More Rockport memories

Aldro Hibbard painting in the collection of the Rockport Art Association

Much of the Rockport art colony revolved around the RAA (Rockport Art Association). The Art association was founded in 1929 and acquired an old tavern building built in 1789 at the very center of Rockport, essentially the best located property in town. Founded by a group of artists to show their art and promote the visual arts the RAA has been in operation over 90 years. Making it one of the oldest operations of its kind in the country. One of its founding members and Rockports most famous artist Aldro Hibbard was not the first president, but did serve as president for many years somewhat later.

An enormous gallery with barnlike proportions was built shortly during the depression and is now named in Hibbards honor. Behind that the smaller Maddocks gallery is also from the late 1700's. Admission to the RAA is free and visitors can see the work of up to several hundred artist members on display. membership is juried (in fact I will serve on that jury next year).

When I arrived in Rockport with no money I secured a very part time position as the janitor there. Here is that story.

I arrived at the start of winter and found as room in an inn that was willing to rent me a room at a very low weekly rate rather than have that room sit empty all winter. I gave them nearly my last dollar for the weeks rent. The owner of the inn mentioned to me that the RAA was looking for employees. There had been some kind of meltdown there a week or two before and the new president John Manship ( son of great American sculptor Paul Manship who created the golden Prometheus unbound statue that flies across the back wall of the skating rink at Rockefeller center) had fired everyone on the staff. A new director Ann Fisk ( daughter of the artist Todd Lindenmuth) was in place and I went up the ancient red stairs to her office on the second floor of the old tavern building. I looked pretty rough, I had been on the road for a month and living in friends apartments in Boston. She gave me the old don't call us, we'll call you routine. I went back down those narrow stairs and as I opened the front door I noticed a fine coat of snow on the front walk, it might have been dry leaves, try as I can, I can't remember which, but I decided I would just go to work despite her ambivalent attitude toward my employment.

Reynolds Beal the grandson of American impressionist painter Reynolds Beal was already on the payroll and quickly figured out what I was up to. With a sly wink he opened the door to the janitors closet beneath those same stairs and reaching in, handed me the broom. We were instant friends.

I cleaned whatever the hell it was off the wide flagstone walk up to the front door and then began my unofficial janitorial duties. Ann Fisk didn't figure out I was on the job for an hour or two, and when she did she realized I solved at least a small part of he employee problem or maybe she saw the humor in my taking the job unbidden and let me continue.

In the position there as janitor for a couple of hours each morning over the course of that winter I quickly knew everyone that frequented the place, staff, and members artists. But I was still sort of invisible, a new janitor doesn't get a lot of attention. In retrospect I realize that it was an ideal situation, within a month I knew all of the players in the art gallery that had become my new home.

The RAA is a place where the histoiry seeps out of the walls at you. I quickly developed a great fondness for the pace. I liked getting to kn ow the rooms and walls that my hero Aldro Hibbard had known so well. I moved to Rockport because of my admiration for Aldro Hibbard and now I was immersed in the RaAA which was his legacy. The membership had a real high average age, but there was a critical mass of talented professional artists who either lived in Rockport or came every summer from around the nation to participate in the still vibrant art colony.

The historic use of molybendium in ancient cultures of the Euphrates

Frank W. Benson, Eleanor

I ran into this quote from Frank Benson online:

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

Aldro T. Hibbard Retrospective      October 5 ~ November 11

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

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

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

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

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

Information is often the enemy of design.

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


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

Let me introduce, Aldro T. Hibbard

This guy is my hero. I was unaware of him until after his death in 1972. I saw a memorial show of his work at the old Doll and Richards gallery, now long gone, on Newbury street in Boston. I was floored by his paintings and I have stayed that way. I have spent a lot of time studying his art.

Most of his paintings are in private collections but a few are out where the public can see them. The Currier museum in Manchester New Hampshire has one hanging and the Whistler house in Lowell, Massachusetts has several very good ones. The Vose gallery in Boston has handled many of the best over the years.


He is from the second generation of the Boston school. The word school here refers to a group of painters rather than an institution with classrooms in building. Hibbard studied with the great American impressionist Edmund Tarbell at the Museum School in Boston. Frank Benson also taught there during this era. Both Tarbell and Benson are important painters with works that hang in the American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. When they reopen the American Wing you will again be able to see them there, along with the Sargents and Homers.

Aldro Hibbard moved to Rockport, Massachusetts in 1920 and was a part of it's rise to national fame , during the time when there was a fad for summer art colonies around the nation. He taught a summer workshop there for years and coached the Rockport baseball team. He was, like George Bellows obsessed with baseball and probably could have played in the major leagues had he not chosen to pursue his art instead.

Aldro spent his winters painting in Vermont. he is mostly known as a painter of snow. I think he was the best snow painter who ever lived. He would take his Gloucester easel out no matter how cold it was and paint alone in the hills of Vermont. In those days many more of the fields were still open and there were many fine views that no longer exist today. It surprising when you go to the small towns in which he painted to see how nature has reclaimed all of the fields that were once so laboriously cleared.

I had the good fortune to know his daughter who told me about growing up in the heyday of the Rockport art colony. She also spoke of wintering in the snows of a Vermont that was in those days before good roads and interstate highways, extremely remote. She told me once I reminded her of her father and I will treasure that as long as I live. Maybe she was jiving me, but I hope not. I helped put on a large show of this artists paintings at the Rockport Art Association about ten years ago. I went to see it every single day it ran..

There is a book reprinted by that art association and still available there. I recommend you buy one as it was for many years unavailable and artists paid high prices for dogeared copies.It has been reprinted in a small quantity and when they are gone may be unavailable again. This book is ;

" A.T. Hibbard N.A. Artist inTwo Worlds" by John Cooley

it is the only way currently, to own a collection of plates of his work and the last chapter of his book is filled with advice he gave to and was recorded by his students. The telephone number of the Rockport art association is 978 .546.6604.

