Broadway and its reference image – November 15, 2023

Here’s another painting (top) and its photo inspiration. This one – named “Broadway” – 22″x30″ I painted this year. It was chosen to be part of the California Watercolor Association’s National Exhibition early next year.- 2024. This year it’s an online show – everyone can see.

The photo I painted from (bottom) was collaged from among the other photos. I pulled elements from several of them – starting with the one in the upper left. I fell in love with the blue and green reflected on our dining room table. The story of  the images and the painting is here.

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Paintings and the images they came from – November 14, 2023

“Southside Lily Pond” and the image that I used to paint it – in 2008.

Hi everyone!

I was updating my website with a couple of new paintings yesterday and realized it’s been two YEARS since I’ve shared something here with you. I have been using my voice on a new-ish occasional podcast more than I have been writing journal entries. I had the sense, though, that it’s high time for me to show up here, too.

Then, as the amazing mystery of the universe goes, I received an email this morning from someone asking if I had the reference images that I used to create my paintings, and that she’d be interested in seeing them side-by-side. Boy, do I have them – a whole library, every single one.

Ding! Ding! Went the bell. How about a journal entry? No amount of voice can tell you what photos can.

I thought I’d share a few oldies. When I first started painting in the middle-aughts (2004-2008) I had much younger eyes and lesser technical abilities. Were digital photos yet a thing? I seem to remember getting a CD with images along with the sets of prints from my film photos from Longs Drugs.  I digress…

I painted full sheet paintings – 22″x30″ – looking only at 4″x6″ prints! No zooming, no editing. As you can see, I cropped by folding the photo.  As low tech as you can get.

These paintings came through after I had found my sea legs and could think about navigating the wild waters of watercolor. The most prominent and universal differences between image and painting:  the paintings are lighter – and clearer. There can be a sort of mushiness in a photo that the artist brain clarifies by finding and deliberately painting edges. There IS a reason to paint, even representationally, somewhat photo-realisitcally, as I do. The end result is potentially much more compelling. That’s my claim and I’ll go to the mat to defend it!

All of these panntings have their stories. If you want to know about the origins of the images and paintings, it’s all there in my Gallery.

Here’s the one I called “Paris Roses.” Painted in 2005, it’s a full sheet. It’s also the only image I’ve painted more than once. The bottom panting is larger, 26″x41″ and came through 15 years later – during the Pandemic lockdown – on gessoed paper, so the texture and effect is its own thing.   It’s called “Love.” Interesting to see how much more I need vibrancy now.

Both of these paintings are in the Roses Gallery.

Another super-favorite is “Twin Dahlias.”  Painted in 2007 and is 22″x30.”  I cropped this from both ends.

This one is in the Other Flowers Gallery.

Next comes Reach.  Also painted in 2007, also a full sheet.  THIS one was painted looking at a section of a 4″x6″ photo.  My funky crop was a cut-out of an old white envelope.  I decided to de-clutter the painting by leaving out the rose vine in the upper left. The intensity of the sky has its story – you can read about it in the Roses Gallery.

This last one I called “Morning Shine.”  A full sheet yet again.  Painted in 2010.  I let myself really make the background painterly. I remember having fun wtih it, inlcuding rose and blue, echoing the colors in the subject, along with the yellow ochery colors of the house behind the camelia.   In this painting I can see the starting of my obsession with light.  I did my best to paint the light bouncing off the leaves.  See how much less “mushy” the painting is, as compared with the photo?

This was fun!  Let me know if you’d like to see more.  As the years have evolved my paintings, I use Photoshop to compose quite a bit.  Some images I’ve painted from are so much more than those captured by my camera.

Thanks, Liza, for the inspiration!

Love to all –

Cara

Inspired by Joseph Raffael – December 2, 2021

The finished painting on my kitchen counter. Each square is about 5 1/2″ and the over all is about 34″ square.

I learned that he was gone via a text from Patti:  “Did you see that Joseph Raffael passed away?”

Patti Sulewski is a beautiful artist and beautiful person from Auburn, WA who tracked me down during the pandemic. She joined us on Zoom when we were only meeting there.  She learned of Joseph Raffael and his work on our Zoom sessions.  And like many of us, she became a big fan.

