Sunflowers, Tuscany

By Carrie Jacobson

I went to sleep last night, and everything felt OK.

I got up this morning, and after I’d been working for a while, I realized that my back hurt, just under the shoulder blade on my left side.

I started painting professionally and posting paintings to my own blog, The Accidental Artist, a couple years ago.

I was doing something on my blog the other day, and looked at a screen and learned that I’d made 500 blog postings.

(That also means 500 paintings… in fact, it means well more than 500 paintings, as they are not all posted).

I woke up just a while ago, and it was springtime.

Now, it’s the last day of November.

How life happens while we are engaged in living!

***

Sunflowers, Tuscany: Oil on canvas, 30×40.

Please email me at carrieBjacobson@gmail.com for price and shipping/delivery information.

Nigel

By Carrie Jacobson

I am thankful today. I am thankful every day.

I am thankful to live in a world with sunshine and beauty. Thankful to have friends and family members I love, and who love me back, no matter what.

I am thankful for the dogs and cats who live with us, and who come into my life through painting.

I am thankful for the gift that painting is in my life, and for this amazing chance I’ve been given to start again, to start anew, at the age of 54.

I am thankful now to have a job, and an income, and to not be scared all the time.

I am thankful to be alive.

Petit Chien

The other night, honestly, I was feeling pretty low, and I’d been venting by sniping at Peter, who had seemed to be sulky and angry.

“Well you haven’t exactly been a bowl of sunshine these past few days, either,” he said.

Well, I hadn’t, I mournfully confessed, the tears rising. I was not enjoying my job. I hated being yanked around, told to do one thing one day and another thing the next. I was being pressured to finish the directory listings, like yesterday – a task I don’t like and am not good at. I don’t like this, I said, I don’t like this at all.

Most of all, I was feeling angry about the fact that these weeks of working have meant very little painting – and if I was looking at a future of very little painting, I was looking at a future I didn’t like much.

So what was I doing? Why was I working – in journalism, no less – when all I really want to do is paint?

I felt angry, I felt sad, I felt trapped, I felt sulky and whiny and miserable. I could hear my voice rising, and shaking, tears and frustration all wound together –

And then it all changed.

Just like that, I realized that I wasn’t going to quit this job, and so this, all this misery, all this whining, all this anger – it was just me, stamping my feet and jumping up and down, throwing a tantrum, crying “poor me.”

It was all optional, every bit of it.

The truth is, I have a job, with a paycheck and health insurance. Very soon, I am going to be done with the directory listings, and I’m going to be out in the community, meeting people and writing stories.

And I can make time to paint.

Sure, there will be many, many days when I have to do stuff I don’t want to do, when I have to follow instructions – even instructions I feel are stupid, pointless, hysterical. Yup. That’s why they’re paying me. That’s why it’s called work.

Peter and I, and our dogs, are worlds better off now than we were six weeks ago. And I am grateful, grateful beyond belief that I have an income, a way to make a living while I work to make a career.

——

It is not too late to commission me to make a painting for you for the holidays! Send me a photo – of a landscape, a beloved pet, a house, a garden that you love, and I will have a beautiful palette-knife painting for you within a few weeks. The commissions are rolling in, so do it sooner, rather than later! Email me at carrieBjacobson@gmail.com and we can get the process going.

Little Italy

By Carrie Jacobson

Everyone is busy, busy, busy! So I’ve come up with some ways to save time and energy.

1. Make insomnia your friend. If you wake up in the middle of the night, forget about going back to sleep. Just start working.

2. Sleep in your clothes. If you’re not married, or if you don’t really care, keep your shoes on, too.

3. Eat soft food. Cutting stuff up takes time!

4. Don’t listen to the radio. It takes too much psychic energy!

5. Never answer the phone for anything but a true emergency. Return calls only when you know the person won’t be there, and leave a message on voice mail.

6. Wear nothing with buttons or zippers. Pull on, pull off.

7. If you’re really pressed for time, shave your head. Imagine the hours you’ll save in the shower before your hair grows back!

This 4-inch by 4-inch painting is sold, but I have other miniatures (fast to paint!). To see more, check my blog, carriejacobson.blogspot.com

Rusty Refrigerator

I was in Cape Breton Island this summer, painting with a friend, when we encountered these cows on a breathtakingly beautiful road near Mabou.

We visited (thankfully briefly) with the man who owned them. On the rusty door of his rusty refrigerator, in his disturbingly unkempt home, were photos of crop circles he’d mowed into this very field, and thus the incongruent name of the painting.

It’s 30 by 40, and is thick with paint and surface texture. If you’re interested in hearing details of price and shipping or delivery, please send me an email at carrieBjacobson@gmail.com

Aja

This is the other painting I made at the Deerpark Family Fun Day a couple weeks ago. Aja is in the Port Jervis/Deerpark Humane Society shelter, and she is up for adoption. She’s a sweet dog, with the most hopeful expression on her face. Maybe you’d like to adopt her? If you do, I bet you could get this painting to go with her… Here’s the shelter’s web address: http://www.pjhumane.org/

There’s something about a shelter animal that pulls at the heart, even more than other animals do. It has always seemed to me that the shelter animals remember, and know that they’re better off, and treasure the change that you have made in their lives.

Of course, they come with their issues – but who doesn’t?

