CAROL CARTER AT CEDARHURST, DAY 1

Since I never sleep well the first night away from home, I was awake most of the night Thursday night.  So that meant I was up and ready to go early Friday morning!

The night had deposited a heavy frost on the cars and a heavy fog, too.  Several people traveling from some distances Friday morning for the workshop were late due to the fog.  For me, it was a short drive and it was beautiful.  I parked at the Shrode Art Center where the workshop is being held and took a walk, taking my camera with me. 

It was 8 am and foggy and the sun trying to cut through and the grounds at Cedarhurst was beautiful.  I took a short walk around through the wooded areas and didn't go back to the center for about 1/2 hour.  I was surprised that there were already 4 people setting up when I returned - they were early birds :)

Cedarhurst has many sculptures scattered throughout its grounds - one of my favorites is the big gorilla made out of shiny steel or something (I'll get a photo of that before the workshop is over).  This one was a wire mess creation and the sun hitting it gave it an almost ethereal, see-through look that I liked.

Carol began the workshop by having us watch her shape orbs using just 3 colors and thinking about warm and cool sides of something to help shape it.  She used Alizarin Crimson, Aureolin Yellow and Prussian Blue (one of her signature colors) to shape the orbs.  Then we were to do it, too. 

Seems easy until you try it and painting wet-in-wet takes some getting used to and some watching and waiting in order to know when it's okay to add more pigment or lift pigment or twiddle the colors a little (something I am excellent at - twiddling colors - but mine always end up being mud because of over-twiddling!!).  Anyway, Carol said we were going to paint pears next, using that lesson of the orbs and shape-making to see how it could be used with "real" objects in our paintings.  And she said anyone who painted brown pears would get an "F" (see the brown pears she used as models? ha ha).  She said it's very important to not let your photo or still life set-up or plein air situation dictate your painting - think about colors and complements working with each other (to create shadows and to play off each other in pure pigments).  So, we did our orbs, some more successful than others; and then tackled the pears, after watching Carol start her pear painting.

Carol says she always paints from background to foreground, so before you can paint your pears, you have to put your surrounding area in - using just 2 colors, Quinacridone Burnt Orange and French Ultramarine Blue and letting them blend in places to get a good grey color.  She always prewets the area she is going to paint and doesn't prewet more area than she can comfortably control so she broke the pear painting up into background space, then foreground space - all before you could touch a single pear!  So she did her background and foreground space and then we started ours. 

Another signature look Carol has is the glow she gets in her paintings as if the painting glows from within - this is because she creates halos of yellow around her subjects and you can see that around the pears, even in the shadow underneath.  And she did the shadow shapes before starting any color on the background pear.  Again, we used the same 3 pigments we used with the orbs - just 3 and no more to get the shapes.  We started with a base color (Prussian Blue for the background pear, Alizarin for the next one and then Aureolin Yellow for the pear that will get the most attention). 

Because the paper gets so saturated and starts to buckle, Carol weighs down the edges - using anything of weight, including a hammer and a wrench :)  In her studio, she paints large paintings on the floor, bent over them and working (almost always when it's raining so she can have extra time to work the wet pigments).  My back won't stand that but I can just work flat on a table (no tilting this stuff because it will run all over - unless that's what you want).

She showed us a lot of her finished and unfinished paintings to highlight the day's teaching and to show us how she used the simple techniques to get some pretty amazing paintings (and often with 6 or less pigments for a painting and no more).  The focal point of this swimmer is the hand and it has the most work on it - the most pigment, the strongest value, the best shape.  Carol said don't be predictable - when doing a portrait or figure, why make the face the focal point - mix it up and do your own thing.

Why make your hair blonde or brown?  Why make your eyes the color they are?  Be artistic and creative and express yourself with color.

More photos to come tomorrow (when we'll be painting magnolias!).  So homework tonight is to draw it out on the paper and have it ready to go in the morning.