I intend to spend a little time showing you the work of Aldro .T. Hibbard and I will dissect a few of his paintings like we did with the Metcalfs some time ago.. See you tomorrow.

A little more about winter painting

I am rather proud to present you with this. It is an image of Aldro Hibbard from the late 1930's taken from the Rockport Art Association ten year book from the year 1940. He does not have the strut across his Gloucester easel and has a weight hung from the center of the easel.
For those of you in far away countries or warmer climes, wondering whats with all of this Aldro Hibbard stuff? He is my hero and an absolutely fabulous snow painter who lived into the 1970's. All of us snow painters in New England model ourselves on Aldro, Emile Gruppe and Willard Metcalf.

Beside him is a pair of snowshoes and behind him is his sled for hauling his equipment into the woods. Judging from the picture on the easel he was in Vermont.

I want to write just a little more about winter painting clothes. We have covered boots and gloves.You will also need a good pair of long underwear, I use the polar weight from Cabelas, and a flannel or turtleneck cotton shirt. On top of that you will need a pair of insulated nylon snow pants, the sort sold for snowboarders, skiers or snowmobilers. I wear a fleece top and then an insulated Parka. Mine is a very inexpensive synthetic unit but it is large and looks like Arctic gear. The highway crew outfits made by Carhartt are OK and the down Trans Alaska parkas from Cabelas are the absolute best. You probably already have a winter parka that will do if you live in the North. If you have good boots the rest of the equipment is negotiable. If your boots aren't good, nothing else you wear will help. The boots are like the foundation of a house. I don't wear special socks but I have those arctic boots, if you don't, you may need layers of wool socks. Sometimes painters bring a piece of carpeting, cardboard or plywood to stand on, it will insulate you a little from the cold ground. A thermos full of coffee freezes more slowly than a can of soda, but I prefer my MOXIE.

There is an old saying ,"If your feet are cold, put on a hat". Most heat loss is out of there top of your head, so have a good hat and probably a stocking cap over that if it is real cold. Polyester fleece is a wonder product and fur is even better. It is always good to bring all of your winter gear in the car, if it suddenly gets colder, you can return to the car and get more clothing, if you are working far from your car, you may want to bring a little extra gear, too much is better than not enough.

I am sure you know, but I should say for safety's sake, save the alcohol for when you get home at the end of the day. Alcohol will make you colder, not warmer and leads to accidents in the woods. Leave it home.

I carry my camera and little music machine-ipod outside and they all seem pretty unaffected by the cold. I mentioned before but you should have a book of matches because you never know. A butane lighter becomes unreliable in the cold. Cell phones are nice these days and if you did have a problem like your car not starting, you might be very happy to have one.

I plan on doing another reader critique. If you want to be a part of that e-mail me a reasonably sized image of a painting at stapletonkearns@gmail.com put the word critique in the subject line please. I will gather those for a week or so. I am going to limit submissions to landscapes as I feel most comfortable critiquing those online. Portraits, etc, it is best to critique with the model present. I remove signatures from the art I crit and I will not disclose whose art it is that I select.

Also I am going to write an "Ask Stape post for the Fine Arts Views site and I could use some questions. If you have art questions for me please e-mail those in and I will direct you to that post when it happens. Thanks.

Easel shoes

Aldro Hibbard winter painting outfit. From "A. T. Hibbard, Artist in Two Worlds" available from the Rockport Art Association here.

I was asked for an image of our New England snow painting hero Aldro T. Hibbard. Here that is , it is not possible to tell too much about his winter costume but we can tell some things. He is wearing gloves and what might be very heavy wool coat. His hat has the pull down earmuffs that I favor myself. The cigar looks to be of an average ring size and length. I can't tell much about the boots but they were probably leather. Hibbard could spend all day outside in any kind of cold but I don't think he could have done that in this suit. This must have been shot on a warmer winter day.

I wear a brimmed hat like the one he has on, but it is made of polyester fleece and is black. I like at least the inside of the brim of any painting hat to be dark blue or black, that is less distracting. When it gets real cold I can pull my stocking cap over top of that. Mine is as I have mentioned before bright orange and made out of some unnatural material that is unbelievably warm.

He is painting on a Masonite panel on a Gloucester easel,. All of his equipment came to the location on a sled. He had some sort of a palette holder that looked like it was a box that closed when he transported it, and was a stand when opened.

I am surprised with how low he has set the easel. I extend the legs all the way, but he only has them about half way out and the painting is set lower than I would like, I wonder if that was because of the wind, he is out in the open .

Here are some shoes for your easel. They were invented and given to me by my friend Mike Graves. They go onto the end of the leg of a Gloucester or a French easel and keep it from sinking down into the snow. Slick trick. They are of course merely squares of leftover plywood about the size of a beer coaster with a hole in the middle. I throw them in my backpack at the start of the winter they weigh next to nothing and take up little room, but in deep snow they really are handy to have.

Controlling your values

Here is a painting by Sorolla, the upper figures display the same lowered values of which I spoke yesterday. Sorolla has left himself lots of room above the value on those boys backs, to place that bright highlight and have it really ring. Look how dark he has made that wet sand reflecting the sky. I suspect that he dropped the value of that to get the boys to tell against it.

Its hard for me to imagine the two together, but in 1914 Hibbard actually visited Sorolla in his studio in Spain. Sorolla told him a studio was a good place to smoke, and the museum was a good place to take a walk. I no longer get to smoke. I can still walk.

Below is another Hibbard, also of his beloved Vermont. I would like to point out several things about this painting. The first is that it has very little atmospheric perspective. Now it's got some, I admit, but look at how dark that distant hill is.

