Caleb Stone, landscape painter
How he financed his first European painting trip, the many lessons learned from his father, and his “minute sky”
I’ve been drawn to the Caleb Stone paintings that I’ve seen in galleries around Cape Ann. His paintings capture traditional subjects in the best possible way, and often show me something new in familiar places throughout New England.
Caleb’s paintings convey the spirit of the chosen landscape and are expertly painted. Some seem to possess an internal light source. Viewing his paintings of Monhegan Island sparked my interest in visiting the island off the Maine coast with my husband last summer. As I write this, Caleb is teaching a weeklong painting workshop on Monhegan and I’m more than a bit envious of the participants.
Scenes of Monhegan are well represented in his body of work; he’s been spending time there with his family since childhood. His father lived on the island for long stints including winters when the population dwindles to a few hearty souls plus a legendary hermit on an almost conjoined island. Caleb recalls some tough passages returning home from the island on rough seas (think 20- to 30-foot waves), literally strapped into his seat for safety-sake.
Caleb reports that it took him many years of practice, formal training at the Lyme Academy of Fine Arts, plus lessons from his father to develop as a professional painter. Yes, Caleb is the accomplished son of the late Don Stone, described as a modern impressionist painter known for his marine and landscape paintings and for being part of the Cape Ann school of artists.
Today Caleb lives adjacent to his airy studio on South Street in Rockport, MA. When he’s not painting on location, he’s teaching painting classes and giving demonstrations at assorted venues, including the Concord Center for the Visual Arts and the Rockport Art Association & Museum.
Here’s the conversation I had with Caleb a few days after an open studio show featuring paintings of his and his father’s.
What was it like to grow up with a renowned artist as a father?
I was very happy to grow up with a father who was not only a great artist and a great father, but also a great teacher. I think it was a similar situation with Tom Nicholas and T.M. Nicholas, as father and son artists.
I went to his workshops for 15 years in a row, starting when I was 12 and until I was in my late 20s. He gave me feedback about my paintings, and I learned from the critiques he gave to the 20 other art students. He was often humorous with his critiques, which helped people remember his advice. [One of Don Stone’s well-known “Don-isms” was, “Value does the work, color gets the credit.” Source]
It sounds like your father encouraged your painting but also joked around a lot.
Yes. He once asked me, “Do you really want me to critique your paintings, Caleb?” And before I could say yes, he said, “Everything I'm going to tell you is going to be in a negative light. I'm going to show you where your mistakes are and what you need to do to improve them because that’s how you learn.” He said he didn’t want to discourage me. Before I could say yes again, he said, “If you want to hear all the oohs and ahhs, your mother is in the kitchen, so go talk to her.” [Caleb smiles]
His feedback was helpful because he had been through it all; sharing that hindsight helped me grow and probably saved me 20 years of learning the hard way.
My father teased me too. He'd say, “You know what's wrong with that oil painting, Caleb? You got the paint too close to the canvas! I bet if you put that in a $200 frame, you might get $150 for it!” [Caleb smiles as he tells this, acknowledging that his father was joking in a loving way.]
What about your father's art most appealed to you?
The way he would capture something in the most beautiful way and also tell a story. He had a way of putting emotion into his paintings that would draw you in.
When did you start going to Monhegan Island?
In 1970, when I was four years old. My father taught and painted out there often, and we spent spring and fall vacations there. As a teenager, I got a job working at the Island Inn as a dishwasher and lived out there for the summer from May until October.
When I was 17, I would work two shifts at the inn and have one shift off per day to go out and paint. One of the owners of the Lupine Gallery on the island, Billy Boynton, wanted to show my watercolor paintings in the gallery.
What did you do after art school?
I was awarded a $5000 John Stobart Foundation landscape painting grant, which helped me get on my way coming out of art school. I traveled out west three times, toward Wyoming and around Utah, California, Washington, Idaho, and Alberta, Canada. I took my camping gear and my art equipment, and I stayed in Jackson, WY, with a couple of friends from art school. I toured around the national parks, camping and painting along the way.
What led to your first painting trip to Europe?
In my mid 20s, I wanted to paint landscapes in Great Britain and France. I asked my father: how does a starving artist finance a trip to Europe? He explained that in the old days, artists would have patrons who would give them money in advance to fund their painting [functionally a commission].
