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.

 

Drawing and Watercolor classes (No Bull)

Time to grab the bull by the horns and start my classes again!  Watercolor classes, as usual, at CandP Coffee house, 6-8 , 6 classes, on Tuesday evenings.  Need 10 people pre-registered to start.  Drawing classes on Thursday evenings....6-9, ten classes,  in the condo hospitality room behind my house...again, I need  10 students.  Class will start in mid November.  Watercolor on November 16 and Drawing on the 18th of November.

Contact me via my e-mail (upper lefthand corner on my blog) for more information if you are interested.

Thanks! Jennifer (BTW, this watercolor is part of a calendar series  done by various artists for Tom Douglas and his restaurants and his favorite recipes....mine was was a garlicky, olivey, tomato-y totally delicious steak and greens salad)  Gitalong, big Dawgie.

What I did on my Summer Vacation

 

We spent an idyllic two days on the Kitsap Penninsula with our friend Paula.  The clouds are massing......summer is showing it's sunny behind over the Olympics.  I stand on my front porch and wave my hankerchief at the passing season.

Paula's feast. A Primary Poem.

 

Ah.

Can yellow be so round?

Webs of algae.

 

Paula's garden, Paula's hops

......that reflection and shadow thing....again.

 
Port Townsend Market...and all the beets and carrots, color co-ordinated.....


 

Sea salad

Glorious potatoes.

Farewell Blue Heron.

Home on the Value Range. Drawing Lesson #4

 

Line  value drawing with cross hatching. 1981

Lesson 3  Drawing on the right side of the brain.

1.  Look at drawings...memory drawing of room and  Ed Koch....Shift?   Judy’s question...analytical? More analogy, relational, holistic.Suspension of time, no decoding speech, active without anxiety.When is the crisis time for young artists?   Look at drawings of Koch and have each student “explain”  their room drawings. 
 

Yeah, I know....this is an iris in my garden, not an ironweed....but the poem is so lovely and applies to iris as well...."profoundest violet", indeed.

Ironweed

By Robert Morgan

There is a shade of purple in
this flower near summer’s end that makes
you proud to be alive in such
a world, and thrilled to know the gift
of sight. It seems a color sent
from memory or dream. In fields,
along old trails, at pasture edge,
the ironweed bares its vivid tint,
profoundest violet, a note
from farthest star and deepest time,
the glow of sacred royalty
and timbre of eternity
right here beside a dried-up stream.

1.  Iris......modified contour line. Mark midlines on your paper view finder. Stare at my leaf and negative space until you see the shapes of the negative.  Hold up your viewfinder and do the same for the iris.  Try drawing the negative spaces (Right brain) instead of the iris.  Don’t tilt or move your head and arm.  Get comfortable first!

2. Again, draw your hand holding something on the plastic.Then cover a sheet of your notebook with charcoal and rub it in with a piece of paper towel to get a medium value tone..


3. Do hand exercise., pg. 106-110  Pick up some of the highlights with your eraser.  Darken some shadows with your charcoal.   Hand out Escher drawing....look at the shadows and highlights.

Assignment:  Read chapter 6.  Apply charcoal to your paper. Using the viewfinder (prop your paper viewfinder) over a complex vegetable like a radish with leaves, a tomatilla, or three green onions.  Let some of the veggie parts go off the edge of the view finder.  Draw and shade the veggie(s) like you did with  the hand exercise.

Have a flowery day.

Bearded Iris                                                                       ©Jennifer M. Carrasco 5/12/10                                         

©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

A Snort for Spring

Ieeeeeeeiiiii!  Cabin fever, spring fever and prison break fever all combined.  I look out my windows and see blooming tulips, daffodils and Weeds.  I am pawing the floor. Let me outta here. Four more weeks in the house.

This is an illustration I did recently for Tom Douglas's calendar (Tom of the fabulous restaurants, cooking fame and one-time Iron Chef).  Several artists contributed to the calendar, and mine was the month of September.  The illustration was supposed to be about one of Tom's favorite recipes, and his September recipe was full of tomatoes, garlic and olives and beef.  Well, of course I thought of Ferdinand the Bull, and to get him energized, I had to sting him with the mythical bee.

BTW, the first scream in my blog is an actual word.  I heard it spoken/screeched for the first time when I was riding a provincial bus in the Philippines.  We rounded a corner on the wrong side of the road and barely missed another bus.  We cringed by the bus by going off the road and went lurching madly through a ditch.  Everyone, including me screamed Ieeeeeeiiiiii, the bus righted itself, and continued to barrel on down the road. 

I always thought that kind of scream was just invented by the writer of "Terry and the Pirates".

©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.

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.
 

Russet, Ochre and Madder Brown

Last Sunday we set up an arrangement in the main room of CandP coffee house and five of us painted away for about 2 and a half hours.  Sharon and I went for the whole thing but the others found it too overwhelming and went with one object or another grouping.

I felt my composition was too busy, so I went home and tried it again and then thought it was too hard edged.  So I just said to hell with it and slathered water along all the outer edges and inbetween.  It turned out sort of 1950's illustration-ish.  I wonder if all my exposure as a kid to Lady's Home Journal and Redbook illustrations are leaking into my 2009 psyche.