There are lots of paintings out there where the distance dissolves into a high key blur. That's fine, but it's not the only way, and it gets to be repetitive if every painting in a show does that. This picture has a crispness and an authority, and keeping the "punch" in the distance is part of the reason why. It also allows Hibbard to give you a greater area of the canvas in saturated color, rather than stepping on his color with white or gray blue to get recession into the distance. I will bet if I had not pointed this out, you would not have noticed it, because it works just fine. Its absolutely amazing the liberties you can take with nature that will go unnoticed by the viewer.

Hibbard gains another advantage with that ploy. Because he has kept the value of those distant hills low, he can paint the yellow trees in front of them so they are bright by comparison, but low enough in value so that he can fill them with lots of color. If he painted them all full of white they would not have that rich color. Remember white will kill your color if you aren't very sparing in its use. Also the color of those hills behind them is pretty much the compliment of the yellow orange foliage so it really looks sweet in front of them.

Where I am going with all of this is;

although you worked hard to learn to state your values accurately, there are times, particularly in landscape painting when you will want to state them artistically. They are subject to the decision making process and are a tool of design like any other.

It took me just a minute to type that. It took me a long time to figure it out. Always be looking, thinking and CHOOSING.

Below is a detail of the brushstroke in the foreground of the painting. Notice how besides being a sort of exciting shorthand for what they represent, they also show the form of the land that they describe.

They pretty much all run away from the viewer and into the painting, but they are all at somewhat different angles. They are all different colors but they are all close enough together in value to stay as a whole. He has thrown accents and a shadow into this big area of light. Notice also that big pyramid shape at the bottom pointing us up and into the rest of the painting. None of this stuff just happened. It was all put there deliberately.

Try to do more than stand in front of the landscape and ask "what does it look like?" ask yourself. " what can I do to it?"

"Aldro Hibbard,N.A. Artist Inn Two Worlds" by John Cooley, only available through the Rockport Art Association in Rockport Massachusetts.

Ask Stape, about broader handling

Nice old Mr. Stape


Dear Stape,
I was wondering if you had any suggestions of things to do to make descriptive brushwork in paintings? I have the tendency to blend the paint to death, or make a sloppy mess of things. I generally paint outside for an hour or so and then bring it into the studio for another hour to touch things up.

signed; Up tight

Dear up;

Getting brushwork is a step away from exacting reproduction and toward art. Just transferring an image accurately from nature or a photo is like journalism, and using visible brushwork is more like poetry. It requires the artist to make decisions other than this goes here and that goes there. It is a visual language in which nature can be expressed. It is also individual and created.

I have written around this subject before, however there are some 470 posts on this blog now and I don't think there are too many people who have read them all. If I were writing a book I could assume you had read chapter three, but in a blog it is more like a magazine, you might have read an early edition and you might not. Here are three links to some relevant posts from the archives, there are more, but I thought these were useful. Every Brushstroke
Every Brushstroke5, Every Brushstroke 3


Below is a bulletted list of some tips for getting better handling-brushwork.

• Work from nature, I think an hour is not long enough, I advise three or four, followed by some studio time.
• Work 16 by 20 or larger, that will get those marks up to a size where you can see them and help cut down on niggeling.
• Use a #12 brush, take the little brushes off your palette and put them in your bag where you won't be tempted to use them.
• Work with flats, you will learn to get fine lines with their tips and edges. They must be new, clean, and sharp. Throw them away when they get broommy.
• Learn to simplify. If the detail is smaller than your brush can render, leave it out! This is the root skill in handling and often design. The enormous complexity of nature needs to be presented in a spare and eloquent fashion. Paint trees and branches, not leaves. Summarize. More magic, less accounting!

• Think in form, build stuff out of the brushstrokes by describing its structure. Usually that means planes, but there are indeterminate areas too that you might do with a dryer brush or a dragged stroke.
• Try to put a stroke down and leave it alone, don't go back into passages and complicate them.
• Make your brushstrokes tell. Don't use eight when one will do.

• Pretend you are laying tile. Make the tile on your palette and set it in place on your canvas.
• Use less thinner and more paint. If you use a medium, try to use a little less, and if you can use very little. That gives juicier paint, a better surface, and makes for more attractive handling.
• Learn to pull a stroke in any direction. You should be able to pull or push your brush at any angle from a point where it touches the canvas.
• Study the work of artists who have great brushwork . Here are a few suggestions. John Sargent, Sir Thomas Lawrence, Franz Hals, Rembrandt, for landscapes there are my favorites, Edward Seago, Aldro Hibbard, Emile Gruppe and Willard Metcalf. Every generation of painters has produced men who use the brush well and with a little digging you will find a list that appeals to you.

• Think in chunks, slabs and dots, Never blend your marks together, place them on the canvas crisply and go on to the next thing. Don't make little marks either, be broad.
• Learn the descriptive strokes that best describe the elements you repeatedly see, rough grass lends itself to rendering with one sort of stroke, and clouds another.
• Put butter in your shoes.

Paintings from the top; Me, Eduard Manet (from artrenewal.org), Aldro Hibbard, Carl Peters, me, Edward Potthast.

I wanted to remind you of the workshops that are coming up.

Marshfield,Massachusetts at the North River art association. April 30n to May 2nd.

Lupineworld, at The Inn on Sunset Hill, Franconia New Hampshire

, LUPINEWORLD, to be held June 19th, 20th, 21st at the Sunset Hill house, the now somewhat famous location of Snow Camp. This will be the week of Lupinefest in Sugar Hill. Landscape painters go there every year to paint immense fields of Lupine, a beautiful naturalized flower in front of dramatic mountain vistas. This will be, like Snowcamp, a total immersion experience. We will meet in the morning and paint until dinner together at the inn. Because this is a co operative venture with myself and the inn, it will be necessary for you to stay there for those two nights. They will provide a discount rate for the workshop attendees and the food is excellent. I will arrive the night before and you are welcome to join me then at the same reduced rate from the inn.