Patti texted – “I’m sad – no more Joseph paintings.”

The stream of beauty and aliveness that this one singular creator gave the world has come to its end.

I wrote this on the condolence page on his website:

Joseph and his art were towering figures for most of my life.  His paintings are a legacy of the way he saw and appreciated beauty and are an enormous gift to humanity.  I am grateful beyond measure for his giant spirit and the inspiration his art has given to me and so many other painters, especially watercolorists, to make our own beauty.  I wonder if he ever knew how much permission he gave us to just go ahead and paint beautiful flowers with washy colors.  Joseph, I hope you are in peace with Matthew and Lannis.

I wrote a post several years ago where I share my connection to his life and work throughout my life.  I am painting beauty (as I see it) in watercolor, largely because of the inspiration I received from his paintings.  This inspiration is shared by my mom, Niz and it ripples out through the artists who all paint with me in Larkspur. 

We all love his paintings, which inspired us to respond in the way we know best – by painting.  The idea came for each of us to take a small piece of one of his paintings and paint it ourselves.  We poured over the books, exhibition catalogs and artist magazines for a section of a painting.  The aim was to not paint a “thing” per se, nothing in its entirety, so that no one square would grab the eye too much.  

The result is 36 5 1/2″ squares, each the work of 29 artists (some of us painted two) – of varying degrees of experience and differing styles. 

The most common response amongst us, to having done this, was how intricate his paintings were and how fascinating it was to sort of get inside his creative mind by re-tracing his brush strokes – each in our own way.

I love that there is a full sampling of his work – older work as well as one he painted this year.  Flowers (of course) but also, water, fish, shells, his pets, and his wife Lannis all show up here.  My mom, Niz painted the last square – a piece of one of his colorful borders. 

Thank you to everyone who participated in this project – and of course to Joesph Raffael for being the reason for it all.

Here are a few more photos of the painting, from interesting angles.

October 1, 2019 – Bewitched by beauty

Fascination – 29″x29″ – Watercolor on Paper

Inspiration and energy to make these watercolor paintings have been relatively steady resources in the past dozen or more years. I have a folder of “candidates” – photos I’ve taken that have given me the message they are worth spending my time on. Most of the time when going through this folder, looking at all these beautiful pictures, I can imagine myself jumping in to start painting pretty much any one of them. My problem is not having enough time.

But after finishing “Aria” in July, I was fresh out of something to paint and a look through my candidates left me totally flat. I spent 2 or 3 days digging through the rest of my image library looking for something that I may have overlooked. I never know when something from a while ago will reach out and grab me by the throat (ok, by the heart) – as it did with both “Sherose” and “Lavish.” Even there… nothing.

The thoughts were scary. Uh, oh. What if the inspiration well has run dry? What if I can’t paint flowers, fruit – all the stuff I’ve loved to paint for two decades – anymore, then what?

Then I went to my friend Samantha Davidson’s. Sam gives the most heavenly facials on Earth. On my way out the door, all tension drained from me, I saw this amazing faceted glass bowl, about the size of a cantaloupe, on her dining room table. It had a single stem of a pink hydrangea in it. The way the squares of glass caught and reflected the light, all the colors and iridescence! My gosh! It HAD to be painted!

Sam happily lent it to me. I came home and found a few things in the garden, waited for the sun to dip a lower in the sky and took several dozen photos. It felt great to come alive, to have something I couldn’t wait to paint!

Before and after the photoshopping work.

I let myself pull out all the stops in Photoshop: use the image with the most colors in the pieces of glass, and then add in a few more; use the one that had a break in the flowers to keep it from being too heavy, add a leaf at the top to carry the eye skyward, and of course shift the colors to give myself maximum joy.

As I watched myself paint the glass itself, I realized how important it is to really paint what I see. The grid-like, linear aspect of this would make it really easy for my left brain to jump in and “organize” it all. In order to make it look real and alive, I had to let the uneven borders, bending lines and diminishing sizes and proportions be as they were, in order for it to really live.

