Bank of Waves

By Carrie Jacobson

Autumn has spun off into winter, even here in the south. If our mornings are not surprisingly cold, and smelling insistently – and falsely – of snow, then they are thick with fog and quiet.

Our little town empties out in winter. One day last week, I think we were the only ones at home on the whole street.

And that’s OK. It is a breath out, an exhalation, a quieting of soul and life and air, and the very town.

I have shows already for 2014, and find my mind drifting ahead, to California in January, Arizona in February, New Mexico in March. A wide roundup of the southwest, with visiting and family and painting, and sun and open skies and the wide adventures of the west.

But here in Wachapreague, it is now, and it is winter, and I will exhale, and I will paint and I will treasure this quiet life.

Sunflowers, oil on canvas, 48×48

By Carrie Jacobson

One of the reasons that I love to paint is that I love the way it makes me feel. I love where it takes my head, where it takes my heart.

When I am painting, it seems that the world goes away. Well, that’s not really right. My surroundings recede. My worries recede. Whatever is dark and sad in my life recedes, and I am left with what is joyful and full of promise. I am left with color, and with light, and with faith.

I paint – and especially with something like this piece, this big, bright, heavily textured sunflower piece – I find a rhythm that helps transport me, helps bring me to that transcendent place, that place where sorrow is something just out of the frame, just off of the horizon.

We euthanized our 15-year-old Pekingese on Monday. He had had trouble walking for a couple of years, and his back legs pretty much gave out a couple months ago. This weekend, one of his front legs seemed to be on the way out. It was arthritis, the vet said, and Looie would not get better. He would not come out of it.

A Day Without Lou Reed

By Carrie Jacobson

The Times Herald-Record laid off all of its photographers and several experienced editors this past week. And Lou Reed died this past week, too.

It would be a stretch to say that the events were linked in any way, even metaphorically. But I can say that they both made me sad, and both made me long for times long passed.

The editors whose jobs the Record eliminated were incredibly hard workers, talented and bright, with experience and the amazing ability to solve a huge range of problems. They’d learned to work without pretty much everything that an editor needs to run a good paper – and yet, they persisted, building the best paper they could with the meager resources left to them.

The four photographers whose jobs were eliminated were among the best shooters I have ever seen. They documented the life and times and people of the mid-Hudson Valley for decades, and they did so with precision and verve and a big dose of love and art.

In its heyday, when Mike Levine was the editor of the Record, and I worked as Sunday editor and art director, the paper had a rough and tumble quality that I loved. We wanted to do something different, we wanted to be a paper that mattered. We wanted to be the paper that we were, heart and soul, not some weak echo of someone else’s idea of a good newspaper.

And making that tenuous stretch, that yes, perhaps tortured connection, I’d say that that was Lou Reed, too. Far as I know, he never wanted to be anything other than himself. Yes, he had his moments of doubt and pain, his weaknesses and his failures – and the Record did, too.

But even if you didn’t love the end result, I think you had to respect the integrity of the Record and Lou Reed.

I’m sorry they both are dead.

Autumn’s Best of Cheer

By Carrie Jacobson

I know that autumn is inevitable, but every year, it excites me. And now that I paint, it excites me even more.

It’s more than the colors in the fields and in the trees. It’s the pleasure of kicking through fallen, drying leaves; the thrilling snap of a frosty morning on my cheeks and in my nose; the way the stars gleam sharp and brilliant in these clear and chilly nights.

But painting the fall is the best, and this scene is sort of the quintessential autumn painting for me. It’s a study for a larger painting I am doing as a commission. And for all of you in the mid-Hudson Valley, yes, it does look familiar. It’s on Route 17A, on the left as you’re heading into Florida.

I took the title of the painting from a poem by Helen Hunt Jackson. You can click here to read the entire poem; the stanza I lifted the title from is right here:

By all these lovely tokens

September days are here,

With summer’s best of weather,

And autumn’s best of cheer.

First Fall, oil on canvas, 10×10

By Carrie Jacobson

Early autumn has a dusty look this year. The colors are soft, underlined with gold and tan and brown. A certain tired dryness seems etched into the still-green leaves, and the field grass crackles and whispers in the wind.

Even though it is early, and autumn’s clothes are thin, the colors pull me in, the swirl of change  and promise visible, tantalizing. It is coming, it is here in a whisper, with a hint of color, and fire, and drama – or, this early, a rich aging, a gentle turn, handsome, quiet, recognizable.

Pound Ridge is a lovely little village tucked into the mountains of eastern New York, Westchester County, near Katonah. If you’re in the area, or looking for a scenic autumn drive, come to the show! It takes place Saturday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., and Sunday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

***

HALF THE DAY Friday (today), I’ll be painting outdoors at Olana, the home of Frederic Church, in Hudson, NY. I’ve been juried into a plein-air paintout with a selection of marvelous painters, and I am excited! Painting will be followed by an auction Saturday at 5 p.m. at the estate. I won’t be there, but you can be, to see the paintings and bid on them, too.

Click here for more information. 

Sorghum
Oil on canvas, 30×30

By Carrie Jacobson

The trees are starting to change color, even on the Eastern Shore. It’s not much, a tinge of orange here, a patch of yellow there. It’s slight, but it is undeniable, and in its way, exciting.

Farmers have cut the corn fields. Birds are flocking up. The squirrels, which are few and far between here in Virginia, are making a racket. And if there are still hummingbirds around, I haven’t seen them in a day or so.