The Only Fish in the Sea (Not) Water color Lesson #2

This is an example of glazing, not in watercolor, but in acrylics...I started with laying out  the  simple shapes in the LIGHTEST value ....pale browns, olive greens, pale reds, etc. , and to keep it simple (I was on a tight budget and of course, needed it done yesterday), I used a MEDIUM value next of all the colors, and then used the darkest and most intense values (sparingly) last.  The reason I bring this up in a watercolor class is that IT'S EXACTLY THE SAME STEPS I USE IN TRANSPARENT WATERCOLOR....with the exception, as you can see....where I used an opaque blue white for the fish and the guy's shirt (as a little dash of seasoning on a beige background)  This is one of a series I did for Tommy Bahama's flagship store in Vegas.

It's acrylic paint on Roclon canvas that has been primed with beige gesso.  My first layer of paint was the glazed "bloom" of orange for the background, and then I went from light to dark in my values of paint.

Here's the black and white version, so you can see the value change.

So many people tell me they hate acrylics because the medium is "garish".  It's not, if you glaze, and make your colors your own...cool down that shrieking green with a little red, chill out a magenta with a little ochre, and GLAZE a complimentary transparent green over that shocking orange.

OK.  Next week please bring a tube of Lunar Black from Daniel Smith.  If you can't make the trip, let me know and I can either pick up one for you or make arrangements with another student to get a tube.  You can also share!

Yep. You guessed it.  The next lesson is about VALUE.  Don't miss it!  And I must say, I was so proud of the way you toiled away at your apple rendering in the last class.  Most of you got it by the end of the lesson, and I have to tell you I was thrilled.  I promise, after the next "basic" class, we are going to get a little more wild and crazy, and your lovely individual style will find more expression.

Water color Lesson #2, Fall 2009

 

2 .Watercolor Class, Fall C and P   Contour drawing.  Using only secondary and tertiary colors. Fruit and and fish.  Warm and cool colors.  Structure.

Look at leaves!  Color samples...warm or cool...guess what combination of primaries.  Secondaries or tertiaries?

1. Contour drawing....mountain ash, boston ivy.  Why? It centers you and slows you down.....gives you focus and a quiet meditation.  SLOW....find an edge and start SLOWLY...back up on shared edges, don’t lift from paper...turn away from.paper.  This is an exercise in looking that happens to use the physical skill of drawing. Focus entirely on the object you are drawing....let the world and your internal “edit” fall away.  (ten minutes)

2. The difference between Hansa yellow and A. yellow, Manganese ,pthalo,  and cobalt, alizarin crimson, cadmium red and earth red.  Notice degrees of staining, granulation and opaque quality.
Mix some secondary and tertiary colors in your pallatte wells.  Make them fairly intense.

On two small pieces of watercolor paper...Draw very lightly (1) Three apples  (1) three fish.
Notice the structure of the fruit and the fish.....this is what drawing can show you.   Put a pale wash of yellow on all six shapes.  Work quickly.
On the second and third apple and and the second and third fish drop in while still wet,  secondary colors and tertiary colors. Let dry.

Show how to make shadows of cobalt and umber (or manganese and umber)  (I don’t like stains for shadows.)
Put shadows to the side of the apples.

Glaze some stain color patterns (dots, stripes, zig zags )on your fish.
 Use red and green (which is what primaries?!!) (mix each with a bit with a complement) to do the curving stripes on your apple and mix a brown from red and green for stems. 

When fish are dry, try wetting all of # 2 fish and using a blue/umber wash on the bottom to show shadow.  Then use  Lunar black for shading on the last fish. (with a light hand!)

Assignment.  Reread 1-15 in Jan Hart’s book.
On a quarter sized paper, lightly draw arrangement of  five fish of different sizes and shapes and angles, or 3  fruit and  branches, leaves or vines. Spend only 20 minutes sketching out your arrangement. Think of the negative space.  Don’t get too complicated.  Use large size or group shapes for a focal point.  Start light, paint shapes with water, then add a pale wash and then let colors bleed into the shapes.  Work from top to bottom.  Use some of the cobalt/raw umber or lunar black to show modeling or shadows.

Using a cool color to create modeling....letting a blue "bleed" into a wet warm colored shape to create a shadow below.

 

Or, using Lunar black to create shadows or modeling....paint area with clear water and then paint with a glaze of lunar black, letting the granulated black pigment "fade" out as it approaches where the light hits the form.

As you work with the paints, I think you realize that the blog entries, while giving you some information and also as a definite reinforcement for what you did in class, are not a real substitute for being in class.  It's a commitment, and I know how our lives are so tangled up with other people and other promises, so the combination of the blog, your efforts and all my support will contribute your feeling of success in this class.  I just hope you will end up loving painting as I do.

Last, but not least, I want to emphasize that I am NOT teaching you splinter skills!  You can use the concept of glazing with watercolor, wash drawings, acrylics and oils. When I was taking lessons on trompe l'oeil (fool the eye) painting and my still life looked too "jumpy" or full of unrelated objects, a GLAZE (over dry paint with oils) of raw sienna, dioxide purple, cad red, or hookers green...(lightly, lightly!) made everything unified...until I punched a bunch of stuff up  and had to glaze it again!

If you have a chance to go to the Vancouver show of Dutch painters, take a look at Rembrandt's lace collars and cuffs...he calmed down that blinding flake white with a swish of umber glaze that puddled deliciously in the impasto valleys.

I'm no Rembrandt, but I was amazed at how a glaze could calm down a rowdy bunch of grapes or day glow oysters! (you should have seen my lobster before I washed him down with a tint of purple)

©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.

Vegetable Love

We had an art business meeting last night, and Leslie brought me a purple kolrabi.
It looks like it will start humming, levitate, spin over the kitchen twice and take off into space.  I am ready to duck.