Carrasco Studio

The Spinach that Ate Seattle

No, I have not abandoned the Art World.  I have not flown up on my own private rapture.

I have been waiting for the planets to align so I can get photos of this year's big mural projects.....about three of them.  However, due to Seattle's extremely wet winter, the stucco has sprung a leak  for the site of my three 5'x 9' canvases. The wine room client has had to have surgery, and the 9'x12' mural in CleElum is installed, but the furniture has to be just right before the client will set up for photos.  Sigh. Life.

So, I have been busy with my other art....gardening.  Note the size of the spinach  on the right hand  side of my raised box and other spinach slithering along at the box base.  I got the seeds from Annie's Annuals and Perennials and the combination of rain and compost  and this special seed has created acromeglic spinach. Huge, and more huge.

  Phil is getting tired of spinach dishes and the whole green thing is getting out of hand.  We've started to go to bed with a machete on the bedstand.

Also, we have put in a living room space in our basement apartment, and it has really amped up it's cuteness factor. (and we can charge more)

Got a new sleeper sofa, found the 50's TV trays at a neighbor's estate sale, and a real little Persian rug at a dry cleaners. Phil worried about the vases tipping over, but I told him that for 99 cents at Goodwill, we could deal with a little tipping.

And, I lowered my standards (and enjoyed it) by painting some Sofa Paintings. Two acrylics...sort of color fieldish with some leaf and water elements, and a gouache ala DeKooning/Carrasco for old times sake. Like when I struggled in Painting 101.

Leaf color field                                                                                    5'x 2' Acrylic on Canvas

Leaf color field                                                                                  3'x 1.5' Acrylic on canvas

Garden Frenzy                                                                 20" x 30" Gouache over watercolor

Hint: I painted the gouache over a big watercolor I screwed up....it was really fun....worked mostly with chip brushes, sharp points to scratch with and pastel pencils. I think I'll do more of these.  After 40 years, I finally got the hang of it.  Besides, I have enough messups in watercolor to keep me busy for a while.

Abstract art is a lot harder, in my opinion, because you don't have the resonance of an image to play against.

And Phil  had real challenges with making the new room watertight. Seattle basements always leak.  I thought Lynne would appreciate this, since she has an artisian well in her basement.  Note also that Phil has installed earthquake plates all around the foundation of our house.  San Francisco is not the only shaker and mover along this ring of fire!

I made the mistake of showing Phil  the levels of finish for sheet rock that Regina featured on Fauxology. Now I warrant that our renter will be the only one living in a level 5 finished apartment!  Painstaking.

Sheet rock knees.  A disease of carpenters.

And also, I've been working on a series of watercolors called, eponymously, "Clear Water"  They are quite large, some of them.....20" by 30", and so far I have about 10 I like.  Here's one.

And then.....I have developed 4 images for a children's nursery that I plan to reproduce.  But I'm keeping those under my hat until their grand opening.......

So, you see.  I haven't been lolling on the couch eating bon bons.

 

On the Trail of Watercolor Easter Bunnies and other Fuzzballs.

Our famed watercolor group at the even more famous CandP Coffee shop has erupted with all sorts of rabbit images for Easter....and other furry beasts.

Mary

  As usual, the class is composed of old hands and dudes (a Far West metaphor for Far West Seattle), and their individual progress was amazing. Mary, a gifted illustrator in her own right, jumped from working almost solely in line art to handling subtle glazes in shaping the form of a polar bear and a couple of very fine rabbits. Sara, a first time student, painted a brilliant hula rabbit while her mother Rebecca surpassed herself with a bunny in an Arts and Crafts mode. And Kim produced a jumpin' prairie hare.  Wendy painted a hatted cat with attitude, Elizabeth painted a " Whoops! Stuffed bunny", Carol did a lovely liquid rabbit sketch, and Ingrid stole the show with her "Dressy chickens."