Painting while camping at the Russian River!

Our Tahoe vacation was busier and more distracted than normal, so I came home having made very little progress and with a fire under my butt to get it finished in time for the Sausalito Art Festival. I took it on a camping trip in mid-August and even painted it on the picnic table in our dusty Russian River campsite, by (LED) lantern until well past dark. I was determined to get it done!

Somewhere in the last couple of days working on it the title sifted in. The root of the word “fascinate” in Latin is connected to “spell” and “witchcraft.” When overcome by the hunger, the need to paint something like I did this one, I do feel bewitched. That the word “facet” has a similar sound doesn’t hurt either. Here it is – meet “Fascination.”

July 10, 2019 – Riding the waves of creative inspiration

This is an addition to the “I Love Paris + Roses” vein that runs through my work. After the not-to-be-repeated emergence of Eternal, the “clock painting” in 2015, I’ve been in the dark as to what would come next. I liked the circular motif of Eternal, which brought up the idea of a rose window from a church/cathedral. For a long time I’ve loved the pattern of the rose window in Sainte Chapelle, the little church that is ensconced within the walls of the Palais de Justice (Hall of Justice) on Ile de la Cite – the opposite side of the island from Notre Dame de Paris. Unlike many (most?) rose windows it’s not a radiating pattern. Its pattern is called “flamboyant” because it evokes flames.

In the years before landing on this idea, I’ve played around with other images to combine with this lovely tracery – including a version of my self-portrait. This particular image of roses was from the same garden – the Jardin de Plantes as “Paris Roses” that I painted in 2005. I took it on our trip in the summer of 2017 and it was the latest iteration of images I’d put “behind” this window.

For some unknown reason, I was overtaken by a burning need to jump into it on Friday April 12, 2019. I had just finished “Lavish” – which had received such enormous praise that I was almost frozen in how I’d follow it. I had drawn and started on a rose and sage still life, but it wasn’t grabbing me enough to keep me from the impulse to set it aside.

After my Friday group ended, I projected and drew a quarter of the design on a piece of plain paper and then spent 2 hours cleaning up the drawing – and then took a photo of it. Over the weekend my job was to use Photoshop to remove all the white paper in the spaces between the tracery– and further cleaning up the drawing, before replicating it to make a complete circle/square. After superimposing on the new rose image, I drew it on Sunday morning and started in on the painting Sunday evening.

Late morning Monday, the 15th, I my dad called my cell phone asking if I’d heard the news about Notre Dame. I’m so glad it was my gentle, loving, protective papa who told me that it was on fire. At this point, it was still feared that it would not be saved. No, no, no! Like many of us, I plunged into grief at the thought of a world without Our Lady, without Notre Dame de Paris!

The intense emotion spurred me to paint with even more devotion. Though it’s not the design from one of Notre Dame’s rose windows, the whole thing felt too close to not be connected up somehow.

I painted it in a particular sequence – first the four corners, then the nooks between the six heart shapes that make up the circle, then the hearts, one by one – and finally the star shape in the center – while leaving all the tracery white – no masking, just painting around. It took patience and dedication to make sure that all the colors and intensities were such that it appeared to be one image “behind” the white.

My initial plan was to leave the white – I wanted it to be feminine and lace-like. But once painted, it just looked unfinished. The tracery needed a purpose. Figuring out what to do though, didn’t readily come. I made an attempt to make it look pearly with pale washes of blue, pink and yellow. Then I took an unfortunate foray with iridescent, silvery paint – which I then paid hell getting it (almost) all off. The last was an attempt at darker rainbow-ish colors. Nope, nope, nope! Now what?!

God bless the creative process and the mysterious source of ideas! It came to me to cover the corners and edges with a multi-colored brownish-ness that would evoke earth, with progressively lighter greens emerging – like vines growing towards the light in the middle. I had a new plan.

Doing the final painting was fun and easy. No image to look at – just mixing and blending colors. I let the playful part of me lightly brush some gold iridescent paint in the center. It’s subtle, but there.

