Astoria artist blends humanity with fungi
Carpenter hopes to expand
art pursuits in the community
By chaNcE sOLEM-PFEIFEr
Fittingly enough, Jaz Carpenter’s mush-
room art tends to sprout.
The Astoria-based illustrator touches
a stylus to the blank base of her iPad and
begins drawing upward. A character’s car-
toon feet appear, then an outfit takes shape.
By the time she’s reached the character’s
neck, a stem replaces the human anatomy,
followed by a mushroom cap for a head.
While Carpenter’s drawings vary by
color and proportion, she has applied her
signature anthropomorphized mushroom
style to characters famous, local, fictional
and personal. Peruse her Instagram or Etsy
store and you’ll find Jimi Hendrix with a
morel head, Astoria disk jockey JDuB with
headphones slung around his stem and a
bestselling piece inspired by Carpenter’s
grandmother.
“How mushrooms are, how people are,
they correlate in my brain,” Carpenter said.
She sells her drawings under the moniker
Jaz North Coast.
Carpenter operates out of the mush-
room-themed shop Foragers, which she
co-owns with Kirsten Norgaard of the
neighboring Kit’s Apothecary. The base-
ment hideaway is decorated with Carpen-
ter’s work as well as other mushroom decor.
For Carpenter, a foray into this niche
came about serendipitously. She moved to
Astoria from Portland in 2019, and by the
following year her time was split between
mushroom foraging and puzzles. One fate-
ful day’s puzzle depicted Alice from “Alice
in Wonderland” riding a caterpillar, launch-
ing Carpenter down a rabbit hole of cre-
ativity. Her first illustration depicted Alice,
armless with a mushroom head, hitching a
ride on that same caterpillar. Though Car-
penter had worked around artists for much
of her professional life in the music indus-
try and tattoo parlors, this creative expres-
sion was a first.
“I had kind of lied to myself into think-
ing I would only work on a logical front
and would not work on the artistic side,”
Carpenter said, “that was for them, and they
were talented, and I shut that whole side out
and never gave it an opportunity.”
But the accessibility of digital drawing
coupled with time for creative freedom fed
this new passion until it grew into a pro-
fession. All the while, for Carpenter, mush-
rooms took on a symbolic meaning.
“Knowing how mushrooms pop up
Photos by chance solem-Pfeifer
LEFT: Artist Jaz North Coast works on a
drawing. ABOVE: Artwork by Jaz North Coast.
through adversity and create an environ-
ment to help themselves and those around
them to survive, I couldn’t help but associ-
ate it with the people around me in quaran-
tine,” Carpenter said.
Fungi also factor prominently into
another of the artist’s forays — mural paint-
ing. They’re front and center in the Asto-
ria-themed mural she recently completed
for the Labor Temple. She hopes to expand
this practice as well.
“I’m really hoping to do more large-
scale paintings around town. That’s become
my new dream I didn’t know I had,” Car-
penter said.
Beneath her muse lies an ironic secret
— Carpenter is allergic to mushrooms. So
while she can’t safely testify to their taste,
she seeks them out constantly for artistic
inspiration. The best wild subjects, she says,
appear to be “at play”— sudden splashes
of red or gold she discovers in their beds
of earth. Then, she gauges their personal-
ity and tries to imagine a human corollary,
be it a skateboarder or an entire mushroom
family.
As for upcoming projects, Carpenter
is conceptualizing a pipe-smoking 1920s
mushroom and maybe Willy Wonka after
that. But these are the quiet months both
for foragers and at the shop. Carpenter can
afford to spend a little time dabbing at the
ferns of a new mural on her shop wall. If
all goes well, giant fungi will overtake the
mural’s foreground as she paints, sweep-
ing Foragers’ visitors into Carpenter’s
world and blurring the lines, as her art does,
between humanity and fungi.
“I want people to feel like they are small
when they’re around it,” Carpenter said of
her mural in progress, “like a mushroom’s
view of a mushroom.”
Thursday, March 3, 2022 // 9