  Sara                                                         Rebecca

Kim

    
Elizabeth                                                        Carol

     Ingrid                                                                           

I wanted to focus on the qualities of pigments....staining, granulating and glazing, and the idea of furry animals seemed to provide a good vehicle. As you can see in my example below, the addition of raw umber (R), Lunar black (middle), or burnt umber (L) to a re-dampened (or if you feel gutsy, a wash) of raw sienna can give a nice "furry" quality. And, if you want to get down and "Durer", you can painstakingly render the dry under washes with strokes of pale gouache or darker strokes of watercolor

 

In fact, I started the first  class with a print of an Albrecht Durer rabbit (circa 1502) and the whole unit has been devoted to the class experimenting with the qualities of pigments...underglazing, the subtle blending and textures of sedimentary pigments, and the advantages of using glazes over all to tie in different forms and values in a composition.....and,  the use of negative space as an element in composition.

Albretch Durer

The last two classes were concerned with watercolors  and colored etching of animals in illustration for children's books.  We looked at the work of Tasha Tudor, Beatrix Potter, Tenniel , Rackham and Grandville, and contemporary work by artists such as Jane Dyer and Maurice Sendak.   We noted how animals in costume, both as parodies of famous persons and as important additions to children's literature, has been a tradition of  illustrators from the time of Italian grottescas through Victorian lampoons  to today's Jane Dyer's charming illustrations. 

Beatrix Potter

Grandville

                                                                    Arthur Rackham 

                        Jane Dyer

Consequently,as a result of our discussions, I noticed some very fine animal fashions evolving in the latest class creations.  

Perhaps next Tuesday, the class will surprise me with bunny bonnets.

Over the years, I've had a few animal fashion epiphanies myself.  A waspish chantuse....a soulful (soleful?) fish flautist, a very hip daddy-0 goat......

Jazz Band                                            © Jennifer McCabe Carrasco 3/28/ 2008

 

Journey to Far Cathay

 

Journey to Far Cathay (maybe)                                         ©Jennifer M. Carrasco 2008

 

I painted this on a panel for a door to a little girl's bedroom.  Of course I made up a story for it.

The princess is sailing for Far Cathay to be married to a barbarian prince.  Hence the pensive attitude. 

She is accompanied by her duenna, the old crow in the bow, and an unreliable crew of flighty birds.  She may never arrive in Cathay. 

Who knows, the sailor birds may lose their compass and sail to Tasmania. Or drop off the edge of the world.

©Jennifer M. Carrasco 9/17/09  All blog entries on this site, visual or intellectual, are the property of Jennifer M. Carrasco (unless stated otherwise) and cannot be reproduced or used without her written permission.

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. 

                                        

Night Spirit

Last week I read a wonderful tribute to marriage and art on Connie and Randy Coita's website, Studio Abbellire,  http://studioabbellire.com/blog/?p=444,  as well as a stunning post of her latest project, a trompe l'oeil Luna moth on a lichen covered panel. Connie is a gifted painter, and her husband Randy is a fine painter as well.

Randy writes that like the Luna Moth,  we artists often start our lives at night and work until dawn. Yeah, I know, it takes a very understanding partner and no other obligations (i.e. kids) to do this very often, or at all.  It's a very uneasy balance with doing art and doing the mother, wife and worker bee at the same time. I've been there, and like many women, I felt I was pulled in too many directions to be good at any role.

But, if your life has evolved into a situation where you can work into the night, it is the most peaceful and focused time to do it.  No meals to prepare, no bank accounts to balance, no kids to soccer.  Like the actual Luna moth I encountered on our screen door one humid night in Georgia, you have time and space just to be.....to  fan out your creative wings and make beauty. For an artist, it's the gift of a quiet time to create in your mind , on a canvas, or to connect the lights of  fireflies in the night.

I have loved the Luna moth since I was a little girl and my mother gave me "Girl of the Limberlost" to read by Gene Porter. Mr. Porter wrote of many lovely things, but the Luna was a repeated icon in his book.  If there is ever a tender, evanescent testimony to the beauty of the natural world, it is this exquisite moth. 

My painted image of the Luna is from a chinoiserie room I did for a client.  Here's a wall of that room.  Like Waldo, the moth is hiding with a lot of flora and fauna. Can you find her?

And thanks, Connie and Randy, for sharing your vision of "a little night music."

BAAA BAAA Jackson

I amped up my cuteness factor with this lawn ornament I did for my cousin Maggie's sheep soiree auction. I offered to paint the form made of rough pressed wood and decided it had to be done ala Jackson Pollack. Notice this lamb has a talking mustache.

