Fresh
July 14, 2010 by Janice · 5 Comments
Handmade Japanese Papers, Janice Cartier, July 2010
Fresh. Handmade. And whispering. Beckoning like a lover. I have sanguine conté, charcoal and graphite fairly chomping at the bit. We can even haul out some French or some Japanese ink. I have a bit of those. and some quiet time.
I have this urge to make a set of drawings, tangles of trees, dapples of light. Quiet spots you have to make an effort to get to, off the beaten path.
I call them sanctuaries.
Spots I’ve walked and places I ‘ve paused…because there was for that moment something…
Something about them,
something
more
So I stopped..and took them in.
Breathed them in deeply.
Lines…
Lines pulled across the tooth of a page.
gentle deposits of pigment, in blood red that goes all the way back to the Renaissance. Bits of burnt wood dating to caveman times, charcoal resting gently on the page…
pencil tracks left
that trace
An undulating connection
a give and take…
in that moment and this one
Timeless and yet
a breath
A fresh breath in time
Calls to me
Come on…
Drawing,
seeking sublime
And bringing that into being..
On handmade paper that whispers…
Come on
Play with me.
You know you want to.
the artist smiles…
Yes. I do.
Change and Little Boxes
July 5, 2010 by Janice · 3 Comments
Look inside those little boxes. Just look at all the swirly, moving goodness inside each one. And then look how contained they are. How clean the space between them.
I like them.
A lot.
Every time I look at them.
Now live in this, this excited, crazy making place of question:
How to set them free to become what I envision?
Because I love them as they are. I find that crisp clean-ness ever so thrilling.
A kind of strength if you will, harboring very delicious richness.
Structure.
Tension of containment.
Vision.
A wishing.
And I know that next comes a whole lot of possible messy.
The messiness of executing a vision.
Can get awkward.
Can be confusing.
Can be not at all what we think it is going to be.
Can be whole lots and lots of fun.
Can be scary.
and unexpected..
and exhausting,
And invigorating..
Yep.
Messy and uncertain, living in the question.
But the vision of what they want to be,
The concept the heart behind them
Sees and feels and wants
Beyond almost anything in the world
That thing they want to be..
Will help pull them
Irresistibly
Along.
It’s Organizing Monday, and I am organizing nothing, except feeling that energy in them. And looking in that heart. Yep… these.. these little boxes.. I love them dearly.
And that alone is kind of exciting.
The artist smiles.
Truly.
Silly little boxes are making me smile as if they contain a key…
A Working Coast
June 23, 2010 by Janice · Leave a Comment
I paint. But part of my day is spent monitoring what is going on at my source. I try not to check any more than I have to. This is ground my boots have intimately walked. It is painful to see. Personally painful.
And I’ve lived massive destruction I don’t need a third party to tell me what that’s going to be or what it’s like and how long it can take to recover.
Recovery. Is a fragile thing in the region.
I see headlines, images, updates. And responses.
After Katrina, I kept quiet.
It’s personal. Private.
Massively painful.
Extensive.
And here we are again. So soon.
And on an already stressed ecosystem and population.
That was 90,000 square miles of destruction.. not to mention the damage in the Gulf to rigs and boating operations.
Nature bounced back the quickest in some parts.
It may take an incredibly long amount of time to do that this time.
But here’s what I want to say.
People are an ecosystem too.
And the dominoes are carefully arranged.. and already stressed to the limits and beyond.
Look for balance, not reaction..when you respond to those headlines and put your safe from a distance two cents in. We hear you. And it adds to the pain. Look a little closer, do a little work. Maybe see what the issues really are for the people who get up every day , wade through this and do the work for you.
It’s just too easy in this country and has become a toxic sport.. to go for the easy shot, the quick fix, or a game like knee jerk response…
That’s how we got here in the first place.
But there are lives at stake.
And people who really care and deal day to day .
They are oiled birds too.
Break that pattern, do something different.
Find your place..and your compassion.
Then do something real.
That’s all I wanted to say.
The paint flowed freely yesterday afternoon.
I like this kisses thing.
The artist smiles.
Keep it simple, silly. Just exquisitely simple.
Kisses
June 21, 2010 by Janice · 3 Comments
Moleskine Sketch, Photos, Tools, Janice Cartier, June 2010
Kisses. My only directive for the week,. Keep it simple, exquisitely simple this week.
The artist smiles.
Kisses are nice after all, aren’t they?
I gaze at my workload…
And then back to this, my favorite piece of David Bates sculpture. It lives downtown. Yes, in the Dallas Museum of Art. I met it a few years ago on a trip here. I met it before I met David in person at the Ogden Museum in New Orleans.