The workshop will begin Saturday morning and end Monday evening. That's three days. I am charging $300.00 per person, a $150.00 down payment and $150.00 paid at the event, and the class is limited to ten so every one gets plenty of personal attention.

Overlapping diagonals to create distance

Above is a Hibbard. I want to continue with the designing for distance ideas I have been talking about for the last few days. This Hibbard is of Rockport. I was standing and looking down on this spot from above a few weeks ago. It looked pretty grown over now. Many of you who are readers of this blog know that Aldro Hibbard is a hero of mine. if you don't know his work, there is a little book available on him from the Rockport Art Association in Rockport, Massachusetts, you can order it from them at (978).546.6604.

The illustration is presented again with lines drawn on it showing overlapping diagonals opposing one another, crossing again and again in succession. Object is placed behind object, behind another object as they march down into the picture plane.

This is another mechanical method of introducing recession that doesn't depend on atmospheric perspective. In this example Hibbard also uses atmospheric perspective in the background. Using design methods to get recession doesn't preclude using atmospheric perspective.

Above is a Gruppe of winter in Vermont, showing the same strategy. Here is the defaced version with its annoying little lines.

The first set of diagonals physically overlap. But that is not essential to this game. Several sets in there have an implied overlap. That works well too.

I want to remind those of you who are in the deep South that I will be doing a workshop in Rolling Fork Mississippi. Below is the information on that.

Mar.15-19 Rolling Fork, Mississippi
http://patwalker-workshops.com/Workshops2009.html

This is going to be a five day workshop and I will do my usual total immersion style event. We will be painting the Land of the Blues, on location in the Mississippi delta. I will teach the material I do on the blog, but because I will actually be able to answer questions and show you what I mean in paint, you should be able to learn a lot. I will also be discussing the business of art. I will cover relationship with dealers, pricing and getting started showing your work. I hope to see you there. I am going to load my iPod with Muddy Waters, and Robert Johnson for the occasion.

Come flay with me, lets flay, lets flay away!

I wonder if flayed and filleted have the same root?
Here's some chickens, the problem with this picture is that the white chicken, which is the subject (I think ) is leaving the stage through the voms ( look it up, its a theater expression )

This chickens feet are standing on the rabbet of the frame at A, there needs to be enough space here to get those feet in, so he doesn't . People make this mistake with trees and the occasional figure too, At B his beak is too close to the edge of the canvas . This whole chicken would be happier if it were pulled up and to the left.

This painting could be improved by having a greater range of values. Almost the entire picture is couched in two or three values. Do you remember how in the olden days we learned to read from Dick and Jane. The teacher had to teach us about six words before we could read at all. Jane, see Dick run, spot runs fast etc. It was necessary to have that many words in order to tell the story. The story couldn't be told with just three words. A picture is like that, we need enough values to tell our story. I need to do a post on the law of consequent angles.

I also think those two pointy sky holes at 12 and 1 o'clock at the top of the picture are mechanical looking . They are too similar, and too knife like. They might be OK if they were not as assertive.

I knew the late Charles Vickery, a seascape painter, he used to tell a story about taking a painting to Aldro Hibbard who he admired, for a critique., He put his painting down in front of Aldro, and Aldro was quiet and looked at the picture for a long time. Then he got up to leave and as he turned to walk away he told Vickery, "watch out for needles!" When Vickery told me that story I scratched my head for a while, but I gradually figured out what Hibbard meant.

Those spikey shapes in the sky are needles. Beware of pointy geometric shapes that accidentally appear in a design. Ives Gammell would say that "like a fish in the wall paper, having been once perceived will no more down than Banquos ghost!" (Its evidently theatre night, besides dissection night )

This is really nice little painting.The artist sent me the image they had taken of it wet, and shot on the ground next to their easel. I think though, that it has a fault in the dark wall that goes from one side of the picture to the other without interruption. A streak of light or two might break that up nicely.The line of that wall seems to run uphill somewhat I think some broken reflections in the water below it might also help with that problem. Maybe I will attack this one in photoshop over the course of this week.

Every thing in this painting marches across the picture plane like a frieze. That is not a big problem but the painting might have been better if there was a point where something fell at a different angle rather than as another horizontal line. The ends of the gables seem a little asymmetrical I expect they need to be straightened out when you get this one back to the studio. Hard to find a lot wrong with this one though. Nice job!

This is really nice too. It must be out on the west coast. The rocks lead you very effectively to the spire which is the subject of the picture. That rocky spire in the midground there has a really nice shape. I couldn't resist the urge to trick up that water a little bit. I love painting seascape. Seascape painting has to be done out of your head, the sea won't hold still, and it can't be painted from a photo and come out very well. So you have to learn how the hydraulics work and create it.

I pretty much left everything alone except for the water. I think it is more effective with the more active water.The rocks were so worked up yet the water was sort of blank looking. I have spread linear drawing across more of the canvas. I also lit one side of the sky and then dropped its value as it ran across the canvas. That's a little trick that gives a little more interest there, and also gives a feeling of light. I expect it was a calm day and the artist may say that I wasn't true to his intentions. But I do feel its a lot more dynamic and will hold a a viewers attention longer. That's the beauty of photoshop I can do this to a painting, yet the artist still has it in its original form and undamaged. Either way that was fun to do. Is it actually better? I don't know, you decide. It would stand out better in a show or gallery.

I have also thrown a high key note, the foam of the breaking wave, next to the dark of that rocky spire. That makes a tonal climax right at the subject matter. I bring more attention to the area by doing that.

There still plenty of time left in this week to critique more art, send me images, and I will crit your paintings too.
More tomorrow of the great flaying project.

About winter painting

I am going to do a series of posts on winter landscape painting. Before I get to the equipment and the other adaptations needed to paint outside in the winter, I want to talk why you would want to do it in the first place.

