D e s e r t E x p o s u r e
September 2009
 |
Painting Lost Worlds
|
Some fortunate people love what they do for a living, and are smart enough to realize it. Karen Carr is one such lucky devil.
 |
Karen Carr with "George." (Photo courtesy Karen Carr) |
"I went into advertising for 10 years," says Carr, making a sour face and sticking out her tongue. "Yuck. Soulless, awful work — trying to get people to buy things they can't afford, don't need, and probably wouldn't want if they hadn't seen the advertising."
Carr, an ebullient blonde whose body language exudes joi de vivre, is what she first dreamed of being at age six: an artist. "I guess maybe I had an early midlife crisis," she muses, recalling a steadfast decision at age 28 to "give what I always wanted to do a shot."
It wasn't easy. For hers is not just any art career.
"I am essentially a landscape artist and an anatomist," explains Carr, pausing for an interview amid the cheery, purposeful clutter of her multi-room downtown Silver City studio, a former barbecue restaurant off Bullard. "I recreate either lost or difficult-to-create environments, and the details of those environments that support specific flora, fauna and ecology."
Say what? Carr is describing the kind of oversized interpretive imagery each of us has seen — and no doubt taken for granted — in museums, zoos, parks, schools, public buildings and picture books since we were children. Carr's portfolio includes representations of extinct, elephant-like gompotheres (like those on this issue's cover), sharp-toothed dinosaurs, modern dolphins, poisonous frogs, jungle cats and colorful butterflies — as well as human beings in all manner of dress, surroundings and behavior.
"I've always enjoyed both wildlife and art," says Carr, seated under a framed poster displaying a detailed, scroll-like inventory of insects. "I love working with landscapes and animals. It's like being in control of your own world — like setting up a stage or a movie set."
The Texas native presides over a dog-friendly domain in which eight busy workers — including her husband, webmaster Ralph C. Gauer, Jr., and father, artist Bill Carr — meet the specialized visual needs of clients ranging from the Royal Tyrell Museum of Paleontology to the Audubon Society, from the Dinosaur Society to Southern Methodist University, and many more. At humming high-tech stations, staffers sketch, draw and paint — usually with computer assistance — or conduct research, collate data and interact with prominent experts around the world.
Each person at the Karen Carr Studio has a specialty, from fine-art painting to map creation, figure drawing to online graphics. But everybody does more than one thing, and one has a sense that this enterprise is highly collaborative. This is a clutch of learners as well as educators. In one corner there's a life-size skeleton named "George" who helps teach human anatomy. In another is a stage set where models can be photographed as a guide for any illustrations that feature Homo sapiens in costume or action.
"We use a lot of cyclists as models," Carr volunteers. "They have great muscle definition. We take pictures of employees and their kids, too, as needed."
At present, the studio is engaged in a large, complex project on behalf of a Smithsonian Institution museum in Washington, DC. Carr's group is creating all the graphics, maps, murals and illustrations for a new "human origins hall," due for installation next spring. On the day of my visit Carr is using a pencil-like stylus on her artboard, through the sophisticated software programs Corel Painter and Adobe Photoshop, in order to create a mournful scene on her 30-inch monitor that shows the burial of a Neanderthal elder in a pit full of boughs and flowers.
"I follow requests given to us by our clients," says Carr, pointing to a thick document that looks something like a movie script. "They tell us basically what they want; then we go back and forth with them until [the artwork] is finished."
For this endeavor, as with others, the studio distinguishes itself by taking on all aspects of the project, from consultation with and between world-renowned experts to archiving of material and creation of custom maps, paintings and so on. "We do everything," says Carr, emphasizing that there's more to this than simply making a pretty picture and sending it off. "It's job management as well as producing the work."
In the studio's marriage of the digital and three-dimensional fine art worlds, a complex mix of honed artistic skills, intuitive instincts, raw talent and up-to-date software know-how is required, including the ability to verify the accuracy of imaginative renderings. We are not in Hollywood, and what is shown has to conform with science-based reality — or at least the prevailing theories of what is or was real. The goal is first to take a technical concept or scientific premise, then make it appealing and accessible to the public. As a side benefit, perhaps that public will care a bit more about the natural world and human history. It's a daunting task.
"We have to train our employees," notes Carr, "because very few people do what we do. You don't learn this in school." No academic degrees are given in this field and training tends to be on-the-job. "We kind of invented our niche," she continues. "Our main competitor is a husband-and-wife team. Most folks doing this are individuals."
Because their market is so limited, the Silver City studio must accept assignments on a wide variety of subjects, as museums expand or revamp their exhibits, publishers release new books, and universities expand their missions. "We can't stay busy unless we generalize," Carr explains. It's an ongoing education for everyone, augmented by dialogue with experts as well as plenty of book, Internet and academic journal research. One month the crew is getting up to speed on the life-cycle of the Outer Banks crab, the next it is figuring out how to depict extinct ancient mammals no one has ever seen in the flesh.
A noteworthy recent task involved preparation of several exhibits for the New Mexico History Museum, which opened this summer in Santa Fe to critical and popular acclaim. (See "Blast from the Past," July 2009.)
