawing isn’t good enough.”
We are all our worst critics, and this is especially true with creative work. Somewhere in the back of our minds, there may be the voice of a parent or teacher telling you that “You can’t draw!” Or you may be telling yourself that, as you compare your sketchbook page with the perfection you see in your mind’s eye.

Even if you feel like you “canʼt draw” or “canʼt write,” just jump in and try. Remember to focus on your experience, rather than how “good” your work is. Go ahead and be messy, art often is. The most important thing to remember is: there is no wrong way to do your travel journal—other than not use it.

Your travel journal is a personal record of your thoughts, feelings, and impressions. You may find that you like to write more than draw, or make collages more than write. Any way you approach it, youʼre creating a personal record of your unique experience of travel.

So focus on the process of looking around you, paying attention to your senses as you engage with a new place. Pay attention to all of your feelings, from exhausted to exhilarated, as you move through your days away from home. Use your journal to record what interests you—that’s the important thing.

2. ” I feel self-conscious about using my sketchbook in public.”

Drawing or writing in a public place gets easier after the first few times you try it. By the second day of being out and about with your sketchbook, you will probably be over the shyness hump. Most folks around you, busy with their own concerns and going about their daily routines, wonʼt even see what you’re up to with that pen and paper over in the corner.

The few who do notice you drawing will be impressed by your creativity, rather than critical of the results. And someone is guaranteed to tell you about his Aunt Sadie, who “is also an artist”.

If you want to be more inconspicuous, try wedging yourself into a doorway on a busy street, or position yourself at the edge of a group in a crowded market. If you stand in the middle of the sidewalk or right in front of a market stall, you’re more likely to draw attention.

After a little practice, you’ll find you’re comfortable staking out your territory with your sketchbook.

3. “It’s too much bother to stop and draw.”

The best remedy for inertia, or the feeling that you don’t want to stop your forward motion and note something down in your sketchbook, is to always have your sketchbook in hand--that is, literally in your hand. If it’s in a backpack, where you have to think, “Is it worth it to pull that thing out?”, you probably won’t.

Next best is to have your sketchbook and pens in a shoulder bag or coat pocket where they’re easily accessible. Anytime I buy a new purse, I take my sketchbook along to make sure it fits inside.

4. “I donʼt have enough time to draw or write.”

We Americans are a fast-moving people, and frequently want to see as many “sights” as possible when we travel. A travel sketchbook can serve the very useful purpose of slowing you down. Drawing and writing require you to digest what you’re seeing, to stop and record what you think and what you feel about what you’ve seen.

Your sketchbook provides a welcome excuse to linger over a glass of wine in a cafe, or to dally in the sun on a park bench.

Feel free to assert your need to stop and draw to friends and family, or even to your tour group. They may think you’re an oddball—but emphasize that you can be very cranky if deprived of sketchbook time.

And believe me, no amount of time is too short to get a drawing or written thought down in your sketchbook. I’ve done sketches from moving vehicles and when walking down a street that took fifteen seconds. No matter how simple these few lines are, they always bring back a memory.

5. “I don’t know what to do in my travel sketchbook.”

An empty sketchbook can feel overwhelming, and you can sometimes, before you even begin, feel defeated by all those white pages . A good solution is to narrow down your focus to only those things that interest you in the place you’re visiting.

Maybe you love food, or markets, or museums, or architecture—or dogs, shoes, or signage. As you go about your sightseeing, try going on a “treasure hunt” looking for your favorite things.

Another possibility is to keep a chronological daily diary in picture form. Just note where you are and when you’re there, and a few observations about the experience. Don’t be shy about sharing both the good and the bad. Travel can be both exhilarating and difficult, and honesty can make for a very engaging sketchbook.

Another idea for a specialized focus, especially if you don’t want to do much drawing (though I’ll try to talk you into trying drawing in a later post) is it look for printed materials like entrance or transport tickets, stamps, or labels, and use them for a sketchbook collage. You can combine these visuals with a written journal, if you’d like.

The point is, you donʼt ever need to draw a building or a person while you travel the world (or your neighborhood) if youʼd rather not. Permission granted to make your travel sketchbook your own.

Wherever your journey takes you, whether Borneo or the corner store, make your sketchbook your close companion. It will turn you from a tourist to a traveler, and give you a whole new way to see the world.

Do you have any thoughts to share on travel sketchbooks? Your comments are welcome below!

There was a time when, on the same date of each month, my husband James would come home from work and find me sitting on the couch, looking mean-spirited and morose. He'd muster his courage and sarcasm, and ask, "Did that art magazine arrive today? What's the matter…someone getting ahead of you?"

My husband has a name for this affliction of jealousy and self-loathing that's so rampant in the field of art. He calls it, "Compare and Contrast," as in, "Compare and contrast yourself unfavorably to every other artist you know of, living or dead."  