I told this to an art enthusiast friend in Monhegan Island. He worked on Wall Street as a trader. When I explained that I was planning to ask for $500 per painting, he said he would take two paintings and wrote me a check for $1000. Three weeks later he called me to tell me he found five more sponsors. [Word spread and Caleb ended up with $10,000 in sponsorships to fund his travels.]
Tell me more about your trip.
I went from April until the end of June in 1991. I had AAA set up a TripTik, so I had my route mapped, and rental and cars and ferry rides booked. I traveled frugally. I brought my camping gear and my cooking grill.
I went to England and France—Brittany and Normandy. Then, I spent a month in Ireland and went into Northern Ireland, then to Scotland, and then back to England, to Cornwall.
How many paintings did you create on that trip?
I did nearly one a day. They were 12” x 16” oils, 11” x 15” quarter-sheet watercolors, and a few larger ones. I made about 90 paintings during the trip.
For the first couple weeks I was painting in England, I was nervous because I had $10,000 of other people's money and felt so much pressure. I called my sponsor who said, “Caleb, don't worry about it. We gave you this money to enjoy yourself. We know you will give us paintings.” Once he said that to me, I was able to calm down and do my better work.
Do you have any of the paintings from that time? What would you think about them now?
I sold the last two about five years ago.
To answer your question, I think of the ladder of learning as difficult in the beginning, but you make great hurdles, great jumps. Then as you get older, those hurdles become smaller steps, so you are still learning, but you're not learning in dramatic ways. You make so many bad mistakes early on, so you improve by making fewer of those bad mistakes.
It's not that it gets it easier, it's that you know how to do something without making mistakes. Even when I was in my early 20s, I was pretty good at painting with watercolor. I look back at some of those early watercolors I painted when I was in my mid 20s and think they are not bad.
How did you end up doing “work-study” with your father?
I was in a co-op education program in high school, and I would spend part of the school day working at Burger King. My father was tired of picking me up when I would smell like greasy burgers. He decided to pay me to work for him, with the idea that we would paint once a day and I would do jobs such as stacking wood. So, on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, from 7 in the morning until 11:30 am, I would go paint with my dad and then come home and do schoolwork, then I’d do jobs around the house.
If it was raining and we couldn’t go paint on location, he'd put an art book in front of me and say, “Look at this Winslow Homer watercolor and paint it. I want you to learn about how he thought about watercolor and understand the decisions he made.” That experience was great.
What did you learn from your father, separate from art school?
Values, meaning the tonality of paint and how to get a feeling of illumination in your paintings. Also, his sense of color mixture, and getting temperatures of warm to cool relationships. I learned that early on.
It's not easy to mix both warm and cool grays to paint rocks, and to get that feeling of the sunlight and shadow relationships to be right. My father learned from a lot of artists on Cape Ann and his palette was what they call the “Gruppé palette.” He showed it to me in oils, but it relates to watercolors as well.
The Gruppé palette is three yellows, three reds, three blues, and white. There’s no black, no green, no violet. You mix your gray tones from your primary colors. Having green on your palette is kind of like a crutch. If you have green on your palate, everything looks “pool table green” because that is the way it comes out of the tube. Avoiding green from the tube, it teaches you to mix yellow and blue to get green, but then you use the red as a modifier to get those subtle olive greens and subtle pine greens. You start to use the triangulation of your primaries to get your gray tones, whether it's a secondary tertiary or a gray itself. I teach this palette to my students. It's better to have a limited palette.
My father gave me a head start going into art school. He wanted me to learn from other teachers. He said, “I don't want to be such an influence that I'm always right and you do everything the way I say, because then you'll be another me. I want you to be you.” One time he said, “You know what I like about your paintings, Caleb? They're not like mine.”
How did you learn how to teach?
By doing it. When I first started teaching my workshops, my father said, with tears in his eyes, “I'm so proud of you. You're going to learn so much being a teacher.” I said, “I thought it's the students that are going to learn.” He replied, “Yes, but you have to know every little problem that they're going through and figure out how they can get out of that problem. You're going to grow because you have to have that vocabulary to describe where your students went wrong and how they can fix it.”