Fantastic sculpture. Very nice man. We have a lot in common. And a lot, not.
He chisels out paint strokes on his canvases almost like he chisels and hammers wood.
My work isn’t like that. But our source and our intentions sometimes share common ground.
I find his work scrumptious. Modern. Soulful.
I keep this little pic around to remind me. Simple. Look what he made out of simple and how it breathes. I must go visit it again soon. This piece will stand against any Picasso..or Braque. Could sit comfortably right in the middle of their world. But it is decidedly David’s work. And he is right here in Texas. Living and breathing now. I think he has a dog.
He reaches back, is very aware of the big picture, and stays very present to go forward.
Sometimes simply. One small board, one small block at a time to make a whole person. I’ve seen pictures of his garage. It has lots of oddments strewn. But look, he found a little one, perfect.. that can be…a nose. Ahh here… perhaps an arm… Just one simple thing after another.
And look how wonderfully that turned out.
So this week?
Kisses.
How marvelous would that be to just kiss the work you love each and every day?
Wouldn’t that build beautiful memories?
Wouldn’t that be a splendid thing,
If passion and work
Were a simple simple thing?
As simple as a kiss?
Now.. that just makes me smile and WANT to get working..
The artist is chuckling.
Ahh…It’s Organizing Monday and that’s what I am organizing. To bring my passion to that very tall stack of tasks.. and marvel in the least and little parts.
See if that makes this whole week… something .. a little more exceptional…
How about you? Easy to get bogged down in the very bigness of it all?
Love At First Sight
June 14, 2010 by Janice · 4 Comments
Photo by Phillip Macdiarmid/Getty Images Europe
I fell hard in love with this image the first time I saw it this spring and searched madly to find out more. I had seen bits of Roni Horn’s work thanks to Hauser and Wirth. A pink cube of glass. In a gorgeous light filled space. Simple in design, exquisitely fabricated and somehow perfectly presented right there.
Hm.
An idea had been kicking around in my head with some of my small inquiries. I have some sketches, but the form had escaped me.
Perhaps writers go for a walk, kick at leaves, or pebbles along the way until the verse is nudged into what it wants to be. Or perhaps a scientist tinkers in the lab, let’s try this or that and see what comes of it.
Artists sometimes wander and look. At timeless pieces, or newly made, visit studios, or read what art writers are writing. Look a trails others leave. We are part of a rich fabric of context. I personally love that the Met has been endowed with this. I wish I could tell you what happens to me when I gaze at ancient Chinese bronzes. Or neolithic art. A sigh and an uptick both come cozy to my heart.
Art for me is a professional calling. As much as I try to escape that at times, it would be idiotically stupid to succeed. It’s who I am. How I view the world. But it isn’t narrowing. Quite the opposite. It’s a huge window on our world like science or philosophy. So wandering among the history of it, or the right nowness of it, is part of what I do. It can be overwhelming.
If you let it.
My little sketch of what if….
can pale in comparison…
With all that has come before or is now in the making.
Unless you realize
that it all begins with a small what if.
Every effort, every piece, every ism..begins that way.
And then the chill bumps start..
the artist smiles
Our little sketches of what if’s
Are our membership cards
into this ancient and enduring practice.
And my heart settles once again with the sheer richness of that.
And you want to honor the practice.
When I see something like this magnificent pink glass cube, I marvel at how simple and how complex it all can be. How diverse and how full of wonder… and I look at my sketches… my small inquiries.. and think…
Perhaps ….
glass
Birds…like fossils..
in and out of glass…
Maybe…
And I wander on…
Totally in love with this pink cube and what it took to make it.
I am looking for fabricators…and prices…
Another path of passion.
That’s just one more thing I am Organizing on this Monday. Sigh. The artist looks at her stack of tasks…
Then back to this.
It’s important to keep our dreams and loves in mind.
Especially on Mondays.
How about you? Got a touchstone for a dream? Something you are working on?
Resilience
June 11, 2010 by Janice · 1 Comment
Watercolor, 300lb D'Arches Paper, Janice Cartier, June 2010
Destruction and construction are interlocked parts of creation. So is deciding. I’ve kept my hands off this piece for a week. Walked past it again and again. Of course news images are juxtaposed upon it in my mind.
Keeping this clean has become part of the painting process. I mentioned that struggle before.
Last night I saw a friend of mine on the news…calm collected informed and insistent….as he generally is in public…and heard an interesting thing….that we may just step up and do something that has been needed for a long time. Flood the wetlands with the Mississippi River.
And my heart lifted.
It would be that hard choice . You know the one to get out of nature’s way. Let it do what it used to do in a constructive way.
