Dog Portraits Unleashed Artist's Creativity

“As much as I love color, there’s something magical about creating form from nothing but light and shadow. In a world where color is constant and sometimes overwhelming, black and white art has a kind of serenity.” So says graphite artist Carole Raschella who is the featured artist through Sunday at the .

A mostly self-taught artist, Raschella has also worked with paint and digital, but drawing with a pencil is her real love.  She grew up in England, moved to Maryland, married, and moved to California.  At the suggestion of her husband, she wrote a script and sent it to actor, producer, director Michael Landon.  That submission resulted in five years as a writer for Little House on the Prairie.  During her 25-year detour from art, she also wrote for The Waltons and many TV movies. 

When fewer and fewer TV movies were being made and TV producers seemed to be seeking out younger writers, Raschella returned to drawing. Unfortunately, her art business officially opened its doors on Sept. 8, 2001, three days before the 9/11 attack. With the tragedy on everyone’s mind she felt it prudent to re-launch at a later date.  However, she was inspired to do a tribute piece to America: in front of the American Flag sporting a tough attitude sits her Irish Setter over the quote:  “Don’t Tread on Me.”

That dog portrait was not her first.  Raschella got into the profession of art when she showed her dog at the National Breed Dog Shows where she displayed her Irish Setter art.  When that market became saturated, she went on to Rottweilers, German Shepherds, Border Collies, and Weimaraners, mostly as private commissions since she discovered, she says, that "the breeders understandably spent more money on their animals than on art on display at shows."  Eventually Raschella gravitated to drawing people.

Raschella also enjoys working in Photoshop because she finds it easier to combine picture elements digitally than to do it by hand. If given sufficient reference photos, she can change the hairstyle of the subject, for example.  She can change backgrounds, change the apparent age of the persons, put them in nicer settings, and neaten up their clothing.  One of her most challenging tasks, she says, was to change a photo of an old Aztec woman and make her look like age 25.

More recently, she did a painting of a squatter, a man named Ray, on her husband's property in the 1938 Chatsworth community of Lake Manor.  Ray had been there 25 years and her husband didn’t have the heart to make him leave.  Instead, Raschella used Ray as the subject of a painting, adding elements of items hanging from a rotted fence, a bandana, some old boots, and a marijuana sprig.  Titled after the Willie Nelson song My Heroes Will Always Be Cowboys, it won first place in the Westlake Village Annual Art Guild Show in 2009. Ray became the subject of her Last of the Mountain Men which won Best in Show at the same show the following year.

Carole Raschella will doing demonstrations at Chatsworth Fine Arts Council Studio Tour on Nov. 6 from 10:30 a.m.-4 p.m. The tour starts at the Depot with tickets and maps of five studios, and a buffet and art.  Learn more about her at Paintinginpencil.com and etsy.com/shop/raschella.