It took me a while to get past that nervousness of teaching, but once I got into it, it came naturally. My father told me I was a better teacher than he was because I was able to explain what I was doing while I was doing a painting demonstration.
Did you experiment with other mediums and subjects before you decided to focus on landscape painting?
Yes. I tried it all, including photography, sculpture, still life, and portrait and figurative painting. My father encouraged me to narrow my focus after my second year of art school, so I focused on landscape painting. Still, I also did some life drawing because I thought drawing from life helps you draw anything.
Some of the small canvases in your bookcase are painted over figure studies. Please explain.
I sometimes go to the life drawing sketch group at the Rockport Art Association for practice. Once I’m done with it, I think to myself, what am I going to do with this painting of a nude woman laying on a couch? I'm not going to sell it or exhibit it, so I wipe it down and paint over it so I can use the canvas again.
If someone offered you a commission of different subject matter, such as an urban landscape, would you want to do it?
I don't like to do commissions because I do my worst work when I'm working for someone who is paying me to do a painting before I paint it. I'd rather paint what I love to paint and then hopefully someone wants to buy it because they see something in it that they love.
However, I would have liked the artist life in the days of Michelangelo, when the church would pay for a painter’s food and lodging, so they could create their art.
Are you mostly painting on location these days?
Yes, I still do mostly plein air painting and will sometimes finish them up in the studio. I start some of the larger ones in the studio.
I get my inspiration from painting in nature. When I’m on location, my brain can create a painting much easier than if I work from a photograph. A photograph is already flattened out [like a painting on canvas] but there's disadvantages because you see all the faults that you don't want in the picture. It’s easier for me to edit scenes on location rather than when looking at a photograph. I can leave out a telephone pole or move a tree to make the painting work better.
Do you have another dream road trip in your mind that you hope to do at some point?
Yes, my wife and I would like to go on a three- or four-week trip to New Zealand and visit both islands.
Do you have a painting that you've made that you would never sell?
Yes. I've done certain paintings that are almost like a premonition of things to come, as if I've gone a little bit beyond my present ability and I knew it. Those are the ones I don't want to sell. Having the painting is more special to me than making money off it because I did something in that painting that I didn't think I could do.
The art market doesn’t generally value watercolors as much as oil paintings. Does that affect your decision about whether to paint in one medium versus the other?
I probably paint the same number of watercolors as I do oil paintings. But the same size watercolor will sell for less than an oil painting. Sure, many galleries think oil paintings are more valuable, but that’s their interpretation. The gallery in Vieques, Puerto Rico that shows my work shows mostly watercolor paintings.
How are you evolving or changing as an artist? How do you challenge yourself?
I’m always trying to find something new or more challenging to paint. Painting soft clouds in watercolor is a challenge. I call it my “minute sky” [laughs] because as soon as I wet down the paper, I’m painting the whole sky: laying down the warm tones of clouds, putting in the shadow of the clouds, and adding the blue of the sky, all within a minute's time because all of it has to have soft edges.
The soft edges come from the paper being just the right wetness. After a minute of painting, you have to put it down and leave it alone. Getting the timing right so you have the paper at the right dampness is a challenge and critical.
[With the watercolor paper positioned vertically] I'm painting the top of the sky first because that's staying wet least amount of time and then I work down toward the horizon. The paper is like a sponge, with the water slowly seeping through the paper downward. I'm doing those last brushstrokes of the clouds near the horizon at the end. I have to get the timing just right.
Watercolor paintings can go wrong so easily. There is no going back if you get a watercolor wrong. You just rip up the paper and try again. I don't agree with galleries saying that watercolors are a secondary medium and that they're not as important as oils.
If you were going to go out to paint today, how would you decide oil versus watercolor?
I wouldn't necessarily decide just today. I would go to the place a few days or a week beforehand and pick the time of day I wanted to paint and research it. If I notice that the scene looks good at 8 o’clock in the morning with long shadows coming across the road, for example, then I would arrive there at 7 o’clock to set up, knowing that my light is best at 8 o’clock. Then I would take some pictures and paint, and continue on and hope the light pattern stays.
I take pictures of the shadows because they can change quickly, so I can always go back to my camera and refer back to those first shadows. Painting in the morning is more difficult than in the afternoon because you're painting the light as it was when you first saw it and then the light gets worse and worse [meaning the shadows are going away as the sun is higher in the sky]. When you paint in the afternoon, the light is not so good at first, and then it gets better and better.