Sacrifice for a huge gain.
Flow to push the bad stuff out…
Using source to heal source….
The artist smiles…art imitates life imitates art?
So I will continue on this piece
With clean…
Exhale lovely greys of dying fronds in that white space on the right, in their normal life span..
And capture fractures of light in the blues,
And dapples of gold
As intended…
Use my brush as boom…
And leave room
For resilience.
I have no doubt that it’s going to be ugly enough out there for some time…
And I am saying no, this is mine.. you don’t get this.
Not here.
Not now.
It’s too magical, too worthy,
I’m saving space for it to bloom
This afternoon.
Flooding it with love and color…
Flow…
Decisions and resilience.
I tend to like those going to a constructive effort.
Now can we get a Naughty Margarita, it’s thirsty work…but not not doable.
Losing Louisiana
June 2, 2010 by Janice · 12 Comments
60" x 80" Watercolor Diptych on D'Arches Paper
That was the name of the show. The invitational show by the Grande Isle Community this painting hung in. “Unknown Territory”, the subtitle. I had won an award at one of their annual competitions on the island so I was asked to please contribute some things for their selection. For this special show. To raise awareness around America’s Wetlands. And for the possibility of more press, they would have the show in New Orleans. This is what they chose. The painting…Graveyard Field Falls off the Blue Ridge Parkway, named for the unusual coffin shaped berms dotting the approach to the falls.These are the woods surrounding the water..always wetlands..the artist smiles..
It was actually painted in Santa Fe on my friend Shelley’s dining room table. My view? A Santa Fe courtyard filled with cactus and a beautiful sculpture of an Indian maiden.. coyote fences out the kitchen window.. a western windmill not far away.
But the trees and the woods? I was within them earlier in June of that year with one of my oldest and dearest friends while I tried to recover. Another trip into New Orleans. A week of packing up under strictest orders not to stay more than a week…my lungs would barely tolerate that. I have fled New Orleans in crisis three times since the storm, each one requiring months of recovery. Silly lungs. Silly toxic stew the hurricane stirred up.
But I am partial to breathing. So I stay away.
Thing is…
Whether I am there or not, there breathes into my paintings.
If you look closely in this painting, you will see magnolias escaping into the sky behind the branches like so many souls fleeing into heaven, into strange territories, into a life to make over.
They appeared spontaneously while I painted at that dinner table in Santa Fe. Just happened from the brush. It is a large painting…intertwined, interconnected…magnolias painted in a western desert. It was painted before I knew that the exile would go on so long…
It went back.
It hangs in the Director’s office at the Arts Council of New Orleans. On loan. They are keeping it safe.
I had hoped to go back myself.
The oil?
The oil that would now coat my boots as I walk the barrier islands I formerly walked, the bottomlands I painted.. the source…my source…
Would kill me in a heartbeat…
Exiled.
I can get out of my source,
I can’t get my source out of me.
And I can’t seem to paint this week. Although angry red and operatic washes intrude in my head, elegies..longing for something I can’t have…
Do you know how tired I am of dealing with death?
Do you know how weird and horribly wrong, all this feels?
And yet, how familiar?
How the world for me, is so strange and foreign?
So removed, when so much room inside is taken up with this?
That I have to practice non attachment everyday, just to balance it all?
Art is a living breathing thing and I am living events that are so big…finding the little in them takes everything I ‘ve got.
How do I get it out? Are there enough words, is there enough paint?
I haven’t found it yet.
I want to paint more than this, I want to paint whatever is before me, with a fresh and vigorous heart…it’s not happening like that. It’s not presenting that way…and believe me I am trying…
And I know this is not how I usually write. I don’t like this at all.
I find it repugnant…
I am looking for my own grace amid a struggle…
but to say nothing..to say nothing about how much this alters everything..everything..again
is to abandon the people on the frontlines..
It’s bad enough I have to have clean boots in what will be another war, the first recovery not even nearly completed…and now this…
It is a bit much.. I am trying to quickly process through the stages of grief and get to the doing part..
So I beg your patience…
But we, we are responsible.. not BP alone…for tolerating a toxic nation.
I have had enough.
Been fighting this wetlands war quietly behind the scenes for quite some time.
Along side names you’ve seen in the headlines.
I do not like the spotlight. I like one to one.
I love making art, and talking process, and sparking creativity..helping others find their voice, their spark…making paintings to sell ( to good homes, like puppies I have raised..my paintings have been lived..the artist smiles again)
Now ….what to do?
I am merely a painter.
An angry, grieving, and very tired painter.
But I can breathe..if I take care of myself… as long as my paintings sell…
And I can write..
