In celebration of her 81st birthday, Carolyn Eastman Cazares has commissioned The Center Gallery Fine Art in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, to sell her personal “legacy” collection.
Cazares is donating the profits from the sale of some 200 originals to her two favorite causes: The Sierra County Student Art Show (aka Tiger Art) and TorC’s People Growing Together.
When Cazares was 4 years old, she drew a tree that she notes did not look like the “lollipop trees” that her peers drew. Her nursery teacher proclaimed her an artist and her parents supported her art by buying $1 Walter Foster “how-to” books, which she “preferred to classes.”
At 7, she received her first set of oil paints. At 14, she took life drawing classes taught from renowned artist Warren Hunter. She said drawing the human figure still fascinates her.
Her work broadened over the years and from her 20s to 40s, she explored fashion design and sculptures, collage, acrylics, pastels, air brush and watercolors.
In the ’60s, she painted with Alberto Mijangos, a member of San Antonio’s “angry young artists” and was the Mexican American Institute of the Arts’ director at the time. She studied sumi painting (Chinese brush and ink) in Virginia with sumi master, I-Hsiung Ju.
Cazares said sumi came to her quite naturally and has influenced almost everything she’s done since. Her sumi master calls sumi painting a performing art.
“The brush dances and the ink sings,” she said.
She has produced thousands of pieces, from large paintings to calligraphy of Hebrew letters, as well as ink drawings as small as a postage stamp. Cazares is fond of saying “no piece of paper is safe around me.”
She summarizes her body of work as the four Fs — faces, figures, flowers and fruit. She is including her “small treasures” in this show gleaned from her years of accumulated sketchbooks, many which had never been shown.
In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Cazares opted for quarantining at home and devoted herself to further studies in “ancient wisdom, comparative religion, conspiracy theories, historical fiction, and the relationships between humans and extraterrestrials.” With no TV or radio, she found “a book a day keeps reality away.”
Cazares calls this stage of her life the fat lady’s swan song:
“If I live, I live and if I die, I live,” she said.
Tiger Art is the popular name of the Sierra County Student Art Show, sponsored annually by the Sierra County Arts Council and The Center Gallery Fine Art.
The show allows sixth- through 12th-grade students, selected by a panel of judges, to sell their art at the show and compete for scholarships and prizes. The second Student Art Show will be held at the TorC Civic Center from April 21 to April 22.
The nonprofit, People Growing Together, organizes community assets to maintain Sierra County food security through building an underground sustainable greenhouse for year-round production.