"Compare and Contrast" is a chronic condition in my professional field, painful and difficult to cure. Even financial success and public acclaim do not guarantee relief, since there’s always another artist out there richer, more esteemed, and more famous than you are.

If you find yourself suffering from "Compare and Contrast," give a try to my three well-tested remedies:

1. Don't Believe Everything You Read

You know those super high-achieving individuals you encounter in the media, the ones who make you feel so defective? They aren't actually real. They're the airbrushed, polished, edited versions of flawed, messy, normal human beings like ourselves. Don't believe what you read in magazines, newspaper, blogs, or on social media about your fellow artists.

Yes, an art critic can write a review about an exhibit that's brutally honest. But usually what's printed (or videotaped) by art journalists or artists themselves is a public relations puff piece. You'll understand that best when the PR is written about you, and you have a hard time recognizing yourself.

2.  Expand your Imaginative Space

Try this mental exercise: Visualize yourself in an expansive landscape with infinite acres to explore. Now invite in all the artists of the world. Why not? There's plenty of room for everybody here, and you can roam anywhere you want. Feels liberating, doesn't it?

Now imagine yourself not in that limitless field, but instead perched above or below all these artists on a steep ladder.

Which feels like more fun, running free across a wide open savanna or crouching down, trapped in an over-crowded tree house? Which feels better, hierarchy or equality? You can choose your relationship with other artists.

3. Make Envy Your Teacher

At 30 I was a single mother trying to keep my painting going, and without much in the way of money or time. I could envy plenty about other young artists who seemed to be moving forward faster and straighter than I was. I was especially jealous of the ones who had gotten themselves to Europe to study and paint.

Why, I asked myself, have I been so unadventurous and unambitious? Why didn't I channel my inner Gertrude Stein, and sail across the ocean in pursuit of an artist's life in Paris after art school, instead of settling down in a half-renovated row house in Baltimore? I can laugh at my younger self now, but at the time my resentment towards those freer spirits was hard to bear.

What cured me was the wisdom of my husband, who said, Quit beating yourself and everyone else up, and just go! So I went to Rome with my best artist friend, and managed to stay for two months. Wandering that great city with my paints and sketchbook was a powerful antidote for corrosive envy and self-blaming.

I came home thankful to my family for holding down our home fort. And thankful for envy, because that horrible, powerful feeling had given me a direction to move in, and a kick in the pants to make a change. I've been back to Europe just about every year since.

Jealousy and envy are sharp spurs, and I'd much rather move myself along without the pain. Paraphrasing Joan Didion's words, I'd rather be more satisfied with myself, and accept that I'm always where I should be. And if that's out in a wide open field, running with the other hunter-gatherers, I'll be happy.

Your comments are welcome below! Feel free to leave your website link.

When I go to Paris, I always do the same three things on my first day: take a long walk along the Seine; stroll through the Luxembourg Gardens; then sit in a café, people-watching and sketching while I enjoy lunch and a glass of wine.

 On the morning of day two, it's time to get myself over to the Louvre. I have a standing invitation there in the French Wing to visit my old friend Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot.

I've known Corot since I was twenty, when we began meeting in the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. for long tête-à-têtes. We became very close during those sessions together.

True, he'd been dead for a century and a half, but how could we not feel a strong connection, given what we were doing there? Standing for hours at the museum with Corot, copying his painting, color by color and brushstroke by brushstroke--we couldn't help but get intimate.

 Artists have a peculiar relationship with the dead. Long-gone painters, writers, and composers are still vividly, vibrantly present in our minds as we work on our own painting, writing, and composing. Sometimes they even feel closer to us than our living peers.

That's true for me. Dead artists have been my heroes, my companions, and my teachers. Giotto, Degas, Matisse, and Cezanne are in my personal pantheon, as are the more recently alive Edward Hopper, Fairfield Porter, Joan Mitchell, and Richard Diebenkorn. They're with me everyday in my studio, talking to me about their painting.

They tell me how they mixed that beautiful grey, why they made this shape so light and that one so dark, where they got that idea that seems as if it came out of thin air. I have very little that I can tell them in return--but that's o.k., they're generous with their help, and I love to listen.

These relationships among artists, living and dead, happen because art is not about time, and it isn't about backwards or forwards, or about a worst past, or better future.

Art is a continuum that spans from the first Neanderthal who scratched on a cave wall, to the great artists of Florence, Paris and New York, and then on to the young painter working alone in her room right now, anywhere in the world.

Art is living history, a long chain that swings sideways, always adding new links and creating new connections.

If you join that chain, the dead will come alive, to talk and to teach you, too. And maybe, someday, you'll do the same for someone else.

Your comments are welcome below!