"We had a lot of fun making 'My New Mexico,'" laughs Carr, referring to the oversize state map she and her team created for the museum. It is peppered with cartoon-like icons associated with people, places and happenings throughout the Land of Enchantment, ranging from the Navajo's sacred Shiprock butte to utilitarian Hobbs pump-jacks, from rolling northeastern grasslands to yucca-studded southwestern cattle ranches. Stylized images from our own region include the Gila Cliff Dwellings, W Mountain, WNMU, pronghorn herds, bicyclists and the Silver City Museum. Carr also managed to sneak in a representation of her 16-acre hillside homestead, which her extended family shares with horses, sheep, goats, turkeys, chickens, rabbits and dogs.
"The work I do here," says Carr, with a sweeping hand gesture, "is high-tech — and it pays for my low-tech life at home." The latter encompasses goats and chickens that yield milk and eggs, angora bunnies and churro sheep for wool used in spinning and weaving, turkeys and lambs for eating, and horses and dogs for riding and companionship.
The animals keep the Carr compound in constant motion because, as she observes, "they get very noisy about it when they're ignored." It is the fulfillment of a childhood dream, she crows, to be able to milk her own herd of goats. The menagerie began accumulating soon after Karen and Ralph, along with her parents, grandmother and daughter, relocated from the Dallas area seven years ago.
"I wanted to have my critters," says Carr, "and I really wanted to live — and do live — in one of the last wild places in the world. People think there are all these wild places out there and there aren't. There are large places that are really parks with animals in them." Truly wild places, she says, include New Mexico's Gila region and parts of Alaska, Africa, Russia and the Amazon — but not much else.
There are now more African antelopes living in Texas, Carr points out, than in Africa. Those in Texas aren't truly wild, but rather inhabitants of private reserves or game farms set up to serve sport-hunters. "People don't realize," she stresses, "how much of our planet's wild nature has been lost and how little is left. The window of opportunity to save it is closing quickly."
It comes as no surprise that the Carr clan's favorite pastimes include horseback riding, camping, birding and other outdoor activities. Their enduring connection to nature transcends generations. Karen Carr's father, Bill, was an in-house artist and sculptor for the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History, where her biologist mother, Linda, after graduating from the University of Texas-Arlington, also worked. "I grew up playing in that museum after hours," says Karen Carr, who recalls an early fondness for snakes, lizards and beetles. "I love that museum — and they are still one of our clients."
Carr grew up with a keen interest in physics and earth sciences, as well as art, and narrowly missed majoring in chemistry at the University of Texas-Austin. "I was accepted by the chemistry department, but showed up [to register] on the wrong week," she recalls. "I went instead to the art department and the dean there talked me into enrolling as an art major. But I double-tracked for two years and took calculus and physics as well as art. I then transferred to North Texas State University, which had professional internships. When I graduated I got a job right away."
Later, Carr enrolled in an MBA program and studied marketing, accounting and related business courses. Around the same time, she got married and gave birth to a daughter.
Then, as now, her dad was an important inspiration and mentor. "Bill is a genius," Carr says of her father. Despite suffering a stroke soon after relocating to Silver City, he "still can do work that nobody else on the planet can do. His ability to do people is wonderful, and he still teaches us."
After her side-trip into advertising, which helped her master some crucial skills, Carr took advantage of past friendships in the realm of science — particularly paleontology — to drum up business. She pounded pavement and knocked on doors.
"There was no one to show me how to do this," the artist sighs, rolling her eyes. "I kind of wormed my way into it and built a business over the past 20 years." So successful has her studio become that Carr was awarded the PNM/WESST "New Mexico Rural Entrepreneur of the Year" award in 2008, among many other citations she and her husband have received over their careers.
In the future, Carr hopes to add digital animation and 3D production to her studio's repertoire. She acknowledges that the ongoing press of contracted jobs has so far limited the team's capacity for expansion into new domains: "Once we get some down time, we'd like to expand our product offerings, but that will involve a learning curve."
Over the past year, she points out, the tight economy has been rough on the institutions that are commonly the studio's best customers. "Their money tends to come from charitable contributions, state money and federal money." Such funding has been scarce during the current recession.
By now, however, Carr's reputation is such that clients generally come to her rather than her soliciting them. She also has developed a finely tuned appreciation for what makes a worthy project — and an excellent museum. She is especially proud that her adopted hometown boasts one of the latter.
"Museums are our industry," the artist says, "and one of the major things that made this the kind of community we wanted to raise our daughter in, to live in, and to retire in was when I walked into the Silver City Museum and saw what a professional facility it was. This was not grandma's attic and [a collection of] whatever people had donated with a little text attached. It was a beautiful, well-run museum, despite having very few resources. I was very impressed."
So much so, in fact, that Carr has joined the museum's governing board and become an enthusiastic booster of its expanding programs. "I'm excited about the new campus in Mimbres," she declares, "and the expansion on Broadway," where the Ailman House headquarters is being remodeled and the recently acquired power company building revamped.
Other local Carr involvements include painter Diana Leyba's youth mural program, through which the studio is helping young people create an acrylic mural at Bataan Memorial Park, near Fort Bayard, honoring survivors of World War II's infamous Bataan Death March.
"Silver City is perfect for us," Carr concludes, ticking off her necessary criteria for a town. The list includes not only a high-speed Internet connection and UPS delivery, but natural beauty and friendly, hard-working residents. "Besides all these things, I love the role that art plays in this community. We have so many creative people here. Yes, this really is where we want to be."
Southwest Storylines columnist Richard Mahler is a writer based in Silver City, where he guides walking tours of the downtown historic district. Learn more at www.SilverCityWalks.com For an excerpt from his new book, The Jaguar's Shadow, see this issue.