No time to be fussy

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Rapeseed Fields in Southern France

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Third Time Around

Mother's Day

Watercolor Sketch painted in Arles, France. Cafe La Nuit, painted by Van Gogh.

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Cypress Trees in Southern France

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Abandon

Creating Freddie the Cockroach for Andrea Kramer's Butterfly Project delighted me. After painting in oil for the past eight months, returning to watercolor refreshed my sense of spontaneity with paint.

Unveiled - the Anatomy of a Painting which hung at Monsoon Gallery in Bethlehem throughout the month of October is now behind me. I am pleased by Geoff Gehman's review in the Morning Call.

Visual Arts

By Geoff Gehman of The Morning Call November 2, 2008

FIVE ELEMENTS, FIVE SKILLS

Chris Carter's show at Monsoon is a showcase of five artistic elements: color, line, shape, texture and value. It's also a showcase of her five-tool talents.

The resident of Califon, N.J., is a versatile, canny portraitist. Nicole, an extreme closeup in oil, features a fiery curtain of hair over one eye, a snaking blue shadow over the other eye and an air of fragile mystery. Watercolor/acrylics of nude women are splashy, tattooed landscapes. A pastel of a skeleton has glowing teal bones, a clever carnival touch.

Especially engaging is Between Here and There, a series of oils of fields, forests and roads. Carter easily blends lacily veiled hues, slaloming perspectives and bubbling macadam.

Carter's drawings are just as dynamic. Inky squiggles of dancers are charmingly breezy; a pencil illustration of a boy dreaming of adventures with his collie is just plain charming.

Limited Supplies

The hot, sticky night left me short of time this morning, my body feeling sluggish and unmotivated to spring out of bed, refresh myself in the shower and dash down the road to the studio to pick up my painting supplies for this morning's yoga class. Instead, I grabbed a small tin of paints, a handful of tiny scraps of watercolor paper, a couple of brushes, a few paper towels and a plastic cup for water.

Hot nights generally result in low attendance to the early morning class. Quite a few of the regulars didn't show up. A perfect situation to step out of the "norm".

I found myself in a different state of mind, tuning into the space around the figure and allowing it to merge with the figure, blurring the boundaries of inner and outer energy. As I look at the resulting paintings, poetry comes to mind.