If you have room in your home or in your heart for a shelter animal, go out and get one. You will find love and company and, chances are, a true heart.

If you would like me to paint a portrait of your pet (Christmas is coming! Hanukkah is coming!), send me an email at carrieBjacobson@gmail.com

Frack

On Saturday, I painted in the art tent at the Deerpark Family Festival.

It was a beautiful day, and Deerpark residents made a good showing. I saw old friends and neighbors, met new friends, saw beautiful art, listened to music (even danced a little, with a woman who spent her afternoon kicking up her heels), and I had a great time.

I made two paintings to donate to the Port Jervis/Deerpark Humane Society. Frick, above, is one of them. The other, you will see next week. You can see them both in person, if you visit the Humane Society’s tent next Sunday at the Fall Foliage Festival in downtown Port Jervis.

The donations are part of the Art for Shelter Animals Project, a group I co-founded and continue to run. You can check out our blog at artforshelteranimals.blogspot.com.

Here’s how it works: You make a portrait of an animal in your local shelter or with a local rescue group, and then donate the art to the shelter or rescue group. Before you give it to them, you take a photo and send it to me, and I will upload it to the blog and write a little about you, and a little about the recipient group.

The shelter or rescue group can do whatever it wants with the art. They can sell it, auction it, reprint it on tote bags (this idea came from a young shelter worker, Michaela, who befriended me on Saturday), give it as an inducement for adoption, or for volunteer work – or they can just use the art to make their shelter more attractive. What they do with it is up to them.

In the summer, Susan Miiller, an artist who lives in Deerpark, engineered a small-works animal show in a doctor’s office in Port. Art for Shelter Animals Project painters from around the world sent pieces to be in the show. If they sold, the entire price went to the shelter. If they didn’t sell, the pieces went to the shelter.

My paintings on Sunday were really part of that show.

I love our home here in Connecticut. I love being near my family. I love not living beside a river with a temper (we lived on the banks of the Neversink in Meyers Grove). But I loved living in Orange County, too, and I miss it. Painting in the festival, visiting my old neighbors and neighborhood, and seeing again – and with fresh eyes – the beauty of the region made me miss my old home even more.

But life takes you where it takes you. And that’s OK with me.

Autumn Sky

I look up from the kitchen table when I hear the whir of a hummingbird outside the screen door. He’s hanging there, looking in, or watching me, or  looking at his reflection in the glass beside the door.

Or maybe, just maybe, he’s saying goodbye.

Last summer, Peter told me he was sitting at his desk when a hummingbird came up to the office window – something they never do – and hung in the air, looking him full in the face, then zoomed off. That was the last he saw of the hummers last year. It was Sept. 15.

The hummingbirds amused us all summer, darting and fighting and zooming around the deck. Now they’re moving south. The bluebirds are long gone, the robins, too. Most of the goldfinches have left, though some will spend the winter. In the gardens, the weeds have won at last, and here and there, trees are turning red and gold. Summer is slipping off, into the cool mornings and the cool evenings.

On the beach a few days ago, fall rolled in on dark clouds and darker water, and the sweet, short sun of a September day. Seagulls turned and whirled and dove for fish, and the beach was empty, the summer crowds gone home, and peace come in their wake.

Today is Sept. 12, my mother’s birthday. Autumn was her favorite time of year, and she would have loved this one, with its brilliant skies and its golden days and its bright, happy promises.

If you’d like to buy this painting, please email me at carrieBjacobson@gmail.com for price and delivery information

Buttons

Little Buttons here was at one end of the leash, and Wanda, his owner, was at the other, when I met them, in Margaree Forks on Cape Breton Island this summer.

A painting friend and I toured the Atlantic provinces for three weeks, exploring, seeing, ooohing and aahing, and mostly, painting – and laughing, too. We met Buttons at a point of hilarity that was pretty much unrivaled through the trip.

We were trying to be frugal, and so, while we did stay in hotels, we tried to eat food from grocery stores instead of restaurants.  But this night, in the urban mecca of Margaree Forks, we arrived moments after the grocery store closed.

There were no restaurants in town, and we were hungry.

The owner of the hotel, a not-so-ebullient German named Werner, grouchily informed us – after arguing with us that the grocery store was open (we’d seen the last one out lock the door) – that if we drove to Northeast Margaree, we would find a gas station where we could get a couple slices of pizza.

Werner made it sound like Northeast Margaree was just to the northeast of Margaree Forks. Well, it was, but about 30 miles to the northeast.

We got to the gas station… and the pizza was gone for the day. So we got ice cream instead. But by the time we got back to the hotel, we were hungry again.

In the cooler, we had bread, cheese and CheezWiz … and so we had cheese-and-CheezWiz sandwiches.

For some reason, this struck us as absolutely hilarious, and while we were eating our delicious meal and laughing about it, we looked up and saw the cutest little dog ever. It was Buttons, and he and Wanda had heard us laughing (well, all of Margaree Forks had probably heard us, as we’d left the door to the room open). Wanda took pity on us, left Buttons with us for a while (OK, I admit it, I begged her to leave him), went back to her room and returned with muffins for us.

We talked and laughed, and hugged Buttons, and had muffins for dessert, after our gourmet meal. It was a fun evening indeed.

If you’d like me to make a portrait of your pet, send me an email at carrieBjacobson@gmail.com