So, to answer that question, I research the scene and if I'm not sure which medium to work in sometimes I'll bring both and make my choice when I get on location.
What's the best advice you received about painting or being an artist?
My father advised me to be honest with myself and honest with nature. Being honest means to trust your eyes and not so much your brain. Sometimes people think they know what they are painting versus being honest and seeing and nailing the colors and the lighting as it is versus how you think it is.
If you're being honest with the scene and you're painting it perfectly, then you're like an ink jet printer, no? But you are adding something to the painting versus painting it perfectly, so to speak. What is that balance?
Honesty is also coming up with a strong idea and editing a painting so you're taking away the things that aren't helping the picture and adding the things that will enhance the picture. Honesty becomes not just a literal term but an emotional term as well as the visual thing. I’m being truthful of what is there but at the same time I’m changing things that are there to make things better for a painting.
How did you learn how to edit a scene?
That's the part that took the longest to learn. I used to be too literal and put everything in the picture that was in front of me. I realized it was hurting the picture, not helping. My father once said, “If there was an elephant walking across the road, you'd probably put that in it too.” What he meant is that you don't have to paint everything the way it is. You can move things around. [Still, I’d like to see a painting of an elephant crossing the road by Caleb Stone.]
If a tree is too tall and it's blocking part of a beautiful building behind it, make the tree smaller. Paint it like it was only two years old instead of 15 years old. If the tree is lined up against the edge of the building, it creates a tangent [an unfortunate alignment]. Move it over to the right or the left a little bit, so it’s not creating that straight line effect. You want to create a sense of overlap, so you don’t want to line one thing up next to another.
Lightening round questions
You’re having a dinner party and you get to invite up to 6 people, living or dead—who would you want to have around the table?
John Singer Sargent, Anders Zorn, Joaquin Sorolla, and Winslow Homer.
What was your most memorable art viewing experience?
Probably either the Uffizi in Italy or Musée d’Orsay in France. My father visited Sorolla’s painting studio in Spain and I wish I could have been there with him.
Do you have favorite equipment?
I use the same equipment I have had since I was 7, and I extended the legs of the easel as I grew taller. I like to use an old Anderson Gloucester easel. I have a 20” by 24” painting box with a pallet that allows me to work on a large canvas on location. It is sturdy and has a big pallet so I can have all these big pools of color of oil paint when I'm painting.
What kind of paint do you use?
Either Winsor & Newton or paint I buy in cans and then tube myself. T.M. Nicholas and I would do this all the time. He was more of an expert on tubing and I would help him out with gluing canvases to panel. The paint I get in bulk is far cheaper and the quality is just as good.
What brushes do you use?
For oil painting, I like to use Robert Simmons Signet hog hair bristle brushes, sizes 12 or 14 down to size 2. I also use Princeton red sable brushes for details and small brushwork. For watercolors, I like Cheap Joe’s Golden Fleece brushes, which are synthetic red sable, but they act like a red sable. I use American Journey brush holders.
Palate & Palette menu
Here’s what I would serve if Caleb and his wife came to dinner, which they are invited to do:
Corn Salad with Chile and Lime
Oven-Roasted Chicken Shawarma
Strawberry Rhubarb Galette
Where to find Caleb Stone (and you should!)
Caleb Stone Gallery
106 South Street, Rockport, MA
Bryan Memorial Gallery
180 Main Street, Jeffersonville, Vermont 05464
Fine Art Design Studio & Gallery
Isabel Vieques, Puerto Rico
Lyme Art Association
90 Lyme Street, Old Lyme, CT
Rockport Art Association & Museum
12 Main St, Rockport, MA
Roux & Cyr International Fine Art Gallery
48 Free Street, Portland, ME
Such a heartwarming relationship between father and son. I love how the paintings, of both men, are so evocative of place and season. Thanks for mentioning my Substack on Notes. I haven't quite gotten the feel for how that works exactly. Do you paint Amy?
I was taken by how Caleb talked his father, too, and I loved seeing their paintings together. To answer your question about whether I paint--I am a beginner, and I started this Substack to learn from all the talented people around me.