And here is Maggie's event.  She trains sheep dogs and is an animal whisperer.  She is the first person who has ever told me that sheep intelligence exists on a special sheep plane.  I was humbled.

Do come to the event if you can.  After the pen and the sheep shipment (sheep have been brought in from Arizona so Maggie's sheep won't get too tired) are paid for, all the proceeds go to a special projects foundation for Vashon Island teachers.

So far, I'm bringing 6 of my peeps to come enjoy the event, hang out with dogs and sheep and have a picnic on the meadow. It's supposed to be nice.  Yawl come. Baaaaa.

A Horse of a Different Color

Since I'm ramping up for a new project ( a set of three murals,) I haven't done new work since I did the rendering for this current job.  So I thought I'd throw in a blast from the past. (You can tell by my hair color)  One of my more unusual jobs.

This was done for The Ruins, an private dining club extravaganza where nothing was ordinary. I was fortunate to be hired to do a lot of painting for The Ruins, and this was one of my projects.

My client showed me a full sized white paper mache horse that he had bought from Fredrick and Nelson department store when it went out of business, and asked me to paint it gold and then cover it with tiny flowers.  The horse had traveled with Yves St. Laurent's runway fashion show, and Seattle was the end of the line, so Mr. French Thoroughbred ended up the store basement, waiting for someone to lead him into the light.

A horse knowledgeable friend told me that the horse looked like it had too much spring grass....perhaps refering to it's round belly.  I preferred to think it was pregnant and one night would give birth to a whole litter of floral colts.  Of course it is a boy horse, but I didn't let that interfere with my story.

Horses keep turning up in my oeuvre, and in fact, were my initial drive to create art.  I lived in a small rural community and all my friends had horses and/or cattle, and I desperately wanted a horse.  However, my father, in his infinite wisdom, would not buy me one.  So I drew them, did paintings of them, rode my friend's horses and would whinny and paw the air when I came to the breakfast table.  Dad ignored my subtle hints, and I outgrew my fetish.  Well, sorta.

Later in life I painted and repainted the Spokane Loof Carrousel horses on four different occasions.  Fifty-eight of the lovely creatures.  I posted this before (see my carrousel archive), but here it is again.  GiddyUp.

 

 

Harvest Table, Sukkot Thanks

  I just finished doing a centerpiece panel on a table I had decorated years ago. My client's family had grown to grandchildren, and she needed to extend her table another couple of leaves.  As I remember, the initial finish was very complicated and took ages to do, and when I looked at the table leaves to match I was in despair.  Also, it just wasn't up to my standards today.

So, I suggested that I design a panel for the middle leaves, and I would separate the end edges with a small border to offset any discrepancy between the new and the old finish.

My clients are Jewish, and since the table will be often used as a family dining table, I suggested using artifacts from the Jewish harvest festival of Sukkot.  I looked up the items on the Internet, and decided to use the Lulav (palm leaves, myrtle and willow in a woven palm container and a citrus called the Etrog) for my design, with some grapes thrown in for jollity.  My client is an opera singer, so he suggested the mandolin and music motif in the center.

     

I did the drawing on tissue for the client's approval....drawing one fourth section and folding it twice and tracing it for symmetry. (Well, sort of)  Too much symmetry gets my back up...raises my Zen hackles, so to speak.

After approval of the design, I did  the prep and stippling of the boards...about six layers of different stippled glazes.

 

  Then I covered the panel area with a frisket that I picked up from a sign painting company.  It's called Transferite and it's like a big sheet of moveable masking tape.  I've had a roll of it forever, and to keep it from being too sticky, I dust a little talcum powder on the surface before I lay it down.  I cut out everything with an Exacto blade except the foliage, the grapes and the lulav and etrog, taped off edges with blue tape, and sloshed on hooker green Liquid Golden acrylic mixed with a little bone black.  Then, while it was still damp, I spritzed it a little with a mixture of rubbing alcohol and water and picked up some of the mottled areas.  I waited and then added several layers of green and black, let it dry and then peeled off the remaining Transferite on the fruits and leaves and the lulav.  Then I started painting them with liquid Golden Acrylics....beginning with transparent glazes until I got the rich colors I wanted.

Then I painted all the sections I planned to gold leaf with a vermilion red.