The search for a one-word name had me bouncing back and forth between “Revelation” and “Remembrance.” The latter referring to the Sufi practice I’d learned from Mark Silver – to reconnect our hearts with the Divine. It also took me back to where I started this piece – with my heart very close to Notre Dame – Our Lady.

Then, just as I was finishing it, a dear friend Carol Torresan, very unexpectedly passed away, washing us all over with how precious life is, and how precarious it can be.

For Carol, for Notre Dame, for the Sacred Feminine, the force that grows from the earth toward the light: Remembrance.

April, 22, 2019 – Honoring Home

On Saturday the commissioned diptych I painted at the start of the year went home. Chris and Bob came over to see the piece for the first time and take it down south with them. Here’s the story from my portfolio gallery:

Chris and Bob are dear friends from when we were regular members of the Fairfax Community Church. And though we are dear to each other, once sharing church community was no longer part of our lives, we didn’t see each other much. So it was a lovely surprise to hear from Chris in the fall of 2018 that they wanted to talk to me about commissioning a painting.

Once we talked, I heard the news that they had made a big decision to move to San Diego County to be near their kids who’ve settled there. After more than 30 years in their house in Woodacre, they were really going to miss it – and the big persimmon tree in their front yard. They had seen my persimmon paintings and thought I’d be just the right artist to capture the spirit of their tree.

We quickly set up for me to come take photos – it’s a short time while the fruit is ripe and there are still bright orange leaves on the tree. Both Chris and Bob were home when I arrived. Bob set up a ladder, and then attended it while I climbed up to where the fruit was. My first photo-taking session was in the early evening and there was just barely enough light coming through the tree to light up the leaves; sunlight does amazing things to their color and it wasn’t quite there. But, by the time I came back a few days later, the smoke from the terrible fire in Paradise, California had drifted down to the Bay Area and I was worried that we’d missed our moment! Thankfully, the smoke hadn’t yet gotten bad enough to block the sun and I was able to get a bunch of great shots in the mid-morning light.

While I was there, they shared their inspiration: the fruit and brightly colored leaves, of course; Bob also wanted to see the craggy bark of the trunk and they would love to have their view of the Woodacre hills behind it all. Using a picture Chris took the previous spring of the hills (because the smoke had taken the blue out of the skies) I went to work in Photoshop creating a collage of all the elements they spoke of. Then the three of us sat together to review and play some more. After one more editing session, giving them three options – one of which was “it” – I was ready to paint. I was happy with what we came up with too – it was my first diptych. We all appreciated that, though they are a pair, each could stand on its own just fine.

Online classes, Holiday Open Studios and Christmas kept me from it; I started in just before the New Year. I painted in stages as I often do: the sky, then the hills, then the trunk and branches, all those leaves and finally the fruit. I’d never taken on this level of detail in a piece like this. Not only was there the texture of the bark and the pattern of the trees on the hills, but all those leaves with their veins! Each part of it was fun and challenging, but I had to work with myself a lot to stay out of overwhelm. By the beginning of March I was done – a bit more than two months.

In the meantime, their house was on the market and they’d moved south. Since, I really wanted for Bob and Chris to be together (with me) to see it, we had to hold off until Easter weekend (2019). And because they wanted it to see it first in person, I didn’t share it online. Other than those who’ve watched me paint it, Chris and Bob were going to be the first to see it.

Easter Saturday morning they came to see the two paintings where I had them over the fireplace. The reaction was worth the wait. Smiles, exclamations of joy and a little tear – affirmed that their intention and my efforts resulted in a piece of art that memorialized their home here for their new home there.

I grew up in this place – the hamlet of Woodacre in the San Geronimo Valley. My mom and dad moved our family there in 1963 before my two younger brothers were born. My mom and dad still live in the direction of the view in these paintings. It feels like the shape of these hills are baked into my DNA. So, though I had played with loftier, spiritual ideas for the title of this piece, the right name was simple: Woodacre.

I always feel gratitude as I finish a painting – to have the privilege to do what I do. But this was bigger, fuller, more meaningful. Thank you Chris and Bob for entrusting me to honor your love of Woodacre.