Here's a painting by Aldro t. Hibbard* as an example of why. There are great pictures to be made outside in the winter. The potential for designs is enormous. Those big areas of "white" are just great for making arrangements. Pretty much everything in the landscape is darker and sits silhouetted against that white field. Also the snow is woven throughout the whole scene generally so it often unifies a picture. Like white velvet painting!

There is another thing that happens in the winter too, all of that green goes away. That makes the deep woods into a fine place to paint when in the summer it is way to closed in. Big views appear that are only there when you can see through the trees . Village scenes are unified because of the snow on rooftops is common to all the houses and driveways and other ugly ephemera disappear or can easily be made to. In the winter you can stand in the middle of a stream and look up its length like a country road. Below is my old friend Stefan Pastuvov painting along a frozen stream in Maine.

I would rather paint outside in January than July. In July everything is green except for the sky which is blue (with a little yellow in it) in January there are dozens of colors, and they are sophisticated 500 dollar suit colors too. There are heathers and ochers, browns and russets. The pines are green but its not the acidic green of summer and the snow is prismatic. Its not white, it is opalescent. It is very interesting to paint. When you want it lower in value than your pure white pigment, you will have to add color to it to get it there. What color? generally all three. Or you will paint it purple and shoot yellow into it. Or paint it green and lay purple over that, or pink and then, well you see what I mean. The color of snow in the light and in the shadow is vibratory. It is my favorite thing to paint.

Here I am painting in the snow up near Bethel, Maine. There is another good reason to paint outside in the winter though. If you want to be a plein air painter and are only painting outside in the warm months you are only working PART TIME.

You are also missing out on a lot of learning. The structure of the trees is evident in the winter and that's when you learn that. You wouldn't imagine you could learn to be a figure draftsman only drawing the clothed figure. Well, the trees model nude in the winter! A lot of landscape painting is tree painting. They are the figures on the landscape painters stage. In order to learn to draw those figures you need to be out there in the winter studying their anatomy.

There are a lot of what I call inominate colors out in the winter landscape. An inominate color is one that you can't easily name. That is, its not red, or blue, or yellow but a combination of all of the colors. They are everywhere in the winter and learning to make them is fun and teaches a sophisticated range of grays and browns and heathers etc. That puts more arrows in your color quiver.I will be back and tell you more about winter painting tomorrow.

* Aldro from the book Aldro Hibbard artist in two Worlds available through the Rockport Art Association

Hibbard paintings and a lament for the missing New England

Every morning I log on to my blog to check what I wrote the night before. There are always a couple of typos or words left out. I don't know why I don't see them the night before. I go over every post several times. There may well be gremlins altering these posts while I sleep. So if you log on early in the day you may enjoy errors that will disappear later. The posts you read last week or last month are quietly healing in the background as I go back and review them. There's a reason real writers have editors.

Here are three more images by Aldro Hibbard. The top painting is of a place I have located. It is a series of rocks and caves called the cauldrons on Schooner Head in Acadia National Park. I have painted in that area many times and I know very well what it looks like there.


I think it is very valuable to seek out the places that the "old guys" made their paintings.

If I look at what the artist made, then subtract from that what is actually there, I arrive at the the artists decisions .

Many of the places I used to do that 20 years ago are now gone. Particularly those on the harbor in Gloucester where generations of artists worked.When I saw the old wharves and boats in the 80's I just assumed that because they had survived so long and that everyone valued the history of those places , that they were safe. I was wrong. Now there's a post I can do this summer. I will take my camera over to Gloucester and show you some of the locations and the paintings that were made there

I have no idea where this bridge was. I am pretty certain it is long gone, but it was in Vermont though. Of all the places in New England the northern parts of rural Vermont have changed the least. Even there the woods have taken back the pastures and many of the barns are fallen in. A barn will stand until the roof goes. Then it deteriorates rapidly. A field goes back to small trees and bushes in only three or four years.


I will remind you that all of these images and many more can be had by contacting the Rockport Art Association.

http://www.rockportartassn.org/gift_shop.htm

and acquiring the Hibbard book before the very limited numbers of available copies are gone.



I was in the last generation to paint the wooden dragger fleet that sailed out of Gloucester. There is not a single one of those boats left on the water. The last, the 120 foot long Vincie N. sat at her mooring at the end of Rocky neck for years. She is gone now. C.W. Mundy and I painted her together, it seems like yesterday, but it must have been nearly ten years ago.

I try not to take anything beautiful that I paint for granted anymore. I know most of the old New England I love to paint is disappearing.The wooden windows of historic structures disappear to be replaced by plastic ones with no divided lights. All the wooden lobster boats that were still common into the 80's are gone from the harbors I paint on the coast of Maine. Lobster traps are made from vinyl coated wire, and the buoys that mark their places in the cold water are now made from styrofoam. Now I understand why a lobsterman would get tired of working on a wooden boat every spring and hauling in the heavy waterlogged wooden traps. So I don't blame them, but I do miss the aesthetic.


Tomorrow I will strap one of these paintings onto my gurney, retrieve my scalpel from the autoclave and begin dissecting it. Wanna pass me that hemostat? See you then.

A Gruppe painting discussed

As long as Emile Gruppe has surfaced I think I will talk about a couple of them. Emile is one of the artists who from about the 1920's through the late 70's was one of the most sucessful and well known painters of the Cape Ann school. The other "big guy" was Aldro Hibbard. Although I like Gruppe well enough, he is eclipsed for me by Hibbard. The Gruppes seem a little "quick" for my taste. But that is what they were about, and people who like Gruppe like him for that reason.

