Artist Carrie Waller is accustomed to setting up a new studio space. She and her husband, Brian, a colonel in the U.S. Air Force, have lived all over — Germany, Japan, Alabama, Texas, Arkansas (twice) — so Carrie has learned how to adapt to new work spaces. Her current studio, a well-lighted area just off of the kitchen in the home she and Brian share with their teenage sons Steven and Sam at Little Rock Air Force Base in Jacksonville, is perhaps her favorite.
“I feel inspired when I am in this space,” Waller says in an email. “I have organized it in a way that helps me be more productive. This is the first time I have really had adequate space for my studio and my still-life props and framing materials.”
Waller creates colorful, hyper-realistic, still-life watercolor paintings, often of household items like jars, glasses and pots. “Denkyu,” a vibrant painting of light bulbs, won the $1,500 Gold Award at the recent Mid South Watercolorists Exhibition at Laman Library in North Little Rock. In 2020, she won the $10,000 Grand Prize in the American Women Artist’s 2020 Museum Competition and last year won Best of Show in the Women in Watercolor International Competition. Her work has been exhibited in Japan, Greece, Belgium, Italy, Colombia, England and elsewhere.
She spends most of her day in the neatly arranged space, tending to administrative tasks associated with her work as an art teacher and as a board member of the National Watercolor Society. She’s most creative in the evening, she says, and often paints “into the wee hours” if she is on a deadline.
Waller has a degree in interior design, and the decor of her home and work space shows it off. Nothing seems out of place. The walls around the studio are filled with paintings she has collected along with several of her own works. Art books are stacked neatly behind her and a pandemic-inspired painting by her of bottles of soap and disinfectant sits on an easel near the window.
She uses Daniel Smith watercolors, which makes sense as she is an ambassador for the brand. She keeps her dried paint in small containers, sort of like those for storing pills, that she found at a Japanese hardware store. The paints are organized by color, and since they are dry she can take them onto airplanes when she travels for workshops and doesn’t have to worry about them being lost.
All that Daniel Smith paint will eventually be brushed onto paper made by French company Arches. Waller works with the paper laid flat on her large desk, and her subjects come from reference photos taken by her. She adjusts them using Photoshop and then looks at the images on an iPad as she paints. Her paintings usually are 30 by 40 inches and can take three to four weeks to complete.
Watercolor artist Carrie Waller at work in her home studio. (Special to the Democrat-Gazette/Steven Waller)
“I always go into it thinking this will be the next big winner,” she says one morning last week during an interview at her home. “I just want to make sure I’m not wasting my time.”
One of the things that makes Waller’s watercolors so remarkable is the way she captures light, something influenced by her father, a news photographer.
“I grew up with him having to stage shots and seeing him composing images all the time,” she says. “And light has always been a muse of mine. I love dramatic light.”
She also gravitated toward hyper-realism.
“I think people have a stereotypical thought of what watercolor is, kind of wishy-washy, looser style,” she says. “I wanted to do tightly rendered [paintings]. I’m not the only one, but I wanted to have my work push the boundaries with what you can do with watercolor.”
The fact that the space isn’t in a separate room or area of the house isn’t a deterrent, she says. Her family is accustomed to it.
“My youngest son will pull up a table and paint with me,” she says. “My sons have been around it their whole lives. I never put it away, they just had to learn not to touch anything.”
When she’s working, Waller says she likes to listen to podcasts or have a movie or TV show playing in the background.
“I never listen to music. I have to go into autopilot when I paint and listening to a podcast or movie allows me to do that.”
Some of her current favorite podcasts are “Handsome” with Fortune Feimster, Tig Notaro and Mae Martin and “Smartless” with Jason Bateman, Sean Hayes and Will Arnett.
Waller says she has always been creative, but she didn’t start painting until about 13 years ago when Brian was deployed to Kuwait. Her sons were still quite young and she “needed an outlet to not go insane,” she says.
She was blogging a lot at the time, so she started blogging about doing a painting a week. She also discovered a podcast, Artists Helping Artists, hosted by Leslie Saeta who had a career in marketing before becoming an artist.
“I became a huge fan girl and followed all of her advice,” Waller says.
She taught drawing classes when she and her family were stationed in Germany and was asked to teach watercolor classes.
“I always liked watercolor when I was in high school,” she says. “So I picked it up, but I really didn’t paint for myself. I painted to generate income, and I taught a lot of classes.”
She has found a community in the watercolor world. Along with being on the National Watercolor Society board, she belongs to the American Watercolor Society, Louisiana Watercolor Society, Mid-Southern Watercolorists, American Women Artists and others.
Belonging to these groups “helps tremendously,” she says. “Because I move so much I don’t have the luxury of plugging in with one small community and building … so I was strategic in the societies I joined. When you start being in shows and winning awards, you get your name out there [and] they ask you to come teach.”
Waller says that when Brian retires from active duty the family may stay in Arkansas. But whatever happens, there will be another move, and she will have to give up her favorite studio.
“We are only here for a couple of years, and then I will have to start all over,” she says.
Carrie Waller keeps her paints in these containers that she bought at a hardware store in Japan. (Arkansas Democrat-Gazette/Sean Clancy)This post was originally published on this site be sure to check out more of their content
