Carrasco Studio

Anna Akhmatova Swimming

"......Anya had grown tall and graceful, with long, thick, straight dark hair and beautiful white hands. Her gray eyes looked out of an almost unnaturally pale face.  Swimming in the dark, still waters of the ponds of Tsarskoye Selo, she (seemed) like some mermaid or water nymph and Gumilyov was...entranced by this image.(Amanda Haight, Anna Akhmatova: A Poetic Pilgrimage" pg. 8)

Light in the trees

I tried again with my sun through the late summer trees, and I'm happier with this.  I think I'll do a series of these pieces.  This is probably closer to my true self as an artist.  Not the subject, but the approach....a little messy, more emotional, more abstract. I can do the exquisite,  controlled pieces  for clients, but for this personal work  I want the feeling, not every leaf.  Transcendant yearning, awe.

"Oh how that glittering taketh me!"....Robert Herrick

©Jennifer M. Carrasco 9/25/09  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.

The Bloom of Sunlight on Dark Water

I am gearing up to do some sepia drawings for The Lost Resort website,and I wanted to acquaint myself with some watercolor renderings first.

Hoko River in Summer

Sunlight falling
onto and into
the river.

Slow moving water
through a tunnel
of trees.

A stain of light,
 a slow bloom,
a yellow green lamp
on the floor
of the leaf shadowed cave.

A Time of Trees

Last night, after the bright glare of sunset and the ensuing pop and crackle of fireworks subsided, I put on a CD of Sharon Robinson's," Everybody Knows" that has a song I love. It's not the Porgy and Bess Summertime, but one Sharon wrote. Her Summertime is about how "I want to put my light things on.....and wants "peaches on the table", and you know she is singing about something else as well.

I carry summer in my heart against life's grey days of rain. Instead of "thy rod and thy staff" of the Bible, poetry and art will sustain me.

On my walk to the grocery store, I usually pass under some catalpa trees that have been so brutally trimmed that they are like giant green toadstools...a mat of overarching tiny twigs and leaves.  This time when I passed by, it was full of children, and their father was trimming the tree to give a platform for a treehouse.  The sweet fresh faces glowing in the dark leaves, the brilliant sky and an occasional pink foot or hand poking out.  They called to me and I stopped to talk with their father.

And Ann Sexton's poem.  It is enough.

Half awake in my Sunday nap
I see three green windows
in three different lights---
one west, one south, one east.
I have forgotten that old friends are dying,
I have forgotten that I grow middle aged,
at each window such rustlings!
The trees persist, yeasty and sensuous,,
 as thick as saints
I see three wet gargoyles covered with birds.
Their skins shine in the sun like leather.

I'm on my bed as light as a sponge
soon it will be summer.
She is my mother.
She will tell me a story and keep me asleep
against her plump and fuity skin.
I see leaves,
leaves that are washed and innocent......

I know what I know.
I am the child that was,
living the life that was mine.
I am young and half asleep.
It is a time of water, a time of trees.

stanzas from "Three Green Windows" by Ann Sexton

 

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.

Robin in Windfall

                                       
Robin among Windfall

At the top of the hill
I catch my breath,
to face the harsh wind
and look up at the sky,
a turmoil of clouds
and volatile blue.
 
To my right
a robin pauses,
his orange breast
citrus sharp,
among the yellowing apples
of last year’s fall.
Only birds harvest this crop.

But my Grandmother
 gathered all;
apples, cherries, eggs and me.
She kept us from spoiling,
showed me how
to prepare for the cold.
I remember
her pantry,
jam jars glowing
 crimson and orange
in  dusty shafts
of afternoon light.

I walk on with my memories,
 then pause
near a plum tree,
For moments I stare
at buds trembling
at the edge of beauty.
See? There!
Two poufs of pink,
cotton candy explosions
on rough mossy twigs.

Delight bursts in the air,
 and falls at our feet.
To blight
with neglect
is to wither,
to provide nothing
for snow.

A housewife to memories,
 I harvest the wind
in a drawing,
store poems
on my desktop,
preserve short-tempered March
in cloudy words
and staccatos of paint.

Jennifer M. Carrasco

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.

Queen of Heaven

 

I signed the contract with the card company today.  38 images, all copyrighted and in card format.  This image will come out with others of the same ilk (see medieval girl.) The company asked me to tone down the background into more of  a garnet color, because they felt it would look richer.

All this was A LOT OF WORK.  I learned far more about PhotoShop than I ever really cared to learn, but I guess I am a Better Person for learning it.  (Frankly, I'm tired of building my character.)  My mother used to tell me to "offer it up". Catholic, of course.

Speaking of Catholic, the title comes from the Litany to Mary at the end of the mass.
I always loved the titles the priest would call out.... "Rose of Sharon", "Tower of Gold", "House of Ivory", and the congregation would murmur, "Queen of Heaven,Rejoice, Allelulia" while incense billowed around the priest and the altar boys and the light streamed through the stained glass window above the altar. 

I am not a practicing Catholic now, but a few years ago I restored the painted marble  pillars and the baptismal font of the pretty little Gothic altar in my former church. It was very peaceful and familiar, painting a faux marble finish on the plaster pillars and listening to Mozart.  The priest lent me his tapes, and I played my favorite, the Requiem, again and again.

I wrote a poem about the Virgin after the project....about the difference between our plain statue of Mary and the glamour of the Spanish/Filipino Marys kept by the old families in Manila and brought out once a year for processions.

I hardly recognized Filipino Catholocism as being Catholic....it was so mystical and contained more than a few aspects of the old Malay culture.  Same religion?  I don't think so.

Procession of Virgins

Tonight Manila frees
God’s mothers
from  glass boxes
in the living rooms 
of old mestizo families.
At twilight the Madonnas  lurch
from somber gates,
their altars hoisted
on the gleaming backs
of praying men.


Ave, Maria de Santa Rosa, the Virgin of Sampoloc.
Ave,  Queen of Sorrows from Binondo.
 You and your sisters show pale faces
 like the tilted eyes of God,
ivory ovals in a radiance
 of crinkled hair and diadems.

My childhood gods were plain.
The church placed prim
among the ordered neighborhoods,
where Mary was the patron saint
of varnished pews.

Blandly, she and Jesus smiled
on farmers and their women;
the mothers with their babies
crying in the back.
I’d fidget in my seat, and dream
of  boys and high adventure
while glancing idly
 at the blank
of Mary’s face,
her plastic flowers,
 lacy curtains at her feet.

Where you, Madres, your Spanish brilliance spikes
 a retinue of comets in the dark.
Your generators surge, electric candles
urge light across moire, along your goitered neck,
and snag on jeweled ears, the lace at breasts and cuff.

 Your light slaps facets on  sweating walls,
spins glamour out of filthy ground
and clothes the  beggars squatting by canals.
Tonight you scatter glitter in the streets
where day shows only garbage,
circling dogs,
and slinking rats.