Carrasco Studio

Birds and the Bees, Promotion and Saving Sick Children

Carrasco Promotion Panel   30"x 20"    ©Jennifer M. Carrasco   2/15/2005

I think it was Auden who said poetry won't save the world, but maybe art donations to causes might help alleviate some misery. 

        

So, after schlepping down to one of my favorite causes for the 400th time with a matted and framed watercolor to be auctioned off, I put together a system that will be donate-able and save ME the  misery and expense of framing, matting and schlepping.

        

I painted this fancy border, then I tacked on a photo of my latest big project in the middle, and included a  brochure and bio and cards with a certificate awarding the donor 2 hours of decorative painting. With the stipulation, of course, that it will apply to within the city limits and be claimed within 6 months. 

I didn't want to drive all the way to Enumclaw.

        
This donation of hours would cover some hummingbirds over the sink or a flight of butterflies above the tub, and it's a win/win for both me and the donor, since often they want more.  Ergo, more hours and $. Both of us are happy. 

Or the donor forgets to claim the service and the charity and I am happy.  And got some free publicity.

        

I do love painting on a dark ground.  It is so easy.....the images pop and the ground affects the modeling and color in lovely ways.  With this piece I was inspired by  a beautiful decorative French illustration in a 19th century reference book.  I took the concept and ran with it, and it was one of those projects that just flowed.  I did very little sketching....and kept adding animals and flourishes and visual jokes (the mouse and the little fruits watching Kermit  on TV, the butterfly carrying a love letter, etc., etc) and a portrait of myself on a cell phone in the upper left hand corner..."Call me, Call me!"

                            

I finished it in a day. A record. That sort of serendipity is rare.

The material is acrylic gouache painted on black gessoed foam core with some sparkly stuff applied around the edges. 

                                        

Full Circle

I ran across this when I was looking for entries for a poster competition.  I painted this mural  a few years ago on a plaster panel for Jergen's Paint, a family owned, high end paint company in Seattle. And herein lies a tale.

In 1991 I left South Carolina in a 15 foot van and a pickup in tow. Broke, scared that I couldn't make a living, and anxious to do any kind of work, I applied with my portfolio to everything from design firms to artist in residence to house painting companies.  Mr. Larry Jergens was the first to offer me a job as a house painter and I took it. I was the only woman working with a crew of very competent union painters and carpenters, and I was next to useless.  After a month, I was offered a more appropriate job, and I went to Mr. Jergens, thanked him for giving me a chance, and we parted on good terms.

About 12 years later, Mr. Jergen's son Tim asked me to do a painting for his atrium, and his plasterer Gavin did the plaster panel and I painted the ornamental  cartouche and birds with the iconic Washington Mt. Ranier scene in its center.  Tim was pleased.

Note the paint stained drop cloth draped at the top along with the hanging  brush.  Below it is  Mr. Larry Jergen's autograph...cleverly cleaned up and stylized by my awesome letter designer friend, Iskra Johnson.  Below that, if you look carefully, you will see a paint bucket.

There is a narrow band of faux marble on the inner edge of the outside molding, and I needed a delicate fillet of some sort to finish it out. I went to a doll house store on Phinney Ridge and a very old woman helped me find the proper tiny molding.  She would bring out miniature things to show me, cupping them in her hand and cooing...."Isn't this just precious?."......or, "this is soooooo sweet!" 

This experience alone was worth the whole project.

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