Oil on canvas, 12x36. Please contact me at carrieBjacobson@gmail.com for price and shipping information

By Carrie Jacobson

I’ve spent a day or so in fear this week, mostly, I think, because I’d promised myself that I would take it easy this week, and I don’t do well with leisure.

So today, instead of taking it easy and succumbing, I am taking action, and refinding my courage. It’s there, I know it. I can feel it. But like so much in life, it wanes and waxes.

Yesterday, I thought: Leave my job? Leave my family? Leave this place I know?

Today, I think: Why not? I have a dream, I have a goal, I have a mission. No one is going to waltz into my life and meet my goals for me. No one is going to dream my dreams. If I want this to work, if I want to leave my paying job, and make and sell art, and make this life happen, it’s up to me to do it.

It’s up to all of us to do it, isn’t it? And to not settle for anything less.

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.

Dunes, Ocracoke

By Carrie Jacobson

Finally, finally, I have been freed for a vacation!

I left home Friday at noon, and arrived in Cape Hatteras on Saturday. Sunday morning, I took the ferry to Ocracoke Island, and began painting.

This was the first painting I made on Sunday, and while I was making it, I began to understand some things about myself and what attracts me – or at least, what is attracting me on this trip.

You think “Outer Banks” and you think water and waves and beaches – or at least, I do. But on Sunday, I realized that for me, it’s not that. It’s the dunes and the sky.

Beaches and waves I can get in Westerly, R.I., near our Connecticut home.

Dunes – backbones of the earth, raw and rhythmic, dunes are what call me. Long skeins of dunes, under a huge and unbroken sky, these pull at my eye and my heart and all my senses.

I don’t pretend to understand this. But seeing them, and painting them makes me happy. And so, on this narrow, windswept island, I am painting dunes and not questioning my soul.

Black Dirt Overlook

By Carrie Jacobson
At the end of this week, I am heading to the Outer Banks of North Carolina, to get away, to see something new, to paint.

Since my job at the Record was eliminated, I’ve been able to take a lengthy painting trip every year. This year, I haven’t had the chance. The others have been three to four weeks, marathons of painting and discovery, exhausting and exhilarating and filled with energy to last me through the year.

This won’t be as long, but my hunger for it will give me in depth what I will be missing in length.

I do feel a little odd leaving New England at the height of autumn — but the colors aren’t bright enough to hold me — and I have seen this before. My eyes need something new.

I think all our eyes need something new, even if it is just for a glance, just for a moment. We need to look away, go away, see afar or microscopically close — and then, the middle distance looks fresh again.

I will do my best to remember to post a painting from North Carolina for next week’s Zest!

If you are interested in “Black Dirt Overlook,” which is oil on canvas, 18×36, please email me at carrieBjacobson@gmail.com

Passing Fancy

By Carrie Jacobson
Here in Connecticut, I live near a place called Buttonwood Farm. Some would argue that its claim to fame is its delicious homemade ice cream… I would argue that its sunflower fields and related charitable project is where its real glory is.

Every year in July, Buttonwood Farm grows acres and acres of sunflowers, cuts them and sells them, giving the funds to the Make-A-Wish foundation. This year, the farm raised more than $100,000.

The sunflower bouquets are a draw, and the ice cream is a draw, but the fields of sunflowers themselves are the real draw for me.

It is a fantastic sight to see, yellow and yellow and yellow, the sun come to earth on tall stalks, brightening even the grayest of days.

Painting sunflowers is about as fun as it gets for me, and so I’ve gone back day after day to paint. The first day, someone bought my painting before I had finished it. The painting I made the second day sold before it was dry. So far, I have the third and fourth-day paintings, and they are headed for the Mystic Outdoor Art Festival this weekend, in downtown Mystic, CT.

By the time I made this painting, late last week, the hot weather had done its work, withering leaves and forcing the flowers’ heavy heads to droop, their crown of petals to curl.

I think the sunflowers are gorgeous, even bowing and passing as they are here.

“Passing Fancy” is 12 inches by 48 inches, oil on canvas. If you’re interested in finding out about price and delivery, please email me at carrieBjacobson@gmail.com

Cape Cod Morning

By Carrie Jacobson

Where have I been the past couple weeks? Apparently I’ve been in some other time zone, some time zone in my head, where the passing of days is meaningless – even though it continues to happen.

As the days have traveled by, I have looked up and realized that yes, I’ve forgotten to post to Zest. And forgotten a slew of other things as well.

