Carrasco Studio

Keep them Foxes Coming

Fox crossing the snow in the Copper Mountains           ©Jennifer M Carrasco 10/23/93

 

        The Thought Fox

    I imagine the midnight's moment's forest:
    Something else is alive
    Beside the clock's loneliness
    and this blank page where my fingers move.

    Through the window I see no star:
    something more near
    Though deeper within darkness
    Is entering the loneliness:

    Cold, delicately as the dark snow,
    A fox's nose touches twig, leaf;
    Two eyes serve a movement, that now
    And again now, and now, and now
       
    Sets neat prints into the snow
    Between trees, and warily a lame
    Shadow lags by stump and in hollow
    Of a body that is bold to come

    Across clearings, an eye,
    A widening deepening greeness,
    Brilliantly, concentratedly
    Coming about it's own business

    Till, with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox
     It enters the dark hole of the head.
    The window is starless still: the clock ticks,
    The page is printed.

            .............................Ted Hughes

Or painted.  Or sung...... Carved, Composed, Collaged, Connected.

Arctic Daydreams

This is where I learned to memorize images and then go inside to draw them.  My ink would freeze, otherwise.

Frozen Dreams

We were talking about Alaska last weekend, and I dug up some of my journals of my trips to different parts of Alaska with Ben,  a bush pilot I was hanging out with over a period of about three years.

Here are some entries from the Copper Mountain trip I took with him in October of 1992.  He was flying provisions and people into a gold mining operation in the distant mountain regions that border Alaska and Canada.  It was an adventure......beautiful, cold and involved some pretty fancy flying.  Ben was such a good pilot and so experienced that I didn't feel much apphrehension as we wound through the snow covered peaks and valleys, banking and twisting to arrive at the small landing strip on
plane skis.

 .

Coming up the Matanuska Valley, I saw a little red "Beaver" plane going the opposite direction.  One bright red speck against all that white and black hugeness.

The valley was so gorgeous and silent, and I really liked the gold mining crew.  The men worked long brutal hours and two women cooked for them....wonderful food...homemade bread and cookies and huge meals.  A lot of the miners were college kids from the lower 48 or rough and tough older Alaskan men and women.  They weren't supposed to transport alcohol, but there was a lot of that plus canoodling between some of the men and women.  Ah, those long cold nights.

As I mentioned, the landscape was breathtaking, but one thing that shocked me was the total lack of concern for the environment.  All the cyanide tailings were trailing into the creek.  Gold mining is a curse on the environment, and I saw many rugged Alaska individuals spoil the bounty of the country with trash and disregard for environmental consequences. 

I think I put this in an earlier entry, but it was such a part of the trip I'll put it again.
The lights were so spectacular, and I was half awake and shivering in the 4am....it seems like a dream.  The lights even made a sound....like the crackle of cellophane.

Ben and I took several trips, and each one was a revelation to me. I got over my fear of flying. Period.

Several years after we stopped seeing each other, Ben went down with his plane in Yakatat Bay.  They found his body a few weeks later.

CandP Drawing Class#4 and Left Over Rabbits

After I marvel over this wonderful drawing/watercolor done in the 14th century by Durer, I also wonder how he got it to sit still for such a complex drawing.  Maybe, he was a good "memorizer" like we have been talking about in class. Durer looked, closed his eyes to see the image, looked again, closed his eyes and saw the image in his head and drew it before the bunny hopped away.  Or maybe Durer was a Rabbit Whisperer.

Anyhow, with Easter just behind us, I thought it would be appropriate to have Bunny as our picture of the week.

* Sometimes brown pencil or brown ink lines are very effective to limn out a drawing you plan to paint....the black lines can be too dramatic and interfere with the feeling of volume....as you probably know...a hard line around a drawing of an object "flattens" it out.

Also, my friend Karen is a calligrapher, and she collects quotes.  She has set up a site where she sends a quote a day to friends....this is one I really liked (and a poet I love and admire....heard him read a few years ago at First Presbyterian and I blubbered all the way through it.)  The quote made me think of you, Lena, and your philosophy of Voluntary Simplicity.  Maybe you could tell us more about it in our next class?

"Practically speaking, a life that is vowed to simplicity, appropriate boldness, good humor, gratitude, unstinting work and play, and lots of walking brings us close to the actual existing world and its wholeness."  Gary Snyder

#4. Drawing on the Right side of the Brain  4/21/09

Empathy...bringing yourself out of yourself....”Being something else......a daffodil, a pet, another person....can be a side benefit of drawing

2. Warm up.  Draw a key with both left and right  hands TOGETHER.

3. Practice looking at parts of the room and “drawing “what you see " smashed "up against the plexiglass with your pencil  on the paper.....Hold the glass (and your head) still. check angles with the crosshairs...Don’t point the plexi into space.  Pg. 101.

3.  Tape edges of paper so the paper is the same format (not size) as viewfinder. Tone it with graphtite.....rub in with s circular motion....smooth silvery tone. Draw cross hairs on it. (not too dark) (see book)

4.  Do another drawing of your hand under the plastic...holding a pen.  Now....looking at your toned paper, lightly draw "crosshairs" on it and then place dots to connect as guides  for drawing your plexiglass drawing on the toned paper/.

