Carrasco Studio

St. Nicolas Trudges On

I've heard it on the best authority (Drudge and Celebrity News) that the old guy is on his way through the frozen North.  He's been walking a lot and dieting (Recession) and the reindeer are on strike for higher wages, so he had to start early. Tomorrow he'll be at the Canadian border and be in line at customs, but if he clears that, he'll be at your house on schedule.

Since you all have been good, I'm sure you'll get yo-yo's instead of sticks.

Happy Holidays from me and Phil.

My cards, both for holiday and events,  are available at www.Emery-Burton.com.carrasco carrasco

 

Arctic Daydreams

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

A Stone, A Leaf, An Unfound Door: Drawing Class # 5, Perspective and Negative Space

                                              Interior by Vilhem Hammershoei  1905

...a stone, a leaf, an unfound door: of a stone, a leaf, a door.  And of all the forgotten faces.....O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again.                                                                                                                                 Thomas Wolfe....Look Homeward Angel.

In my first semester of college, I was placed in a class where my job was To Read Books.  I was in bliss. I was so low in my math skills that I barely qualified for bonehead math, but I was able to sidle into a higher level English class where all I had to do was  read books and write about what I read.  One of these books was Thomas Wolfe's, "Look Homeward Angel", and it was perfect for an 18 year old in love with literature.  I would clutch the book under my arm to class, to dinner (if I could get away with it...formal dinners were expected even in the dorms at that time) and on my way back from the library in the evening.  My campus was snowbound and cold in the winter, and I would slip and fall, and the book would skitter across the ice and stop in a snowbank.  I loved the book, still have the tattered copy with me, and its forward has haunted me ever since.

That metaphor of the open door, opening upon door upon door..... An enfilade into more mysteries and experience. Like Thomas Wolfe's book, like art, like drawing, .... a journey far too prolix and more than a little mad.

1  Discuss Chapter 7....Pass out Temple Grande page on the conflict between verbal and visual information.

2.  Show Tony Ryder’s method of blocking in.... .Relationships    Basic unit...figure...often the length and width of the head.
 


3. Basic Unit.....review. pg. 126.. the correct Basic unit controls the rest of your drawing....Remember Tony Ryder......boat...vertical unit, for me, is easier....use the horizontal and vertical of paper format to check angles.  Draw angles of Hopper painting...each shape...start with largest and get smaller and smaller. 

Choose the main vertical as your basic unit.  What direction should you have in your format?  No shading, just contour ....can use ruler if you like.


5. Drawing a stepladder.  Hold up viewfinder so the stepladder touches at least three edges of the viewfinder.  Keep the viewfinder in the same position and close one eye.    Focus on negative spaces around stepladder....first draw negative spaces around viewfinder.  Check the angles and lengths with a basic unit and the verticals and horizontals of the paper format.  Then start on the interior negative spaces....again, check the angles and lengths.

Assignment...Draw the Ballerina....negative space.......shared edges between the positive and negative..  Double check angles and curves with horizontal and vertical edges of the paper.  Come up with your definition of art....Read chapter 8

.......And watch for negative and positive confusions.....

 

Monkey Men                                               MC Escher                                   

"....If the red slayer think he slays,

Of if the slain think he is slain,

They know not well the subtle ways

I keep,  and pass, and turn again."

                                                        Ralph Waldo Emerson, from Brahma                                                                                                              

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.

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.

Hike to the end of the World

Well, the farthest end of the continental US.  In snowy weather.  With cougar tracks outside our cabin in the morning.

One of my best friends, Norma Jean from Texas, came up to see me for a week, and we took off to the Olympic Penninsula for three days.  We stayed in a cabin at the Lost Resort at Lake Ozette......way way out there toward the end of land......and, we were the only guests there.  There was us, the Lost Resort owner, Rob Snyder (who has a lodge that has a bath, a bathroom , stocks 99 different kinds of beer and has  three very nice little cabins as well as lots of camp sites, and a few neighbors and a Forest Ranger. (who has a cute little black spitz dog).

We went to bed with the full moon shining in our windows and woke to snow.  Lots of snow.

I did one watercolor while I was waiting for the snow to stop

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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.

 

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.