This week where I live, sunrise is at the earliest it will be for the entire summer. Sunset will continue to grow later, but the truth of the matter is that we are in that stretch, that sweet stretch, where the days arc out broadly, and dawns and dusks are as slow and gentle as they will be all year.

This time, though I am cold as winter on these 50-degree mornings, I am aware. This year, for the first time in ages, through the fog of the passing days and the missed appointments and the forgotten meetings, I am stretching out along these golden days, and savoring their length and light and fragile dawns and dusks.

The Fog Is Rising

By Carrie Jacobson

It seems to me that there was more fog when I was growing up. Sure there was, figuratively – but I mean really and truly in the weather sense of things.

Maybe that’s just my admittedly foggy memory – but now, it seems there’s fog only on rare autumn mornings, when the fog is over the rivers, the night’s cool dreams meeting the morning’s promise of heat.

When I was a kid, we had whole days of fog. Whole weeks, it seems, even. The fog would roll in off the water and blanket the area, and it was a regular thing, as regular as sunny mornings or rainy ones.

I remember living in Idaho and longing for the fog. Longing for days of rain, too. Longing for those gray New England stretches that of course, as a kid, I couldn’t stand. Spend a year in a place where it’s always sunny, and you’d be surprised what weather you’d yearn for.

At any rate, I had a great time making this painting. I feel like I’ve been freed – and I didn’t even know I was locked up.

Interested in this painting? It is oil on canvas, 36×48. Please contact me for price and delivery information: carrieBjacobson@gmail.com

Reservoir Sunrise

A pair of hawks is nesting in the trees along the driveway.

They are beautiful creatures, red-tailed hawks with enormous wingspans. They soar and circle effortlessly, their high-pitched cries tearing at the morning’s quiet.

I am excited to see them, excited to have them in our yard.

But I’m worried, too.

Every summer, bluebirds nest in houses along our back fence. Woodpeckers come for suet, gold finches for thistle, chickadees and cardinals and bluebirds, orioles and titmice and house finches, sparrows and bluejays and grosbeaks and more all visit our feeders.

And this year, they could be in danger.

Maybe the hawks are far enough from the feeders. Maybe the feeders are close enough to the house. Maybe there are enough moles and voles, chipmunks and squirrels, field mice and bunnies to keep the hawks happy. Maybe the hawks will go hunt in the nature preserve that borders our land.

But maybe they won’t.

I look at the hawks, soaring above the yard, and I feel something inside me that is as wild as they are, as predatory, as simple. It is the thing that fights for what I believe, that protects my daughter and grandchildren, that loves with abandon and strives with ferocity. It’s pretty deep in me, most of the time, but it is there, close enough to be summoned. Close enough to rise up on its own.

There is more in me that is like the yard birds, twittery and flighty, more tame than wild, willing to take a chance to get a good meal.

In most of us, I think, the balance is pretty much like that. The hawk is there, but down deep.

I will watch, this summer, and I will hope. I will move the feeders closer to the house. I will be ready to defend our yard birds. Everyone deserves to live, and I will do what I can to make sure that everyone does.

Interested in this painting? It’s oil on canvas, 24×24. Contact me at carrieBjacobson@gmail.com for price and delivery information.

Blue Dreams

In just a few minutes, I will go over to the Lighthouse Gallery – a lovely little gallery near my home here in Connecticut – take my show down, replace the paintings with other paintings, and drive what is essentially my Lighthouse/Wallkill River School Gallery show to Boston for the Paradise City show, a major, very high-end arts and craft show that I am a little stunned to have been accepted into.

Chris Rose, curator of the Lighthouse Gallery, came over to my studio the other day to select the replacement paintings, and he put some notions in my head.

One was to try (again) a limited palette. The other was to work on two paintings at the same time.

I like a challenge, and I like Chris, so I tried both – and am I glad I did. I really love this painting. I can’t say that I understand it or can explain it. I can’t say that it adheres to anything in reality, or to any rules – but it has a soft feeling that really appeals to me. Also I am a sucker for blue, so there you go.

I will post the other painting – this one’s opposite, soon.

These are versions of a painting that I think might be the best one I ever did, which was bought by a dear friend of mine at my show in February at the Wallkill River School Gallery in Montgomery. I am honored  that my friend bought that painting – and really, also, helped me paint this new one.

If you are interested in buying “Blue Dreams,” please contact me for price and shipping/delivery options. The painting is in oil, on a gallery-wrapped canvas, 24×24.