Gruppe was a splendid designer and pattern maker. The autumn scene is of the Congregational Church in Rockport, sometimes called "Old Sloop" church. The big dark tree on the right is balanced by three or four lighter birch trees leaning away from it at the opposite angle, on the left. These trees include a pattern of darks against the brightly colored midground. Gruppe has used counterchange all over this picture, setting the dark parts of the trees against the light parts of the sky and on the left darkening the sky so the white birches are boldly relieved against it. The strong darks make the colors "pop". A strong shadow is usually called for in order to get a strong light. It is the contrast between the light and the shadow that makes the picture "pop. This pattern of darks is liked together into a web like net thrown over the midtones of the distance.

The strongest and biggest dark (on the right hand tree) is placed next to the church, which gets our attention to that area. Sometimes artists call that a tonal climax, the darkest dark and the lightest light are placed together at the subject. It is a useful device sometimes.

The foreground and the base of the tree look to be painted in the mixed "umbers" that I mentioned last night. They contain all three primaries. The foreground grass looks like it was painted with ocher, but Gruppe used no earth colors, so it was mixed from chromatic color.

I wish Gruppe had taken a ruler to that steeple though. Gruppe lovers don't care, but that would bother me if I owned the painting. Its lean would haunt me. The bottom left corner of the lantern (that part of a steeple) needs to be kicked out a little to look "square". Gruppe was an excellent draftsman, I just think it wasn't important to him. It is that sort of thing that puts me off Gruppe sometimes. I never have that problem with a Hibbard, he adhered to a higher standard in his drawing.

Notice the repeating gables of the buildings across the middle ground. They have a relationship to one another that is rhythmic. The repeated shapes differing in size and perspective give a jaunty bebop sort of a feel.

One of the advantages of painting loosely as this is that you can get away with a lot of arranging. The more literal you are, the less poetic your arrangements will be.

YOU CANNOT OBSERVE DESIGN INTO A PAINTING!

In order to have rhythm and design in your painting it is necessary to push it around so it has those things. They will not mysteriously appear , they have to be consciously installed. A meticulously rendered highly accurate rendition is often arrhythmic.

A little more about drawn planar recession

Here is an Aldro Hibbard. This is one of my favorite Hibbard. I have written about him before and if you search the blog using the box at the upper left, you can find more. This Hibbard has a great passage that uses the "stacked" recession I was talking about in the last post about the light house painting.

I think this is a big enough idea that I want to stop and make sure that all the readers "get" this one. There is another idea implied by this and that is :

YOU CANNOT OBSERVE DESIGN INTO A PAINTING

You can look all day and not see this kind of recession, you may find places where it exists, but this is something you "install" into the landscape. It is an arrangement that is forced onto the actual appearance of the scene to maker a better, clearer design, rather than the more random arrangements presented by a natural location.

The detail of the lower right hand corner of the picture shows this tactic, I have photoshopped this image to make the planes a little plainer for you. The upper image has not been altered.

Below I have outlined some of those "stacked planes that recede away from us like dishes drying in a rack, viewed at a 45 degree angle.

The beauty of this device is that it Gives recession and variety to arrangements of things which actually march straight across the canvas in real life. Rather than having stripey lines of landscape elements arranged equidistant from the viewer, they are arranged in serried rows one behind one another. Think of rows of marching Egyptians from some tomb bas relief. The Egyptian sculptors used this device all the time.

A diagonal composition

Aldro Hibbard. Lanesville

I have been thinking about the question asked by deepbluehue and want to speak a little more about that.
I'm interested in learning more about concealed geometric arrangements. How do you decide what kind of geometric arrangement to use? I'm guessing that you design your landscape, still life, etc. to express that arrangement but subtly.

I don't need to know music theory to enjoy Debussy. Most of the viewers don't know about the structure operating within a painting. They don't really need to know about that structure to enjoy the art. But if you want to MAKE a painting you do need to know about the concealed geometry underlying a designed image.

There was a period a few years back when dentists offices often featured wall sized photomurals of forests and other subjects. I think that has passed and now they are back to those lovely charts about gum disease and posters of happy chipmunks wielding over sized toothbrushes, in the pastel shades those sorts of rodents prefer. The over sized photos didn't really work. They lacked that spark, that humanness, that a painting has. They were of course as accurate as they could be, but they weren't arranged. That geometry concealed below the surface of a traditional painting appeals to something in us that craves order. I think that is why photography hasn't really destroyed painting like many thought it would.

Now lets talk about that Hibbard. It is of Lanesville, Massachusetts. That's a place I know pretty well. It is still a good place to paint and hasn't changed all that much. Many artists have painted there. The design is built on a diagonal leading the viewer up through the painting to the right.

All the way around that diagonal there are other lesser lines running in the opposite direction to counterbalance the design.We usually expect a picture to "balance" . A line generally needs to be countered by an opposite line to balance.

The arrangement of the lines in the picture, gives it

AN ORDER CALLED BALANCE.

I think a few of you are surprised that I call balance a design element, but it is. In fact it is the most basic design element, for those of you who imagine you can make good paintings without having to use an underlying geometric structure, remember balance. You can sometimes just crop a picture to balance, but if you are merely copying photographs, you will have problems with your pictures balancing, even if nature should accidentally occur before your lens in a pleasing arrangement, that leads the eye well, and gives a feeling of enough arrangement to satisfy that human need for order.

Above is a Willard Metcalf (from artrenewal.org) That also has a diagonal design, see it running right up the middle of the painting? The rising diagonal has a positive and major key feeling. Like the Hibbard before it has the same counterbalancing lines intersecting and setting off the main diagonal of the composition.

So there is another design stem. A rising diagonal with smaller lines counterbalancing it. This is a very useful composition and is found frequently not only in landforms but in skies too.

As you look at paintings, try to discover the geometric structure upon which the artist has built his design. Often just knowing that there is a hidden geometry there is enough to help you spot it. Tomorrow I will talk about another design stem.

