Meet Jeffrey Carr | Artist/Painter

We had the good fortune of connecting with Jeffrey Carr and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Jeffrey, have there been any changes in how you think about work-life balance?
As an art student, I could focus most of my attention on art and art making. As I moved into a series of positions as an art professor, got married, and helped raise a daughter, I thought of my life as containing four compartments: My family, my teaching career, my studio artwork, and my spiritual life. I spent about the same amount of time and energy on these four. When I became the Dean of an art school, and my daughter went away to college, I found that my studio life slowly drained away in favor of my academic and spiritual practice. When I retired and moved back to Southern California, where I had grown up, it had been about a decade since I had painted actively. Then, my wife got sick, and I devoted myself to caring for her and my dying brother. My wife died in 2018, and my brother also died shortly afterward. My daughter Charlotte has grown into her own life and career and is now starting a family. I have found, to my surprise, that my studio art activities are at the forefront of my life again. I paint almost every day and have produced a large body of landscape and figure paintings. I am a full-time artist again! As to my spiritual life, I meditate every day and have been an active Buddhist and Advaita practitioner for almost 50 years. But I no longer belong to an active sangha or spiritual group. I have found that my spiritual practice has merged into my art practice in a way it had never done so before. It’s all devotion. I am now painting probably more than at any time in my life.

Let’s talk shop? Tell us more about your career, what can you share with our community?
I recently retired and moved back to San Diego after a long career as a college and university art professor in the Midwest and East Coast and then as Dean of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. I’ve gotten most of my training and experience as a painter on the East Coast, but my paintings are all about the light and color of California. I found my art identity as a painter at the University of California at Santa Cruz. I went east to study painting and drawing at the New York Studio School in Manhattan and the Yale University School of Art. I retired to East County, San Diego, to live on a property I grew up on. Since moving back to California, I have returned to my early love of painting landscapes and smaller-scale figure paintings. You can see my work on my website at https://jeffreycarrart.com/. There are also two books about my work: BEACH, Paintings of Southern California, and NUDE, Paintings of the Figure. Both are available here: https://jeffreycarrart.com/publications.

I create my paintings in a small studio where I live in Spring Valley, California. From my house and on my walks, I see wonderful views of the southern California landscape. There’s a hint of the ocean and the desert where I live, and there’s light unlike any other; sometimes pale yellow, sometimes russet, sometimes slate grey. My landscapes are based on what I experience on my walks and visits to the beach. I paint what I see, but I paint indirectly, from observation, memory, and photographs. The light constantly changes. I paint an ideal, the way all painting exists as a temporary manifestation of an ideal. I am painting myself as an experience of the light, color, and space I sense around me. I paint my experience of being alive to the presence within a place.

I love the color and light of California. It’s the California light. I grew up here and have waited all my life to return here. I live on the same property I grew up on, with the views of that mountain, St. Miguel, that I paint repeatedly. I like the “bones” of the landscape, the geometries and contrasts of houses, streets, trees, hills, and sky. I paint the scenes I see every day on my walks. I’m best with the subject matter I see every day. When I paint a landscape I’m not so familiar with, I can’t find the scale, color, or light that I want. The light of California has liberated my color, as it did with all those French painters from Delacroix to Balthus, whose color was liberated by the color of the Mediterranean. It’s the color of Diebenkorn and the Bay Area figurative painters. The art writer Robert Hughes calls this color-based landscape painting “The Landscape of Pleasure.” That’s it, exactly.

I think of myself as a modernist through and through. Being a modernist painter means that the color, rhythms, and arrangement of shapes within my paintings create a sense of light and space, not a detailed recording of appearances. It’s easy to say this is true of all paintings, but it’s not. A lot of contemporary art is about creating and manipulating images and associative content, not how color, shape, and arrangement establish the sense of space, form, and light. There is depicted light, and then there is the immanent light within the painting. This light within the painting is generated by the interaction of pictorial elements, not an illusionistic recreation of light falling on an object. It’s two different approaches to painting. One comes out of fauvism and abstraction, the other out of naturalism and realism. My interest is in the pictorial language that is essentially abstract. That is, using subject matter to explore a more purely visual language.

Let’s say your best friend was visiting the area and you wanted to show them the best time ever. Where would you take them? Give us a little itinerary – say it was a week long trip, where would you eat, drink, visit, hang out, etc.
First, look around. Look at the beautiful light, the ocean, the orange and yellow hills, the arcs of freeway overpasses, and the grey and beige of freeway and surrounding hills. Check out the seals at Seal Beach in La Jolla. See Hotel Coronado. Visit Sunset Cliffs. There are historic Arts and Crafts style houses in North Park. See the hang gliders near UCSD. Meditate in the beautiful garden at the Self Realisation Fellowship in Encinitas and watch the surfers and occasional sea lions at Swami’s Point. Have lunch in La Jolla at The Cottage. Visit the plaza and museums at Balboa Park and the Zoo. There’s Windandsea Beach and The Cove in La Jolla. Visit Torrey Pines Beach and have lunch at Lotus Cafe in Encinitas, near one of my favorite painting subjects: Moonlight Beach. See the young crowd at Ocean Beach and “Santa Cruz Cove,” the site for several of my paintings. Walking around the Hillcrest area to see arts and crafts homes, yoga studios, stores, and bookstores. There’s lots to see and do. San Diego is all about pleasure.

The Shoutout series is all about recognizing that our success and where we are in life is at least somewhat thanks to the efforts, support, mentorship, love and encouragement of others. So is there someone that you want to dedicate your shoutout to?
Charlotte Carr, daughter.
Laura Lydecker Carr, spouse for 38 years and an artist-illustrator.
The students and teachers at the New York Studio School.
The students and teachers at the Yale School of Art.
Artists, painting mentors, and painting friends.
Gururaj Ananda Yogi and the chelas of the American Meditation Society.
Lobsang Samten and the sangha at the Chenrezig Tibetan Buddhist Center of Philadelphia.
Scott McBride and students at the Clearlight Meditation Institute of Philadelphia.
Tibetan Buddhist and Dzogchen teachers and students.
Advaita Vedanta philosophy and practice.
Sthaneshwar Timalsina and the Vimarsha Foundation.

Website: https://jeffreycarrart.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jeffreycarrart/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1344912090

Youtube: https://youtu.be/vgbIAhVEl_Q?si=nUH7AQ0c8CWVszv-

Other: YouTube: https://youtu.be/gHiIJZB5ssY?si=Ka7PkOR-uknuvUUx
Blog “Painting Perceptions” https://paintingperceptions.com/interview-with-jeffrey-carr/?fbclid=IwAR3eSNEmHe90Z8evmF4mgjoUQFkpVYIk6rugAFPopJrdXcMDGROcjCkhgRs

Issuu flipbook: https://www.michaelsitaras.com/

Image Credits
all my own photos