And I can speak to anyone who’ll listen…about sparking choices…
Soapbox? Not my choice,
I prefer the paint..
but possibly, you should know more about where paint has taken me…and how every one of us has that spark of creative power…perhaps that could add some value…
There are senators, and scientists and a city… Several cities actually…
but it all comes down to the same thing…
Choices that we make every day.
What we choose to create…
Perhaps..some of those stories..would be okay…
Hitting publish? Yes.. I think so.
Gentle and Small
April 14, 2010 by Janice · 6 Comments
Mont Blanc Ink, Moleskine, Tracing paper, Janice Cartier, April 2010
“Precisely the least, the smallest, the lightest, a lizard rustling, a breath, a breeze, a moment’s glance-it is little that makes the best happiness.” ~ Frederich Nietzsche
A photo of a Scottish shore, a moment captured by a friend…caught my breath too, those birds darting, swooping, diving and lifting up again in the light…I know those moments too, thrill in them…and so I captured those lovely oystercatchers in ink last spring…
Those lines appear now automatically in some pieces that I do….
Small lines..
Little moments
Of exuberance.
And now on to rice paper they must go..
I don’t know why, they just must.
Small moments,
Small marks..
Small delightful..
Joy.
Captured.
Friend to friend.
Thank you Joanna.
What Comes Before Color
March 24, 2010 by Janice · 3 Comments
Silk, Pacific Northwest Sketch Journal, Raw Canvas, Shells, Brush, Janice Cartier, March 2010
What DOES come before color? Or that first line on a page? Or that dance step, or that line of code? Is is need….or is it desire? And whose is it? Mine… or yours? For any creative thing to be born, there has to be an impulse to birth it. There has to be a playground for it to play on. And there has to be some something that niggles and teases and nags at us until no other thing will do but to give it room.
There’s this whole sort of before color that happens… pure line, pure shape, pure thought….
What if’s that whisper,
Although some of them shout.
Sensations we crave, as much as our breath.
The sound of a word, the tickle of light upon one form or another.
A delight, a puzzle, a mystery…
What is it that comes before color?
What is it that is so essential that against all logic, and necessary things to do..we must do this..and not that?
Is it the call of a luscious tone that will amplify a feeling?
A line that carries exuberance?
Or a shape that gives us pause?
Certain light tickles me, makes me stop in my tracks.
Some forms, I must touch, or die, draw, or cease to be,
Photograph, perhaps.
Certain rhythms I must hear, and translate…
Resonances I guess you would call them…
Is that what comes before color?
Sheer being in wonderment?
At the moment tonal whispers call to me, as much as vivid color,
I seem to want hints of tints,
As much as I want hue.
And I seem to be in love with simply making marks that meander, and ones that have a sharp edge and limits. Precision and chaos together.
And shapes,
I seem to have to trace shapes that I have loved, or touched, definite ones, but they morph into something else at will.
And I am letting them.
It’s like being in some estuarine closet and looking for that thing…
that thing that is both my desire, my response…my whole newness…
and at the same time…timelessly yours.
And that, to me, is what comes before color…that impulse to find…
Something that will last quite a bit longer than today
Sheer wonderment…
Not an easy thing.
Or perhaps…it is rather simple.
Maybe it is
Simply a choice…
A way of being.
A way of seeing.
A way of doing.
Open.
Present.
Listening,
Looking carefully.
What comes before color?
Exploration…don’t you think?
Process…in private studio.
Soft Marks
February 19, 2010 by Janice · 1 Comment
Sennelier Soft Pastels, Janice Cartier, February 2010
Soft Marks. I feel like making soft marks today. And suspensions, like a scrumptious word and extended phrases that chase across a page…
Soft marks..
That dip down and nip, stick, then scurry on…
Soft colors in suspension…
With an occasional edge above the water.
Tips.
Marks.
Edges that hint
Of treasures just below the surface coming to the light.
Like that dream I had two nights ago
Of sea turtles swimming into land.
One by one and in abundance,
They swam in with the tide…
So many,
So strong
With tender underbellies…
I want to hold them in my thoughts…
And look for echoes…
With some phrases that I found…
There’s an oyster in it, edges and echoes there.
Some ripples.
And some soft gentle whispers like kisses on soft skin…
Suspensions
Of time,
Of place..
At my fingertips…
And soft marks
Some with an edge,
A slice right through the surface.
I want to make soft marks today…and see what they could mean.
So soft french pastels?
Oui…
And something clear and slippery…to suspend them in.
Hm.
That’s the mood I’m in.
And later, Naughty beverages all round right? Cheers at five wherever you are…