5.  Reposition hand (using plexi as a guide)   Close one eye, focus on a point on an edge, and move your eye slowly along the contour as you move your pencil.  Check angles with the crosshairs.  Imagine the plexi and crosshairs hovering... over your hand....can check from time to time with your plexi drawing

6/ Look 90% of the time at your hand...Compaire..edges, spaces, shapes, relationships.....when you have trouble, move to an adjacent shape with “shared edges”

7. Pick up light areas ( highllghts) with eraser and darken the darkest darks
 ( shadows) with your pencil.   You now have some volume in your drawing.

What are the three things the left brain has trouble with? 1.  Mirror images (Faces and Vases), 2 Upside down perceptual  info (Stravinsky) 3. Refuses to process slow , complex perceptions.

8.  Do one more hand drawing with the hand holding a tissue using the same technique as what we did in class today(it's in Chapter 6). Read chapter 7

  (Cameron and Jerry...I'll drop by some view finders and plexi plates and charcoal for you at CandP or send them through Phil.)

Snow, Ice and Calligraphy Lumped together

With two feet of snow in our backyard, I am very conscious of the colors( and inconvenience) of true winter weather.  Seattle doesn't get this stuff very often.
We talked a lot in my watercolor classes about glazes and how colors could be cool or warm, and when I went to look for examples, I found a few examples in my old journals about Alaska.  I also found a couple of drawings that reminded me of the beauty and the harshness of Alaska winter....getting up at 4 am and standing on a path in a snowy valley with aurora borealis crackling (yes, in quiet places you hear the crackle!) overhead, and just the mechanics of staying warm and alive when you are sleeping overnight in a tiny shed with the snow drifting in the corners.

At this time, I was going back and forth from Alaska and Seattle, and my Seattle home was with a Japanese American woman who is a dancer and a painter.  She exhibits in the US and Japan, and I would often come home to a living room totally wallpapered with her work.  We would sit in the middle of the room and meditate on these 6' tall sheets of Japanese calligraphy...all the same poem and done in a style I called "grass writing," an especially lovely type of calligraphy...very fluid and organic, with a "beat" of darker ink every where the painter re- loads her brush.

Because I was in an environment of snow, and ice forming over black Arctic water. I somehow tied it all together in a sestina...linking Yoko's calligraphy...the whiteness of her paper, the black ink and the suspense of making a wrong move.....to the snow of Alaska, the danger and beauty of walking over new ice, and the rewards and terrors of taking chances.

A sestina is a form I especially like in poetry.  You use six "old" words....ones that have had meanings way back...Indo-European words.....in six stanzas with the old words at the end of each line in a different order for each stanza.  Then you finish it up with a triplet using all six words.  It's tricky but fun....and you can work on a poem like that for years. 

Entrance

The loaves of ice and fish, the ocean into stone.
That sable sweep of water
beneath the miracle of ice
where I stride over fishes,
over ocean's highest mountains,
on sheaves of cold and perfect light.

A woman shapes the brush, adjusts the light
and grinds her stick of ink against the stone.
Morphing pungent dust; stick and mountain
pulverize, transform to ink black water.
Her brush dips and strikes on paper.  Fish
and serpents leap in lines like marks in cracking ice.

I creep, a cautious god on ice,
on avenues of thickened light.
A brilliant sheet between the fish
and sun, transparent stone
 that sprawls across pure water;
grinds it into rip-rap mountains.

Fresh ink thumps between mountains,
those white intervals of paper.  The woman's skin shines like ice
lit from behind.  Her blood shifts to black water
and travels through her brush.  Uneven light
hovers among characters, calligraphy breaks the stone
of paper, the woman's heart breaks, she becomes fishes.

I ask for my place among fish.
I could hack through rhyme, invert mountains
 to touch fathoms. Drop lines heavy with bait and stones
and wait outside as day fades and my eyes turn to ice.
Or teeter on chance. Shout when ice shatters light
And I plunge into the dark arms of water.

Her breath is a slow current of water
and her brush moves in schools of fish.
To drown or wait and bury light?
In and out, her forms retreat to mountains,
to blizzard peace, and then return to ice,
the opening of passion and slipping down like stone.

The stone cracks, black leads split like skin on mountains.
Whales breach the dark water and gulls dive for fish.
I balance on ice, and wait for the sea to flicker with light.

Jennifer M. Carrasco

Snow Bound and Flying in Alaska

From 1991 to about 1993 I was hanging out with a bush pilot in Alaska, so I saw lots of snow and a good sectiion of  Alaska, more from the air than anything else.  I substitute taught in Kotzebue for a month while I was staying with Ben, and I learned to memorize in order to draw later inside the apartment.  Otherwise, my ink would freeze.  I would stand stock still, like I am doing here in my drawing of the beginning of ice fishing in Kotzebue inlet, and some of my elementary students would come up and ask me what I was doing.  I would tell them I was memorizing, and they, being little kids, would nod wisely at the strange white woman and run off to skate/fish/tumble/ fight on the ice.

Once I flew with Ben  into the Copper Mountains (the boundary between Alaska and the Yukon Territory) to bring supplies to a gold mining operation.  The days were sunny, and quite comfortable in the light, so I did a bunch of watercolors on paper outside along the plane landing. The paint did freeze and make these great patterns, especially with the cobalt blues.

A fox came running across the mountains, a brilliant orange against the complements of blue and violet shadows.