When you see a student’s name on a chalkboard, it’s not a stretch to assume they’re staying after class for detention.
While spitballers and daydreamers caught unawares during popcorn reading often earn this distinction, retired teacher Claudette Carlton didn’t discriminate between her eighth grade students when she’d chalk out full portraits of them.
“If we had a little time at the end of the period, they’d come up to me at the chalkboard and I’d sketch them,” said Carlton, who used the activity to occupy mundane moments when there was nothing left to do for her students but wait for the bell to ring.
“It kept everybody entertained for the last five minutes of the period,” she recalled.
Shortly after retiring from her teaching job at Vandenberg Middle School, Carlton took up the art form she’s widely known for nowadays: watercolor painting. An avid pencil sketcher at the time, Carlton was looking to add some color to her drawings when she enrolled in a watercolor class at Allan Hancock College about 12 years ago.
“It just took off from there,” said Carlton, who has a new solo exhibition of watercolors up at Cypress Gallery in Lompoc.
The exhibit, titled Watercolor Creations, opened in late June and will remain on display through Sunday, July 28. The public will have the chance to meet Carlton at a special artist reception, slated for Saturday, July 13, from 1 to 3 p.m., at the gallery.
In August, Carlton plans to lead two watercolor workshops at Cypress as well. She’s been a member of the gallery for about six years. Her watercolor works currently hanging at the venue range between various subjects and settings, all of which she captured in her private studio space in her Lompoc home.
“It’s a bedroom that I created into a studio,” Carlton said. “It’s really nice. My husband put pegboard material on several of the walls so that I can hang my paintings and move them around.”
Depending on the scope of a project, Carlton can spend anywhere between half an hour to four weeks on a single watercolor painting.
“The way I do watercolor doesn’t lend itself to just splashing paint. I have to be meticulous about how I plot it out,” Carlton said. “There’s a lot of layering that goes on. ... You have to let things dry in between.
“It doesn’t mean you have to take a long, long time. It depends on the subject matter and how detailed it is,” she added. “I have a little piece that’s in the gallery right now that I did in 30 minutes. ... Some of them are fast.”
Examples of Carlton’s most time-consuming pieces include large panoramas of missions in California. Many of her paintings are based around historical buildings, such as the Santa Maria Valley’s San Ramon Chapel and Lompoc’s Artesia School Museum.
What draws her to these settings? As an artist and former history teacher, Carlton said she finds these sites appealing for reasons beyond their unique architectural qualities.
“It’s not the building as much as the people that went in and out of that building,” Carlton said.
The artist’s new exhibit showcases her “playful” side as well, with whimsical illustrations of giraffes, penguins, and other creatures that look like pages plucked straight out of a children’s book.
With four children, 12 grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren, Carlton is no stranger to occasionally gifting her watercolor works away to family members. Having several of her own pieces stored away as well, Carlton joked that “they’re looking forward to when I die, so they can get it all.”
“Well, they’re not looking forward to when I die, but they know they’ve got a lot coming to them,” she clarified with a laugh.
Arts Editor Caleb Wiseblood wouldn’t mind inheriting a live penguin someday. Send comments to [email protected].