More Rockport reminiscences

Rockport from Front Beach. Bearskin neck is the spit of land on the left. Notice the red granite in the foreground. Rockport was aquarying town in the 19th and early 20th century and this hard red granite was exported all over for building bridgges monuments and office buildings.
There is another Encyclopedia of Dumb Design Ideas post ready for tomorrow or the next day. but it seems like I am on a theme here. I will talk a little about the art colony as it was in the early eighties. THis may read a little like a laundry list, and you may not know many of the names here. But it is useful that they get written down.I don't know that anyone has written anything about Rockport during this era. Rockport was past its heyday but there was still a a lot going on there.
Here are some of the artists who had galleries at the time.

• Paul Strisik ( National Academy)
  
• Tom Nicolas (National AScademy) -T.M. Nicholas
• David and Line Tutwieler and Charles Vickery
  
• John Caggianno (opened a year before me)
• Bruce Turner
• Lou Burnett and Martha Moore
  
• Dorothy Ramsey and Mike Stoffa
• Al Ruben
• Ferdinand Petrie
• Wayne Morell
• Joe Santoro (on Railroad ave) also National Academician.
  
• Shumacher (deceased but still showing seascapes)
• Charlie Stepule
• Nathalie Nordstrand
• Betty Lou Schlemm
  
• Mildred Jones (on a side street, later ran over her close friend Marian Williams Steele in the parking lot of ther Rockport National Bank, almost killing her.
  
• Allenbrook a portrait painter, I never knew him.
  
• Domenic Demari
• Don Mosher, Christine Mosher
  
• Stilson
• Dorothy Robbins
• Sven Orville Carlson
• John Terelak and Martin Ahearn
• Rudy Colao, Pam Fox and Fred MacNeil
• Peter Vincent
• Al Czerepak
• Helen Van Wyck home and teaching studio
• Charles Gordon Marston
• Jack Callahan was around but I think had given up his gallery.
  

There were as many more in Gloucester a couple miles away. Artists like Charles Movalli, Dale Radcliff, Ken Gore and Bertnie Gerstner, Ward Man and more I have forgotten. There was also Roger Curtis painting seascape and Cheslie D'Andrea painting fishing boats and marines. Bernard Corey was member of the Art Association so I saw him around some. There were other galleries, I have forgotten some I am sure, and there were even more artists who didn't keep galleries. I knew all of these artists well, except for Stilson and Allenbrook. There was a lot of community and we knew one another through the Art Association and the grocery store. The artists spent a lot of time standing around on the street in front of their shops and if you walked around town you would stop to talk.Openings and artists demonstrations drew crowds at the Rockport Association on summer nights. After dark the streets were full of strolling locals mixed into the tourist trade. There was a lot of interaction. Again, we were all SMIMMING in people most of the time. I always walked in the street because the tourists on the sidewalks stumbled along in a daze.

Ellens Harborside restaurant was a good affordable place to have a seafood dinner and I often saw artists there. Alan Davidson and Lucien Geraci were always there together. In the summer Charles Vickery came to town and occasionally sat down at my easel and painted seascape demos for me. Joe Santoro used to come in and put his arm around me, very Italian. He was a watercolorist and a member of the Guild and a National Academician. Walker Hancock another Academician was still making sculpture in nearby Lanesville I was invited to draw the figure in his studio with a small group several times a few years later.

There were a lot of soms and daughters of artists from the previous generations still around. There were Elaine Hibbard, Aldro's daughter, John Manship who was Pauls Manships son. And The Beals, Ren, Bill and Telka. Ren was the grandson of Renolds Beal and the nephew of Gifford Beal. I believe he was related to Stow Wengenroth too. Richard Kuehne the son of Max Kuehne the American impressionist and gilder.

Harry Ballinger was still around and I met him on painting jury for the art association I think he was about a hundred. His seascape painting book is still a classic. Marshall Joyce still sent watercolors to the shows at the Association. There were also some good retired illustrators around at the time, like John Wentworth and some GI combat artists. My head is spinning, there were so many artists there at that time,Not all were great, but just the energy of so many people painting in such a small town was exciting . Painting was the industry of Rockport. Most or all of these names may mean nothing to you but they are who was around in Rockport at that time. Aldro Hibbard, Anthony Cirino and Lester Stevens, and Carl Peters were more or less recently deceased when I arrived.

There was also an army of retire commercial artists making art in their retirement and top flight amateurs trying to ramp themselves up to professional. Every summer also brought visiting artists from around the country, come to see what Rockport was like. I met a number of artists from around the nation while sitting in my shop.

I started going on painting trips to Vermont with some of the older guys, Tom Nicholas, John Terelak and Don Mosher I think this might have been a little later. I did paint landscapes a lot with Bruce Turner.

With a few exceptions everyone on the above list is dead. If in 1983 I had made a list of the established Rockport artists I could have listed thirty or more. Today, all but a handful are gone. I guess I should have thought about that coming, then, but I didn't. Many of them could tell stories of painting with Frank Dumnond or studying with Soyer or Brachman at the Art Students League before the second World War. A few knew Gruppe and Hibbard. A few old women had studied with William Merrit Chase. Genevieve Wilhelms, who I hardly knew, hung out with John Sloan and Edward Hopper, I think. Many could describe the art colony during the fifties when it was really full of artists and many of that great first generation were still alive. I should probably write down more of this stuff as it will be lost and forgotten soon.

Rockport years 2

Aldro Hibbard, Rockport, From the Smithsonian

This picture of Rockport was done from behind Hibbards home and studio. There are now large townhouses above this location, but I expect this place may still be pretty much unchanged, although the view is now occluded by trees. Hibbard painted a number of pictures in this location, and there is one that was made into a print. The few copies I have seen of that were done on poor quality paper and the ink has faded. This view looks out over Back Beach to downtown, there are two steeples visible, the one on the left is the congregational church called Old Sloop church. The steeple of this church had a cannonball fired into it by the crew of the British frigate, Nymph, in the war of 1812. Stretching out to the left, is the breakwater forming the old harbor, which marked the beginning of Bearskin neck where I had my first gallery.

