Oh, buoy!

Day #2. Will finish today. I love this fundraiser for Penobscot Bay Resource Center almost more than anything else I do!

If I were gonna make a habit of painting on buoys, I’d find some way to hold them steady. I painted on this one for five and a half hours yesterday, and it wasn’t my painting hand that was tired, it was the hand clutching the buoy.

I haven’t got a table per se in my studio, so I sat in the dinette in my kitchen to work on this. That had the advantage of being more comfortable, but it had the disadvantage of exposing me to my peanut gallery.

How can you tell the lobster is attacking New York? Because that's the Brooklyn Bridge!

“Do you really think a lobster could stand on his tail like that to attack the city of New York?” asked my son.

“A lobster could theoretically grow that big,” noted my daughter, who is a biomedical engineering major and presumably au courant on matters of biology. “Unlike humans, who have a finite number of cell replications, they can keep growing forever.”

Even my engineer husband and daughters haven't found a way to make working on this buoy comfortable. Any suggestions?

“However,” she added, “I think the lobster should be lighted from the bottom. He is, after all, in the City.”

I hate when my kids are right. But I also plan to finish this painting today, so they can have it in Stonington, ME, by May 15.

Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in Maine in 2014 or Rochester at any time. My Belfast, ME, workshop is almost sold out. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops!

Barrier-free plein air painting

Schoen Place, even though it's a reworked old industrial space, is very accessible to the less-mobile painter.

As much as I loved teaching at the Irondequoit Inn and Lakewatch Manor, neither of them were barrier-free. I have a student here in Rochester who wanted dearly to come to Maine with me, but the staircases kept her away.  So when we booked into Belfast’s Fireside Inn, which has a lift, she signed up right away.

Ironically, my home studio in Rochester isn’t barrier-free, so V. only studies with me in the summer. When we first met I thought plein-air handicapped-access was probably not a workable concept. But in fact here in Rochester it works very well. We find a location, V. spins her walker around and uses it as a seat, and we’re good to go. We’ve painted at Lake Ontario, along the Erie Canal, at High Falls and at many other places.

Durand-Eastman is another place that's more accessible than it seems at first glance. It has a paved path along the waterfront.

It’s just a matter of avoiding places with really soft gravel, or places that require too much walking. Realistically, if it’s not safe and pleasant for V, it’s not going to be pleasant for someone schlepping 15 pounds of painting supplies on his or her back.

It’s not something I ever thought of before I met V, I’m ashamed to admit. But since I’ve been paying attention, I’ve realized that barrier-free is something smaller cities like Rochester have done better than other, trendier places in my orbit. We have the space to reinvent ourselves.

Highland Park is another place with excellent, paved paths, and it's possible to circumnavigate the space without using stairs.

I think it's going to work just fine in Maine, too. (I am almost sold out for this workshop, so if you’re on the fence about coming, you really should do something sooner or later.)

Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in Belfast, Maine in August, 2014 or in Rochester at any time. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops!

The internet and art

The Romans kept their ancestor-geniuses in boxes. (Okay, they were actually shrines.) This one, from the House of the Vettii in Pompeii, shows two Lares (or guardian angels), flanking the household’s ancestor-genius.

When I went looking for Iván Ramos’ photos, it was very easy to come up with them, because he is practicing an open-source business model. When I went looking for Van Gogh paintings of an orchard on Tuesday, I had no problems, because Wikipaintings is open source.

Open source started off as a software development model, but has become more generalized. It means universal access through free licensing, and universal distribution, including subsequent iterations. For artists, it’s about sharing your process and it means not worrying too much about the low-res images of your work that are spinning around on the internet. (That’s not too difficult, since we sell paintings, not images of paintings.)

We keep our geniuses in different boxes: Wikipaintings, for one, which claimed to have 75,000 paintings on line as of June, 2012.

That’s pretty much the norm in my world of visual arts, where painters are happy to share process and images of their work. But it is not universal.

I would love to show my students how Andrew Wyeth set up his paintings. But the Wyeths are very protective of their intellectual property, so if you want to study them in breadth, you have to hie over to a museum that holds their work.

I would love to show you Jamie Wyeth’s Seven Deadly Sins, which uses seagulls as models. However, the Wyeths are very tight with their intellectual property, and so you’re unlikely to see the series on the internet. Here are some ravens in Maine instead, which aren’t out of copyright and which Wikipaintings displays under fair use principles.

What does this exposure do to the Cult of Genius that has elevated the artist since the 18th century? Hopefully, it destroys it forever, since the idea of the artist locked in his garret and thinking brilliant but ultimately solitary thoughts, is pretty terrible for the actual production of art.

Artists never worked in a vacuum.

Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in Belfast, Maine in August, 2014 or in Rochester at any time. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops!