Carrasco Studio

To Contemplate a Tulip

Jerry and Jewel  in Drawing Land

When "regular" customers walked through the door of CandP Coffee  to get a cuppa, they encountered  12 women, absolutely silent, holding a tulip in one hand and drawing with the other.  It was like an avant-garde dance, or an art installation, which I guess it was.

Here's some vignettes of the scene.

Jill and her Flower

Sarah becoming a Tulip

Spring Fling

Sometimes I just need to let 'er rip.
This is part of a poster for a painting/drawing jam at the Coffee House we are having on May 1st.   A bacchanal of paint and pencil.  Everyone is to bring some flowers and their art equipment.  A free Free for All on the evening of May 1.

Parvenue

Parvenues

Blaring yellow daffodils
scandalize
the garden..
Violets shrink.
Narcissi wince.
Hyacinths curl
 their lordly lips.

The Mystery of Tulips

Funnels to the Underground

First tulips flare red
on my garden slope.
Spring pours
 down their throats.
rumbles in the dirt.
erupts in sprouts,thorns,
 and rosy leaves.

                                  Jennifer M. Carrasco

I've been an obsessive gardener ever since I helped my GrandDad in our Victory Garden during World War II.  At the age of four, I would eat the garlic raw, smash tomato caterpillars, and put worms in my pocket for my poor mother to find when she sorted the laundry.

Flowers evoke visceral reactions in me.  I want to make a sleeping bag of lilac blooms and and crawl into it.  I want to stitch a lacy blouse of lilies of the valley and wear it to a ball.  But, tulips, ah tulips!  I see myself leaping up in the air, s0mersaulting in a special effects swoop, funneling into tulip's center and  all the way down to its dark heart.

Gardening takes the edge off the fear of death.

Ivory Towers and arrangements of Flowers

My mother always told me if I was expecting a guest and my house was in chaos to open the windows and put out fresh flowers.

Well, Patricia came up to stay overnight, and since most of my basement was stored higgle piggle in my living room, I did just that.  And, when my new poetry magazine arrived,  the colors and image went so well with the flowers that I left it out as part of the arrangement.

Which slides into what I have been thinking about ever since I read a comment some guy put after a poem (not her poem...some other writer)  a friend of mine put on her blog. Here's the quote.
"Too bad that the people who write these kinds of poems are the ones furthest away from living the message withing (sic) them. Then again, maybe that's part of their appeal?"

The arrogance (and ignorance) of this statement really annoyed me.  Obviously, the guy made a judgement about something he knows nothing about.  He doesn't know anything about the lives of the poets....Byron swimming the Hellespont, John Donne and his mistresses, Shakespeare in the tumult of an Elizabethan London or poor despairing Sylvia Plath with her head in the oven.

Perhaps giving him just the tiniest benefit of the doubt, he had been forced to endure some of those academic readings where poets read their work with high fluting voices and rising inflections on every phrase.  I must admit those readings are crazy making.

However, this guy has no idea about the lives of these poets, bad readings or not.
Good poets don't live in ivory towers.  First of all, they must be good observers and most of all, they must have a passionate need to process what they observe and experience in their lives.  It certainly isn't for the money.

Poems can be about something as mundane as the worn finish on kitchen cabinets or a chicken next to a red wheelbarrow, or it can be about Lucifer coming through the realms of hell to visit earth.  Milton was blind and filled with religious fervour....it was his life to "see" these things.  William Carlos Williams was a doctor who felt very deeply the plight and suffering of an old lady patient as she lay dying on her bed. He experinced the joy of eating a plum from the fridge just as much as the bleakness of the landscape in his Paterson, New Jersey.

Poetry can be as raw and urgent as Picasso's Guernica or the  primary colors of a spring bouquet or the harsh March wind. It can be subtle as one of Basho's meditations on a frog jumping into water, or a poem by Rumi about the love of God.
My point is that these poet's lives and their art are of one piece.

Discounting the gassy exhalations of people who rhyme stanzas with abstractions of "love!" "patriotism!" "mother", etc etc. (they are not poets), a true poet writes about what he feels deeply and cares enough to craft into art. As with many of the arts in this pragmatic country, poetry guarantees little in the realm of financial security and fame, but I believe reading and making poetry can help make whole what seems random and meaningless in the lives of individuals in our society.

When I worked with a poetry group, I came to this realization when the group kept asking me the fatal question...."just what and why is your choice of word, this phrase, your stance on an event?" Where did this observation come from. How well do you understand it?"

I find myself caught up by these questions ever since.  It changed my life.

Spring Cadeaux

 

Here's a big rustling bouquet of flowers for your imagination.  I like the sound of a big bouquet as much as the scent and color. (Have you ever noticed how daffodil stems squeak when you gather a bunch?)

Anyhow, I finished this small mural, about 2 'by 1 and 1/2 ', on canvas for a client last night.  The color is a little off since I snapped the picture Very Late at Night by studio light, so the peach and coral are dimmed, but it turned out to my satisfaction.

Here are my steps, if anyone is interested.  Several people have chided me for giving away my "secrets" for free, but actually, there is no true recipe for this kind of work.
Every painter's body talks differently, and in all of my teaching, I have been delighted and surprised by the different takes my students produce from the same assignment.
"Vive la difference!," I say. ( I like to throw in French now and then to show I am literary.)

After I get approval for my drawing, I usually check with my client to see if she or he wants a color rendering for final approval.  In this case, my client passed on the option, so I went on to transfer my drawing to canvas.  I trace it with tracing paper I make myself.....from chalk pastel....color of my choice....and Bestine rubbed over the pastel I have rubbed onto a piece of tracing tissue.  I like this method better than using Saral tracing paper, because Saral is waxy and the colors are too sharp...reds, blues, and blacks. (Also, it's cheaper!)

 

The next step is my underpainting, and I posterized this image a bit to make it more understandable.  I paint plain Golden Acrylic Glaze all over the area and beyond where the image will be painted.  Then I paint a faint background "bloom" in  the area...in this case it was a very pale coral/peach glaze.  After this dried, I painted a pale yellow on the shapes where I could alter the colors with glazes....i.e. pale blue over yellow makes a radiant green, pale vat orange or light quinacridone red over yellow makes peachy or coral hues.....but painted pale blues in areas for my periwinkles and purples.

Then I placed another more coral "bloom" over the area. Softly! Lightly!

 

And, as I said, this is a little dark because of my lighting, but I think one can see my progression....building up the greens, the reds and the periwinkles with thin glazes.
This technique is much like watercolor, and is done with liquid Golden Acrylic paints.  However, you can bring it further into a more painterly and modeled form by going back into shapes and putting down opaque highlights and glazing over them. This is especially effective when you are working on a buff background, as I am doing here. 

The old Flemish painters did this to great effect.  Some instructor told me that Van Eyck would sometimes place 40 layers of red glazes to get that glowing rich red in his masterpieces.

CandP Watercolor Masterpieces. Flora Abunda and Big Smiles

Look at you!  Six classes of work and instruction and slavishly completing all the assignments (and a lot of help from Elizabeth Kincaid's wonderful book, "Dance with Light") and the class comes up with a bouquet of exquisite iris and tulips.

Thanks so much for working with me on this.  It was a new class and I learned a lot as well.  And thank you, Elizabeth!

We are so fortunate to be able to visit Ms Kincaid at her studio in Kirkland on March 24.  We will gather at C and P on March 24th at 6:25 sharp and carpool out to Kirkland to spend an hour with Elizabeth in her studio. Bring her beautiful book and she will sign it for you.

Also, the new class, a drawing class, will start on March 31 and go for 8 sessions....6 to 9 on each successive Tuesday evening. I'll post the materials to prospective students as soon as I get confirmation from enough students.  The fee is $120 for 8 classes.  Such a deal.

This class, like the watercolor class, is very sequential and it's important to make it to each class.  If  you have to miss a class, I will post the lesson on my blog for you to catch up, but it's really more effective to come to each class.  The text book will be "Drawing on the Right side of the Brain", and while you may not draw like an Ingres or Rubens when you finish, you will be astonished at how the perceptual switch has improved your drawing and helped you express this dazzling world......in a hand, a flower, a face, or a piece of crumpled paper.

Life will become a series of quiet delights.  I promise.

The Hounds of Spring and the First Crocus

  I do love the images of white hounds in poetry and art....the  sculptured hounds of the Cluny tapestries and medieval manuscripts. The images of them joyfully leaping in the dark woods in their pursuits or when they turn their elegant attention to their mistress with her unicorn.

And the light and the dark.....the malevolent black hounds running down their victims in the side streets of London.  The huge black dogs following me down a country road in a Florida  twilight.

The white hounds are the delight of a chase, the agile mind finding a clue, the discovery of the first crocus of spring.  The black hounds are revenge and relentless violence.  Hatred bounding down the dark city streets. The hound of heaven and the Hound of Baskerville.

Here's  a section of a poem where I have been muttering the first line to myself all last week.  Ever since I peeked out to see snow covering my tulips and crocus last Wednesday morning.  In a city that often goes snowless the whole winter, a March snow is peculiar and eventful.  However, my primroses and crocus have survived the cruel blast.

            Atalanta

by Algernon Charles Swinburne

    When the hounds of spring are on winter’s traces,
    The mother of months in meadow or plain
    Fills the shadows and windy places
    With lisp of leaves and ripple of rain;
    And the brown bright nightingale amorous
    Is half assuaged for Itylus,
    For the Thracian ships and the foreign faces,
    The tongueless vigil, and all the pain.
              
    Come with bows bent and with emptying of quivers,
    Maiden most perfect, lady of light,
    With a noise of winds and many rivers,
    With a clamor of waters, and with might;
    Bind on thy sandals, I thou most fleet,
    Over the splendor and speed of thy feet;
    For the faint east quickens, the wan west shivers,
    Round the feet of the day and the feet of the night.
              