After that, I started wiping on water based (diluted slightly with water) polyurethane over all the two panels, again and again....sanding with 320 wet dry every three or four layers.  After about 8 layers, I again frisketed off designs and borders I planned to gold leaf and cut out the areas of decorative borders, painted vermillion in those, painted with size and applied gold leaf.

 

I waited overnight, then removed the tape  and patched the gold leaf wherever it was too distressed (my gold leafing, out of necessity, always looks very antique), cleaned up wherever it was needed. vacuumed my glittering studio, put on many more coats of urethane, and there you are.

©Jennifer M. Carrasco 11/21/09 All blog entries on this site, visual or intellectual, are the property of Jennifer M. Carrasco (unless stated otherwise) and cannot be reproduced or used without her written permission.
 

Painting Carrousel Horses

This is an old post on my blog from before I joined Facebook.  My friend Jeff Raum, a most excellent painter, has been commissioned to do a painting of an armored carousel horse, and I thought I would put this out there for him (and anyone else who might find it interesting).  This carousel work got me started on decorative painting and murals. (Long ago, when the earth was cooling)

In 1983 I was askesd by a friend if I would be interested in painting the antique wooden carousel animals in Spokane's Riverfront Park.  It wasn't restoration in the sense of repairing the original finish....the badly neglected horses had been totally stripped and repainted in 1976 for the Spokane World's Fair.  My painting was done because  the horses are loved to death and ridden nine months out of the year, and belt buckles, shoes and purses take their toll on the finish and need repainting every two or so years.

The animals, which include a fearsome tiger, a swan, a dragon and a giraffe, total 58 in all, and were sculpted by Charles Loof in the early 1900's and presented to his daughter as a wedding present when she married the owner of Spokane's Natatorium Park.  My grandmother and granddad, who rode them as did succeeding generations of my family down to my own son, Carlos, told me that people used to take the trolley to the park to dance, and end their evenings with a ride on the merry-go-round.  It sounds terribly romantic, and there is a definite aura about the animals, somewhat like the old statues of the saints.  So many hopes and dreams were carried on the back of these lovely sculptures.  Here's a watercolor I painted of the horses, and the warrior horse stands out because he is so dramatic.  

 

I would work on the animals for two months in the dead of  winter, and  I can tell you that winter in Spokane is an event.  It snows. And snows. And snows.  The park staff ...mostly guys....would come in and prep the horses for me....filling and sanding during the day,, and I would paint them.  I used Pratt and Lambert Alkyd paint because it was hard and brilliant, and it's a wonder  I can still put 2 and 2 together, because the fumes were awful.  No ventilation to speak of , and if we opened the door of the glass house of the carrousel, I would freeze to death.  However, I ended up painting all 58 at four different times.  Even after I moved to S.Carolina, they flew me up to paint.

I would paint until about 9 pm, and dark comes early in Spokane latitudes.  The snow would build up in glittering piles outside, and I would be alone in my world of brilliant animals.  They gleamed in their enameled splendour.....their pretty Arab heads with dished profiles and flared nostrils, their arched necks  and  tumbled manes.  Their tails were/are real, and their eyes and jewels are glass.  There is a place in Kansas where you can get carousel horse tails and glass jewels and eyes, in case you wondered.

The field mice would come out at night to eat the leftover popcorn, and were totally fearless.....doing acrobat leaps over my boots and behaving disgracefully. Sex. drugs(popcorn heightens mouse libido, evidently) and rock and roll. 

 Finally it would be time to go home, and I'd clean my brushes, spread my rags outside, and close the heavy glass door with a click I can still remember with my fingers. The park could be a threatening place at night and I was an easy target, working inside the brightly lit glass house, but I was never bothered.  Only once, while I waited for a bus, did a guy make kung foo moves all around me for about 15 minutes.  That was a little weird, but I think he was fighting imaginary enemies, not me.

A woman named Martha was my boss, and she kept the machines of the merry-go -round in good condition. I liked Martha and respected her sensitivity and good sense.
I wrote and illustrated a story about carousel animals who came alive on winter nights and went out to play in the snow with Martha.  She was a wizard at night and brought them alive with her magic wand. I imagine her as she is in my watercolors...wearing her billed cap and Carhart overalls, polishing the brass and feeding the mice.