I wrote before, of arriving in Rockport in 1983 here. Looking back on that time in my life it seems magical, and I remember it like one of those old photos where they put Vaseline on the lens to get a soft vignetted look. I worked at the art association in the mornings for the rest of that winter, and painted in the rest of my time. I had very little money, but I did sell a few paintings as I kept the gallery open most of the winter. When spring came I moved out of the inn and into an apartment in the jumble of houses that perched on Bearskin neck, a historic spit of land stretching out into Sandy Bay, where colonial shacks and 19th century fishhouses had been turned into galleries in the 20's and 30's by artists and then into seasonal tourist businesses in the 60's. Most of the established artists had their galleries uptown, but on the Neck rent was cheap, and it was very picturesque.That spring I moved out of the Inn as I was able to rent a small apartment on the top floor of a building built out over the old harbor on stilts. It had a little deck and a big picture window overlooking the water.

I befriended a whole generation of artists that year who are now almost all dead, they were the last remnants of the historic art colony.
At the entrance to the Neck was Lou Burnette, a cantankerous old man who sat on the stoop in front of his cluttered shop and had done so for 50 or 60 years. He had studied at the art students league, with Raphael Soyer I believe. His shop had paintings of purple beatniks playing bongos in East Village apartments, wearing berets and smoking cigarettes . Their girlfriends were green and dressed all in black.

At the top of the hill above the Neck was the Art Association and next to that, Paul Strisik had his gallery, he and Tom Nicholas senior were at the top of the pecking order. Although Strisik is dead, Tom Nicholas is still very much alive and undiminished. Strisik was a student of Dumond and in his seventies at that point. I knew him only socially through the Art Association. I remember being at a party in a summer cottage rented by Line and David Tutweiler sometime in that era, where a group of us sat around Strisik and listened to him tell us how to cut a roll of canvas down, on a bandsaw to eliminate waste. A very young T.M. Nicholas was there listening to Strisik that night also, he was to become a close friend, but at that point I didn't know him very well.

John Manship the son of Paul Manship, one of the most important sculptors of the 20th century (he made the golden Promethious unbound that is at the back of the skating rink at Rockefeller Center in New York) was the president of the Art Association. I later was acquainted with him, he bought a painting of mine in a charity auction, which though it didn't bring much money, was a nice recognition that I was thought of as a painter, even though I was much younger than that crowd and was after all.... the janitor. Incidentally, the janitor before me was John Terelac.

I remember meeting Charles Movalli whose work I have always admired, he did a lecture on design in Hibbards paintings that taught me a lot. At night sometimes I would walk around Rockport and look in the windows of all the tiny shops and galleries. Wayne Morell, still alive today, was in his prime and I was impressed with a colorful painting of an outdoor cafe full of people. It had as much paint on it as I used in a week! Seeing that got me excited about having fluid paint handling in my pictures.

At the Art Association I worked with and became friends with a tortured man named Reynolds Beal, who was the product of one of the many artistic families still gracing Rockport in those days. His grandfather had been THE Reynolds Beal, an American impressionist painter, his uncle was Gifford Beal, another painter of the era and he was related to Stow Wengenroth a well known lithographer from the heydey of Rockport too, but I don't remember exactly how. Ren and I started a little company that I gave the whimsical name of DORKOHELIX INDUSTRIES. We made handlettered signs for the little businesses around town. Ren could do showcard leettering in the 1930's style and we made signs that looked period Rockport. I sold the jobs and did any woodworking that needed doing as I by now, had a workshop in my apartment on the Neck. I had built a workbench you could have strapped a horse down on. Antique dealers would bring me old stuff to work on, worthless old paintings, pieces of old circus wagons needing to be repainted, and old gilt frames needing repair and regilding. These connections with the antique dealers got me invited to show in their booths at the antique shows scattered around Boston. There were almost no galleries in which to sell paintings that weren't modern, so it was a good place to show my art besides my own gallery. They were the first New England customers and allies.

I was once loaned a painting by Margaret Pearson, a Boston school painter to sell on consignment. I took it to an antique show in Boston. It was about five feet high and was a nearly life sized nude. probably painted under the direction of Tarbell as she was his student. It was not an idealized figure, but a studio nude of an actual woman with the blood pooling in her feet, and the swayed back of a tired model who had stood too long. The fleshtones were wonderful though. it was a very nice piece of work and I was shocked when everyone pointed and laughed at it like naughty schoolboys. I wanted 800 dollars for it, no one even made an offer. A few years later Pearson was rediscovered and her work brought real money although the market is for her interiors.

One day I got a phone call from Ren Beals parents who lived near me in town. They had a grand house with tiered balconies overlooking the harbor. They wanted to know if I would like some old picture frames. When I got there, they took me down into a cellar room and pointed out a large stack of gilt early 29th century frames that had belongred to Reynolds Beal. I guess they knew I could work on them, and I had been a friend to their troubled son. Many of the frames were huge, 40 by 60 or larger. I didn't have a car so I picked them up one by one and carried them the two blocks to my apartment on my shoulder. Each time I passed the gallery of another artist, Bruce Turner, I had a more fabulous old frame. Most were big Whistler designs although a few were of the wide and intricate Beaux Arts, Sanford White style. After I had gone by about three times he could stand it no longer and accosted me. Where are you getting all those frames? he asked. I gave him a nice one and went back to get the next. Today those frames would go to a museum or at least to a fancy dealer after being restored. But I was lucky enough to have them and I made good use of them. I stacked them, and hung them around the walls of my apartment, and over the next year or two I made big paintings to go in them. I was the first painter in Rockport with gold frames I think, although that changed rapidly in another year or so.
I will continue this tomorrow.