A friend brought a cabbage over the other day, and it was huge and fresh and sweet. On the road to the mainland recently, I saw men picking pumpkins and squash.

I love the falling chill of the nights, and snuggling close, and pulling the blankets tight around my shoulders. I love putting on long pants for the first time, and finding my sweatshirt, and knowing that soon, I’ll be wearing my denim jacket and my scarf and my soft, warm boots.

I’ve gotten soft here in the south. A temperature of 70 sends me looking for an extra shirt these days. And while I am glad about fall, I am far more glad that winters here bring little or no snow.

And soft as I am, I am not yet as soft as whatever neighbor has the woodstove burning, even as I sit here in my open-air garage studio, loving the feel of the autumn wind.

***

I’LL BE PAINTING up your way, entering a piece in a wet-paint auction, and showing my new work at an outdoor festival, and it’s all happening this coming week!

The Olana Plein Arts Festival takes place Thursday through Saturday, Oct. 3-5, at the historic home of Frederic Church, in Hudson, NY. I’m one of 30 artists from across the country, chosen to participate in the event. I’ll be painting outdoors on Thursday and on Friday morning, and entering a wet plein-air piece into the wet-paint auction on Saturday.

On Friday afternoon, I head to Pound Ridge near Westchester for the Pound Ridge Fine Arts Festival, which takes place Saturday and Sunday.

If you’re around, please consider coming to one or the other, or both! And please say hello when you do.

Where He Loves to Fish
Oil on canvas, 20×60

By Carrie Jacobson

A couple from Tennessee was visiting our next door neighbor, Miss Dulcie, when I got home one evening from a recent and exhausting visit to Charlotte, NC. I spent most of the next day sleeping, but roused myself in the afternoon to carry the ancient Pekingese outside. I’d been out there for, oh, 10 seconds when one of Miss Dulcie’s visitors showed up at the fence.

“Hi!” he said. “I hear you’re an artist! That’s so wonderful!”  It became clear to me, even in my exhausted dim dumbness that he wanted to see my paintings and my studio, so of course, I showed him, and his wife, and Miss Dulcie, too.

Turns out that, decades back, he had turned down a full scholarship to Notre Dame to go to art school. Then he was drafted, came home, married, took a job, and pretty much forgot about art.

But way back then, he had painted with a palette knife, as I do, and he was tremendously excited to see my paintings. He swore that when he got home, he was going to start to paint again.

If you get anything from my story (I started making art seven years ago, at the age of 50), get this: You are never too old to make art. You are never too old to START making art – or writing poetry, or making quilts, or throwing pots, or creating mobiles, or making movies – or whatever it is that your heart’s been telling you to do.

Take a class, read a book, watch a video – or just get some materials and give it a try. Your life will be richer, and you will be happier. That’s a promise.

The Red Umbrella

By Carrie Jacobson

On Tuesday, here in Virginia, parents and alarm clocks woke kids up. They rose in a morning that was strangely early, strangely dark. They dressed in clothes that smelled new and felt stiff.

They shouldered backpacks filled with pens that all work, pencils with sharp points, unblemished erasers. Notebooks held oceans of possibility, untouched so far by thought or striving or error. There were special lunches, carefully packed in unstained lunchboxes, in which nothing has spilled or ripened over a weekend.

On the bus and in the schoolyard, they saw kids they haven’t seen for months, and they smiled and laughed and screamed, took up joyful friendships and strained ones, too, and surely found that some of each had changed, over the long lapsed months of summer.

I remember the smell of unused classrooms, open for the first time, in the autumn heat. The creak of floorboards and desk lids, the unaccustomed noises that come from lots of people being inside together. I remember the heat of those September classrooms, the sound of the bell and the PA system, and the feeling of my summer-hardened feet, inside shoes for the first time since June.

I remember the excitement of it all, and how I loved it. I spent the summers happily at the beach, but I was a learner, and school was my place. I loved the classes, the friends, the new clothes. I loved bag lunches and the bus and assemblies and recess and the teachers. I loved learning, and trying, and achieving.

And every year, when school opens, a little part of me wishes I were there again.

Thursday afternoon
Oil on canvas, 18×36

By Carrie Jacobson

Painting began for me with a random thought that I had the courage – or luck – to listen to, and follow.

That began a change in my life, and over these years, little by little, I’ve learned to listen and to trust. When a door seems to open for me, I take my courage in hand and walk through it. Maybe I end up in a small room that I leave quickly. Maybe I end up in a long, interesting corridor, with lots of corners and other doors. The important thing for me is to have the nerve to step through and see what’s there.

Thus, this painting, which seems to me to be about freedom, and love, and the sky and, well, paint itself.

 ***

I KNEW I WAS running out of white paint, so early in the week, I ordered a bunch. I go through a lot, a lot, a lot of white paint. The UPS guy showed up on Friday, and I was thrilled. He was there just in time.

“Yay!” I said. “I’m down to my last tube of white!”

“Hmm,” he said. “I don’t think there’s any paint in this shipment.”

And sure enough, there wasn’t. Canvases, yes, but no paint.

I can fake it when I’m out of other colors… but not when I’m out of white. And there are a lot of situations like that. We can seem to be OK, making do, or even shining people on – but when you’re out of white paint, when you’re out of whatever it is at the very core of what you do, or who you are, you’re just stuck.

Peter and I went to the Big City of Salisbury, MD, on Saturday, and I bought a couple tubes of white paint – so I can go on. If only it were so easy in other parts of life.