Harley

By Carrie Jacobson

Here are a few things I have learned while moving:

1. If at all possible, do not have an art studio on the second floor of a building. It’s nice to feel closer to the sky, but it’s really very much not nice to move All That Crap down several flights of steps.

2. If at all possible, do not be married to someone with ADD when you move. That person will simply not see that a closet is full of stuff, or that the basement is really nowhere near empty, or that, oh, yeah, I guess I did leave some of my fly-tying materials behind.

3. If at all possible, do not run your well nearly out of water while attempting to shock it to improve the water test you need to pass to actually close on the sale of the house. Especially do not do this during a drought.

4. If at all possible, do not schedule an art show in the middle of your move.

5. If at all possible, do not move in the middle of a sweltering summer.

6. If at all possible, just burn everything you own. Then move.

Want a portrait of your pet? It will look great in your home! Pet portraits make excellent presents, too … email me at carrieBjacobson@gmail.com for details.

Big Sky

By Carrie Jacobson

I have not thought of myself as a consumer.

I do have too many clothes, beautiful clothes that I love, and which are now nearly useless as, after more than two decades of going into a newsroom to work, I no longer have a 9-5 job.

I do have too many painting-related items, too many paintings and too much paint, if there really is such a thing.

I have cut my own personal library down to about 50 books. I have thrown away boxes and boxes and BOXES of mementos, newspaper clippings, stories and novels and essays I’ve written. I have donated clothes and shoes and linen tablecloths. I have given furniture and towels and sheets and rugs and blankets to my daughter. I have left good stuff at the end of the driveway, and passersby have happily taken it home with them.  I have sold my dead mother’s possessions at yard sales, and given them to groups holding yard sales, and wheedled and whined until my siblings and childhood friends took them – and still, when push came to shove, we barely managed to fit most of our stuff into a 26-foot-long moving van.

I sat on the deck and looked at the truck and burst into tears.

“I don’t want to be a person who has this much stuff,” I wailed to my daughter and my husband. They love me and generally don’t think I am crazy, though this episode might have dislodged their certainty a little. “We could burn the truck and still live fine in our new house!” I cried – and of course, I was right. We bought the house furnished, after all.

“What IS all of this stuff?” I cried. “What IS IT?”

At this point, I would like to come right out and say that a lot of it is my husband’s stuff. While I would like to live in a house with a bed and two chairs and a flower arrangement, he would like to have a library stuffed with books, walls rich with paintings and photographs and work rooms with the right materials and plenty of them.

So that is him, and that is his stuff.

I told myself that, this move, I would limit myself to one box of things. You know the things, the things it’s so hard to part with, and the things that are so hard to explain. I tried for one box, and think I ended with three – which is far better than the 10 or so I began with.

In the boxes are letters from my mother and poems my father wrote, and notes from friends and staffers. There’s a magic wand given to me by a friend whose birthday and mine fall on the same day. There’s Oscar the Seal, my favorite stuffed toy, which began life as a gift to my brother, but which, according to my mother, I took instantly, before brother Rand had a chance to see it.

There’s a photograph of me and my long-gone dog Gus, at the top of a mountain in Banff, Canada. There’s my Canadian Ski Instructors Alliance certification pin. There’s the oddly shaped box with my baby hospital bracelet, and another tiny box that holds a pin my grandfather won for working for decades at Dupont.

It was hard to get it down to three boxes. Hard to toss out plaques and awards I won in my years in newspapers. Hard to toss out papers I worked on that reported history. A couple of those papers even made history, and I threw them away, too. It was hard to toss out the paper reporting Mike Levine’s death, but I put it in the recycle bin, and instead, kept a rock from his gravesite.

I threw out notebooks and cracked cups I had treasured. I brought old paintings of mine to Goodwill. I recycled my journalism portfolios, gave a hundred  books to the library, donated my skis. I let go of a lot this time. I faced a lot this time.

This time, in spite of the 26-foot truck, I made a lot of choices and came to grips with a lot of truths. I won’t work in a newspaper again, at least not in any capacity that requires nice clothes. I won’t ski again, at least not to the extent of needing my own skis. I won’t reach out to friends I haven’t thought about in 20 years, though I certainly will never truly forget them.

This move is some sort of defining point in my life, and for once, I am facing up to it, and all the truth it holds.

**If you are interested in buying ‘Big Sky,’ please contact me at carrieBjacobson@gmail.com

Marlborough Pond

By Carrie Jacobson

It was nearly three weeks ago that I made a painting – that’s the longest I’ve gone without painting in my admittedly short but very full painting career.

And why? Lyme disease knocked me flat.

So when I finally had the energy and strength to go out and paint, I had to wonder whether I’d be able to. After all, painting came as a gift, unbidden and unexpected – and maybe it will go that way, too.

I needn’t have worried. My eyes, my ideas, my hands, they all worked as well or better than they had before the hiatus.

And I remain grateful.

Interested in this painting? Please feel free to drop me an email at carrieBjacobson@gmail.com

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.

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.