Dawn Over the Ocean

By Carrie Jacobson

I had my first show outside of New England this weekend, and though it was brutally, brutally hot in Annapolis, the show was fun and financially successful.

I am realizing some things about these shows, and where they bring me and the people who visit. Inside the tent, the atmosphere is intimate. We stand close because we have to, in this 10-foot by 10-foot space. My paintings are on the walls, pieces of my heart and my soul, in color, unhidden.

I love being in this place and talking with people about art, and life – I especially love listening to their stories, and their remembrances. Nearly everyone has an aunt or a mother or a grandfather who painted, or who is a painter – and so my paintings evoke memories in them. Their faces soften, they smile, they share, and we all learn something about each other.

Any day that there’s an exchange like that, I think, it’s a good day.

Northampton Dawn

By Carrie Jacobson

Spring rolled into deep summer this week without any thought of June. The lawn – bright with May’s brilliant green just a week ago – is turning brown in places. Branches are drooping here and there, and by afternoon, my flowers are drooping.

At a show this weekend, I sweated like it was August. I drank water and sweated, drank water and sweated, until I felt somewhat like a sieve.

On the TV weather station, I watched a line of thunderstorms creep northeast on a diagonal stretching from Tennessee to Maine, and I thought, this is what global warming looks like. Not the planet frying in an ozone-depleted atmosphere of fire, but a planet subject to gigantic weather patterns that establish themselves and refuse to leave.

But it is summer, and there are thunderstorms, and maybe all of this is just a wrinkle in the fabric of the world. Or maybe not.

Jojo

By Carrie Jacobson

Usually, I use a lot of paint. But there are times when I use almost none at all. I like both outcomes.

It’s the same in life, I think. And I guess the trick is learning when to go for heavy and when to go for light.

I don’t think the answer is easy or clear-cut. But I do think that if I listen hard, and go with what I’m feeling, I’ll make the right choice.

I quit my day job this week. Well, gave notice.

Yes, in a horrible economy, with not much light showing at the end of the tunnel, I am walking away from a paying job… so that I can make art for a living.

My husband and I made this decision easily, in December, and have hemmed and hawed ever since, saying we’d stay here until the house sells, until the path is clear, until we know what the outcome will be.

I don’t think we can know it until we commit ourselves to a choice.

So. Lots of paint? Not much? Jojo looks pretty good either way.

Think good thoughts for me.

Red Barn, Route 17A

By Carrie Jacobson

Springtime on the Salt Marsh

By Carrie Jacobson

For weeks now, I’ve been pushing at something – or, more accurately, something’s been pushing at me – and yesterday, with this painting, I think it pushed through.

It’s hard to explain this feeling. I wrote here, first, that I was a little dissatisfied with my paintings recently – but that’s not really right, as I have loved my recent paintings.

I think it’s more that I have had this idea, an idea of a feeling that I’ve wanted the paintings to have, and they just haven’t had that feeling, not completely. But since it’s something I haven’t really felt myself, and something I haven’t seen, all I’ve known is that the stuff I’ve been doing has not created that feeling. Not catalyzed it, at least not for me.

With this little painting, I feel that I’ve broken through. There’s something in this piece, in the colors, in the daubs and smooshes of paint, in the luscious quality of the marsh against the thinner quality of the sky, something that gives me the feeling I’ve been seeking.

Freedom? Joy? Awakening? I still don’t know what it is, exactly, but I know that this piece begins to have it.

Not So Sunny Sunflowers

By Carrie Jacobson

Here at the end of March, a March that’s felt like May for the most part, the world seems finally to have slipped back into place. A biting wind – a March wind – slices across our yard, taking last year’s leaves with it. The yard is hard and gray, and it seems there is more dirt than grass.

I think that all this feeling came out in this sunflower painting – and to my surprise, I like it! I like the feeling of the last days of spring, of color washed away and muffled, but promising, promising. Friends and family have urged me to seek some darkness now and then. It’s hard to wrench myself from the blue skies and bright sunflower fields – but there is wisdom in what you all help me see.

Shawn Dell Joyce and I will be showing our work during the month of April at the Wallkill River School gallery. The opening reception is April 14 – but the show is up for the whole month. I hope you come by and check it out! The Wallkill River School is at 232 Route 17K (Ward St.) in Montgomery.

By Carrie Jacobson

I’ve been too busy lately, just too busy, and things have been slipping.

It’s OK,  it happens, but when it goes on for too long, it makes me a little crazy. It does truly feel like slipping, like being on a conveyor belt covered with oil, and doing a cartoon dance – whoops! whoops! WHOOPS! The world, with all its promises and commitments, is going by me faster than I can manage to go myself.

Of course, if it’s housework that slips, or yard work, cooking meals, or getting to the hair-cutter’s, that’s OK. But when it’s paintings, or work, or promises to friends, that’s not OK.

I wonder if this is part of what it feels like to get old — that you simply can’t get up the head of steam that you used to get up. That you can never catch up with the world, that it is always, and increasingly, going faster than you.

But now, the first big show of the season is behind me, and the next one is coming up — at the Wallkill River School gallery in Montgomery, starting April 1. The opening reception is April 14, from 5 to 7 p.m. Shawn Dell Joyce and I — both Zesters — are showing together.

Hope to not slip – and to see you there!

Heading Home

By Carrie Jacobson

I remember a man, from North Carolina, I think, who made only paintings of roads.

Well, I don’t remember the man, but I do remember the paintings. They were mostly big, and they were all luscious, and they were all of roads. They made me feel that I had gone somewhere, or I could go somewhere, and it was right in front of me, this adventure.

This was 20 years ago, and I didn’t have the nerve to ask that artist to let me pay over time, or barter something for one of those paintings – and how I wish I had!

I can see them still – and remember the feeling they instilled in me. And while this little painting is not like his, it does bring his to mind.

I still wish I had one of that man’s paintings. Or at least could remember his name.

***

If any of you are in the area of Marlborough, Mass. over March 16-18, stop by the convention center, say hello and check out my paintings in real life. For more on the show, click here to visit the Paradise City site.

Smokey!

By Carrie Jacobson

The spring birds are coming back, and it looks like our hawks are with them.

Last summer, a pair of red-shouldered hawks nested along our driveway. We were afraid, at first, for the other birds, but they seemed to do them no harm. We live beside a nature conservancy, and there’s plenty of food for raptors.

It was really fun to watch the baby hawks learn to fly – and we laughed at their efforts to learn how to hunt. Smokey, the dog in this painting, sat in a window for hours watching with us.

At first, I thought one of the babies was developmentally disabled, as I watched it trying to stomp on worms.

“Look,” I said to my husband, and pointed at the bird and its very strange behavior. “I’m afraid he’s not going to make it.”

But after a couple days of stomping around the yard, he caught a worm. Then he spent a couple days – whole days – sitting motionless on a branch outside Peter’s office. And on the afternoon of the second day, he swooped down and caught a mouse or a chipmunk or something, and he was off and running.

So it’s good to have the hawks back, along with the bluebirds, the robins and the mourning doves.

Spring!

Red Sunflowers

By Carrie Jacobson

Here are things that make me happy:

• My husband, our family and our families
• My friends
• God
• Painting
• My sobriety
• Strong weather of any kind
• The feeling of freedom, even if it’s fleeting, even if it’s just a taste
• A big sky, with no pesky trees
• Coffee
• Bacon
• Knowing something before others do
• A clean house
• A house that’s dirty because I’ve been so busy doing things
• The smell of dust rising in the early moments of a rain storm
• The spring songs of birds
• Going somewhere I’ve never been
• Change
• Sunflowers

And you? What makes you happy?