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QuickTake:
The ‘co-conspirators’ of some 40 years — as Marco Elliott calls himself and his wife, Joanna Carrabbio — are showing new work at the Maude Kerns show, along with two other Oregon artists.
Joanna Carrabbio and Marco Elliott’s studio spaces are often home to not just works-in-progress, but little pieces of nature: lichen and leaves to be committed to canvas.
The two Eugene painters have spent years exploring the environment through explosions of color and texture they found in those pieces of nature. It culminates now in two concurrent painting series from the couple.
Carrabbio, 75, and Elliott, 77, both have work in “Escape to the Forest,” a gallery exhibit at the Maude Kerns Art Center. She has 13 paintings in the show, while he has 14.
The exhibition was open to painters based generally in the Pacific Northwest. Four were ultimately chosen, with Elliott and Carrabbio’s work joined by that of two other Oregon painters: Susan Applegate of Yoncalla and Greg Navratil of Seaside.
Carrabbio and Elliott are more than two painters from the same city. They’re married, working in separate studio spaces on the same floor and critiquing each others’ work for more than 40 years.
Nature painting is a yearslong interest for the two that took on an Oregon bent once the couple moved to the Pacific Northwest about 15 years ago from California. Carrabbio is originally from Michigan, and Elliott from the Provence region of France.
“We’ve been partners in art, co-conspirators, for a long time,” Elliott said. “I fell in love with her through her paintings.”
Carrabbio’s leaves
Landscapes and flowers had always been central to Carrabbio’s work, but in recent years she wanted to move to a less direct, more contemporary style.
That led her to thinking about leaves, which she said she has been drawing since she could pick up a pencil. Their universality and variety in form allowed her to paint shapes the viewer would recognize as leaves, without a strict reliance on still-life or plein air reality.
In practice, that looks like a focus on texture and color, as well as an agnostic approach to negative and positive space, with leaves occupying the leftover spaces carved by other leaves.
Carrabbio paints these works in wide layers and occasional added lines, but she scrapes the actual leaf architecture with a palette knife to form a leaf’s veins and edges. It is a slow process she does in stages.
“It’s more about memory,” she said. “I’ve done representational, like ‘This is a leaf that curves like this.’ But I don’t want to worry about that kind of realism. I want to get my love of it.”
Elliott’s ‘Natural Women’
One winter day, Elliott was looking through work he had done across years of figure drawing, line drawings done under hard deadlines, and wondered what else he could do with that work.
He had been reading about forestry science, and the vast subterranean network of fungus and root systems that connect trees, and the two ideas clicked into place.
“The idea that I extrapolated from the forestry aspect is that as individuals, we can also be connected through an underground network of elements that connects us to nature,” he said.
He studies the lichen and decomposing leaves he keeps in his studio, interested in the patterns and the chemical reaction-stoked color change in the leaves; he works in gouache.
But he said that the name of the exhibition, “Escape to the Forest,” got him thinking about if any artist could truly “escape” the tumultuous current events. “We can’t completely turn our backs to what’s happening and paint pretty flowers when people are being sent to concentration camps,” he said.
His “Natural Women” series, which includes a diverse array of women reconnecting with nature, is a form of resistance.
“This is a response to the horrors of what’s happening,” he said. “This is still what we love. This is still there for us.”
Joanna and Marco
The two have been together for 41 years. They met through art: Carrabbio was a teacher at Venice High School in Los Angeles and Elliot was a “rambling, traveling artist,” as he tells it, working on a book project about murals when he saw one Carrabbio had done with her students. He showed her class slides of landscapes he had painted in Provence, and the two kept going from there.
Carrabbio said that in four decades of life and art together, Elliott has influenced her in many ways. On an artistic level, his love of patterns has rubbed off on her style, seen in her full canvases taken up by leafy texture.
But she’s also bolder now, she said, and more receptive to criticism. “In the beginning, he used to really annoy me at what he used to say,” she said. “But after a while, some of his suggestions seemed reasonable.”
Elliott, when asked the same question, didn’t have a clear answer on how her work has influenced him. But he said it was just like the underground tree network that inspired his series: an unconscious level of communication, a conversation without words.
How to see ‘Escape to the Forest’
The exhibit is on view through Feb. 6 at the Maude Kerns Art Center, 1910 E. 15th Ave., Eugene. An artist talk will be held Saturday, Jan. 31, at 1 p.m. All artwork in the exhibit is available for purchase online through the Maude Kerns Art Center.