    Where shall we find her, how shall we sing to her,
    Fold our hands round her knees and cling?
    O that man’s heart were as fire and could spring to her,
    Fire, or the strength of the streams that spring!
                        For the stars and the winds are unto her          
    As raiment, as songs of the harp-player;
    For the risen stars and the fallen cling to her,
    And the southwest-wind and the west-wind sing.
              
    For winter’s rains and ruins are over,
    And all the season of snows and sins;
    The days dividing lover and lover,
    The light that loses, the night that wins;
    And time remembered is grief forgotten,
    And frosts are slain and flowers begotten,
    And in green underwood and cover
    Blossom by blossom the spring begin.........

And I will be onto the next image......golden apples of the sun.....poor Atalanta.

Painter Elephant Goes Out to Search in the Night, C+P Watercolor#5

 
Now that you are all hip to Mondrian, you can understand some of this elephant image.  The other side to this metaphor is that the artist needs to go out into the night and the dark to find something to feed his or her art.  Take a lantern, take a candle (your technical skills) and snoop around out there under the shadowy trees or even  go into the tangled jungle.  Sometimes you'll see it out in the nighttime meadow,reflecting the moonlight from it's shiny surface, or it might fall out of a tree and hit you on the head. Some images may even bite you on the ankle as you wade through the whispering jungle grasses.  Be bold, be brave.  Listen and be open.

Review homework....look at “Mondrians” and discuss how glazes affect each other.
ent....What is Hue, value, and intensity?  Complements?  Warm and cool.  Did you get any greys or browns with all three colors.?  Why not use opaque white?  Use analogous or neighboring colors on the color wheel to keep your color intensity...if you go too far into complements, you will  start to dull your colors (Sometimes a good thing!)

1.  Did you....? Intensify your yellows and pinks on the iris if you think you need to....use clear water to keep the edges soft.  If you like, start on the very heart of the iris...the yellow ....auroelin and Indian yellow (or a little cadmium red or vermillion) Build up the value and intensity of that fuzzy area slowly, letting it dry between glazes. Two or three glazes should do it.

2. For your iris.  Choose the smallest details that are the darkest  first.  Squint!  Point out on Iris...do small dark veins with smallest brush...practice first on a piece of bond paper.  Demo how you can go over with a larger wash ( with enough water laid down to keep some of the edges soft.)...to keep it from being too “jumpy”  ( It unifies the sharply contrasting shape) 
Look at page 125 and 82.

Assignment:  Try to finish the iris by yourself....correct the mistakes if you can, cut out tape edges or add masking fluid over a small shape of a color you wish to retain..    Look at page 82 and 83.

2. How do you “fix” small mistakes.....see page 120 and 121...use of masking tape to maintain sharp edges....then you can scrub away your small mistakes with water and scrubbing lightly and dabbing with a paper towel.  Don’t scrub too hard!

Assignment:

  If you came to class 5, and you chose a rock to carry around in your pocket, do bring it out, look at it carefully, write down a very detailed description of it and keep that paper next to you as you do a painting of it.  How can you use your techniques of masking, washes, glazes and mixing colors to paint this rock?  Use only red, yellow and blue to make your neutrals......work mostly from light to dark and ENLARGE your rock image to fill your format.  Remember, another artist task is to make the ordinary Extraordinary. (and by that I don't mean necessarily loud or weird...but that's your choice!)

Be sure your "Mondrian is finished to your satisfaction.  I would like to see some neutrals made from your primaries that you applied to your rectangles and squares....a real challenge is to glaze three light value red, yellow and blue to get a light value neutral...brown, grey, etc.

Some of you want to revisit your iris and do it over.  Others will finish what they started, but all of you need to bring your iris to class.  If you want to work on it in the last class that is fine.  However, for those who are finished with the iris,I will bring some LUSCIOUS parrot tulips for you to finish and paint in the last session....using whatever skills you want to use to finish the tulip during our last class. That will take strategy and close attention to time!    Carry on and stay clam.  Jennifer

I will contact Elizabeth and see if we can meet her on one of our Tuesday nights.  If
that's not possible, we'll try for Sunday.

Designing for a project...from drawing to finished piece

A friend of mine told me that she likes to show the work involved in putting together a project, and I've always been interested in the process of getting a painting from here to there as well.  Here is the start of a floral arrangement for a client who wanted it in her kitchen  She sent me pictures of specific flowers and asked me to include them and a hummingbird.  She wants color palette much like the colors in the textile pattern, with some delicate whites and periwinkle blues as well.

This design will be cut out and pasted onto a surface, so I gave her the option of cutting around a relatively uncomplicated "bloom" of color behind the flowers or going into the details to cut out a more intricate perimeter.

I like to draw my design in pencil on tissue for the first presentation, and then go from there either to a color rendering or directly to the actual project, depending on the client's wishes and budget.  I don't trace or copy as a rule, since I like to draw, but with a repeat or symmetrical motif, I will fold the tissue over to trace it.  Saves time.

I've lately been aware of how I have to keep an eye on how tight my curves are in a design. My tendency to draw tight curves needs to be modified.  A more open curve, a straight line here and there keeps my designs from looking like a box of octopi.