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Logging was very important on the Kennebec river up until the 1960’s.

Out on a walk and I just found out that Eastman Johnson lived just over a mile from here on Winthrop Street in Augusta.  I love knowing this.  He was a fabulous artist and to know he was was at his easel just down the road is wonderful.

From Wikipedia:

Eastman Johnson (July 29, 1824 – April 5, 1906) was an American painter and co-founder of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, with his name inscribed at its entrance. He was best known for his genre paintings, paintings of scenes from everyday life, and his portraits both of everyday people and prominent Americans such as Abraham Lincoln, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. His later works often show the influence of the 17th-century Dutch masters, whom he studied in The Hague in the 1850s; he was known as The American Rembrandt in his day.

Google results here.

As artists we paint what we see.  In the visual arts this, of course, makes sense.  But we see things many different ways and my art comes from the various things and ways I see.  I remember being told the old art adage, ” Paint what you know.”  And this makes powerful sense.  Creation of Art is such an intense thing, pulling something from nothing.  This is not easy, if done well.  If you paint things you don’t know intimately then you run the serious risk of painting only superficial art, postcards from travels to places we don’t understand.  You have to look and look and learn and learn to know something inside and out, to paint it well.  Not to capture the surface detail. Hell, getting a likeness, of a tree or a house or a person, that is basic, easy, Art School stuff.  Surface likeness is shallow, just basic art rendering.  But it is telling something important about the thing that is the challenge.  The challenge that keeps expanding if you let it.

So being told to paint what I know when I was young was terrifying.  I was young. I was dumb. I didn’t know anything so how could I paint?    But then it dawned that it didn’t mean I couldn’t learn more, know more, draw more.

So really painting is not about art but about jumping in and EXPERIENCING.  This is the route to having something to paint, knowing more. Just go and dance.  This is assuming that as an artist you want to paint something powerful, something with vision, something strong.  And a powerful painting can be many things…it can be a huge dramatic painting condemming war, or a small simple glance of sunlight on the edge of a summer bouquet.  It is not what you paint but how well you have seen and how you paint it.

To paint something you need to know it, learn it, study it.  Draw it so many ways that you can move it around in your head to fit any angle, any life you want to give it.  The more you look, the more you see.

Often I pose models but they are posed to fit the vision I already have in my head.  I see the figures inside first, sketch them out and then find models and poses to flesh them out.

Which brings me back to what I first meant.  We paint what we see.  Sometimes that is what is in front of our noses right now.  Sometimes the seeing  is in our heads and the “vision” is made flesh on canvas with our paint.   And often paintings are a mysterious combination of the two…and who knows what else.  Often in my work, things from many years ago, things I saw, people I drew, ideas I had, inform and merge into current paintings to bring a reality to new paintings.  Old joining with new to make a painting.  And as I walk down a street I may see a twirl of hair by someone’s ear that suddenty fits well into my current painting or a thought bubbles up from years ago and seems to fit into now.  My paintings may look like moments but they are more like woven stories from many days.

So paint what you see, paint what you know, but never stop knowing and seeing more.  The more you look, the more you will see.  The more you see, the more you will understand and take into your core.  And then, just maybe, with perserverance, we will paint well.  It only ends when we stop seeing.

[vc_row css_animation=”” row_type=”row” use_row_as_full_screen_section=”no” type=”full_width” angled_section=”no” text_align=”left” background_image_as_pattern=”without_pattern”][vc_column width=”2/3″][vc_column_text]My new mural at the Kennebec County Superior Court in Augusta, Maine is now complete.  You can see a portfolio of detail images here: Kennebec Mural.  Just started adding images, many more to come.

Kennebec celebrates the river as road, home and workplace to the generations of ordinary people who traveled, traded and lived on the river. Within the forty foot mural five hundred years and 12 time periods coexist under the same eternal sky. As the river continues constant and unchanging, Christopher Cart paints the human story from Native American canoe to sailing ships to steamships.

The mural depicts ice cutting, logging, sailing ships and ship building, early Popham explorers and Abnakis, leisure days and travel and the hard work of the people who tended the land while raising families. This important shipbuilding river valley launched 4000 ships over the years, so it was a bustling, vital place of importance. The Kennebec river was a major highway to the world and seamen from this region could find fellow Kennebec valley men in any major port of the world.

Months of research were necessary for Cart to accurately portray proper period clothing, tools, ships and details from 500 years of life on the river. Particularly helpful was the vast image reference library at the Maine Maritime Museum in Bath. After the research, came the drawing of hundreds upon hundreds of “studies” of clothing, figure poses, tools and settings, to refine the details and the overall composition of the piece.

When plans were complete, the blank, primed mural canvas was applied to the wall in the Courthouse using 3 gallons of glue. Next the painting of the actual mural began with a scrubbed in underpainting. Cart’s detailed half size final drawings were then transferred to the canvas in charcoal using a traditional grid method to enlarge them. The mural was painted in archival acrylic paint mostly with one and two inch brushes. It is covered with a clear isolation barrier acrylic and three coats of final varnish.

Over fifty figures populate the mural, from a hardworking pregnant colonial wife to sailors aloft in the rigging. As a point of interest, many people connected with the Courthouse building posed as models for the mural, including several Justices, the building architect, construction foremen and workers.

Kennebec honors the men and women who came before us. They are no more, but their legacy endures.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][vc_column width=”1/3″][vc_column_text]

detail: colonial mother and child

Kennebec, by Christopher Cart
14 x 39 foot mural, acrylic on primed canvas applied to wall
Kennebec Count Superior Court, 2^nd Floor,1 Court Street, Suite 101, Augusta, ME 04330
Completed February 2015[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row css_animation=”” row_type=”row” use_row_as_full_screen_section=”no” type=”full_width” angled_section=”no” text_align=”left” background_image_as_pattern=”without_pattern”][vc_column][/vc_column][/vc_row]