Carrasco Studio

Perils of Pauline, or the challenges of painting in the woods

A lovely late summer afternoon in Lincoln Park...listening to birds singing, the high wind in the trees and the lulling wash of the waves in the beach below.  I painted for three hours and loved it....hidden in the weeds, off the beaten track.

BUT DON'T GET ME STARTED WHEN IT COMES TO THE SHEER ICKINESS AND SOMETIMES DANGER OF THE WEIRDO GUYS THAT HANG OUT AND RUIN THE OTHERWISE SERENITY AND CALM OF THESE EXPERIENCES!!!!!

Today I talked to another woman who was painting in the same area at the same time, and she had to call the cops because some creep in the bushes near her was getting off on the Highly Sexual Context of  seeing her paint images of trees on canvas. 

And some years ago, my friend Gina actually had a naked guy jump out of the bushes at her!  Fortunately, Gina is a fast runner.

OK.  I am reminded to paint with friends, carry mace and a cell and watch my back at all times.  It is a fact of this modern world.  It still makes my feminist gorge rise.

A malediction on these creeps. May their fundaments shrivel and fall off in the filth  of their own making. 

Classes, Yup! Plein Aire, Yes!

Plein Aire painting is a joy and an aggravation.  The serendipity of centering a mosquito right in the middle of a divine splooch of yellow and green, the popping and groaning of joints when you sit on the cold hard ground, the approval or disapproval of onlooking squirrels, crows and people.  The sweet person who wants to tell you all about how his mother used to paint (before she had all those demanding children and a grumpy husband).

There is an energy that goes back and forth between the painter and the actual landscape that, on good days when the planets are in proper arrangement, practically vibrates on the paper. It's fast and loose (mostly loose), so you are never sure what you will arrive at.  You also get the whole spectrum......the sounds and smells and textures that you never get from the lovely but dead photograph.  This embeds the memory forever, and when you are drowsing at the edge of sleep , the vision of this experience will accompany you to your dreams.

I still remember, in 1969, painting at the edge of the Hein Palace lake in Kyoto.  I was looking across a bed of iris, across the shimmering lake, to the incredible delicate Hein Temple.  The purple haze of the iris bed, the dragonflies skimming the lake and the polite whispers of the Japanese behind me..."Ah so, des ka" they murmured.

So, I sigue into An Event going on in the World and Seattle..........

Paint Seattle / Worldwide Plein Air Paint Out / Call to Artists
Seattle joins the world for Paint Seattle, part of the Worldwide Plein Air Paint Out from September 11 -13, 2009.  Plein air artists are invited to create their art on site throughout the city as artists around the world simultaneously paint plein air.
Deadline: 9/7/09
 
Details:
Seattle joins the world for Paint Seattle, a part of the Worldwide Plein Air Paint Out from September 11 -13, 2009.  Plein air artists are invited to create their art on site throughout the city as artists around the world simultaneously paint plein air.
Artists wishing to participate in Paint Seattle should complete the registration process on the Walking on Water Gallery and Studios website.  There is no fee. Artists will be included on the Paintout Map and can show in the Gallery on Sunday at the Artist's Reception and Exhibition from 3-6pm at 4333 Fremont Ave N, Seattle.  16 to 20 works will be selected by Walking on Water and be displayed until October 13.  All art during this event must be created in 'plein air' during the three-day event.
For more information and to register visit:
http://walkingonwaterfremont.com/


Deadline: September, 7, 2009

I plan to be down, for this event,  at Lincoln Park again, painting away.  I'll try to be more specific on where I'll be if you contact me via e-mail.  Feel free to join me.  No instruction or conversation.  Just being a Tree, or the spangled leaves or a patch of glorious weeds, and splodging and flailing away with paint and abandon.

And!  Watercolor classes Will Resume at CandP Coffee House..6pm to 9pm on September 8...will go in units of 6 classes for $120.  Contact me if you plan to attend so I can arrange for tables and I'll send you the details and Materials list  Come one, come all.  See ya.

The Crow's Complaint

When I walked down 4oth today with my deposit for the bank and some letters to mail, I heard several crows cawing loudly in a mountain ash on the corner.
The tree had been carefully trimmed, so there was lots of space between the limbs and leaves.  The composition was so beautiful...the complements of blue and orange, the sheen of blue on the crow's black feathers, and the flicker of sun along the bark and in the leaves.  I stopped for a moment to "memorize" the vision.

What really struck me after I stood there and looked for a while was the intensity of this August 1, 2009 sky.  It reminded me of October skies, but with a heat and glow of summer.  This blue was so hard and flat, and yet so luminous that I felt if I threw a rock at the scolding crow and missed, I would shatter the sky and it would fall all around me in shards of blue.

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.

Night Gardens and Flower Ghosts

First of all, let me make this clear.  I do not sing to the devas in my garden (although at times I may inadvertently water them)  I just like to consider possibilites.  Play with ideas and have a good time visualizing the "perhaps" in this astounding universe.

Do not sign me up with a cult or send me messages from the gods.  I think I'll figure that out on my own.

I do go out in my garden in the late afternoon light and sit to watch the sun set over the Olympics.  In my very priviledged life, I am able to watch how, for about a half hour,  twilight seems to incandesce the colors of the flowers...even my gravel path has a purple hue.  And the plants and the trees exhale, a gentle breathing out.

Then I stand up to walk among my roses and galliardia and cut out the flowers that are finished...the term is the gruesome " dead heading"; important for  gardeners if you want the flowers to continue blooming.  And I think to myself, how would flower spirits leave their bodies?

Roses would float up, amorphous and glowing, dropping petals as they leave.  Lilies would shoot up like Roman candles, leaving  sparkling threads of connection to the earth.  Marigolds would bumble up like bottle rockets and silently explode in shreds of light.

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