Carole d’Inverno turns glimpses of strangers into paintings.

People she notes in passing may send the Bainbridge artist into the studio to mix memory with paint.

“I was waiting for the 2 a.m. boat home,” d’Inverno said, “when I noticed the man. He had a real ‘boxer’s nose’ and a big, square jaw. There was some story there, about who he was, but I didn’t want to spell it all out.

“Memory distills certain things, and not just physical characteristics.”

D’Inverno’s paintings of heads would be at home with the eclectic artists who have painted portraits in an Expressionist mode.

Like those artists, she prefers portraying psychological states to realistic rendering.

In one of d’Inverno’s striking portraits, the background invades the face to become the dark circles around the eyes and shadows around the mouth.

In keeping with the simplification of memory, D’inverno reduces mood to a few brush strokes – but they are the right ones to show the human dilemmas of her subject.

“I think people are aiming for the same things,” d’Inverno said. “There’s a commonality to people’s lives. They want happiness, and events conspire to keep them from it.”

The way she catches subjects’ inner lives, she says, is by painting spontaneously.

“I set myself certain parameters,” she said. “In this (series), it was the blow-up of the face. But I like the fact that I go to the canvas and I don’t know what will happen.”

Mornings are her best time to work, says d’Inverno, who is at work in her studio by 7 a.m.

“If I want to start a painting, I begin my turning up the music as loud as I can,” she said.

“It’s fortunate the the nearest neighbors are far away.”

D’Inverno and her husband, jazz guitarist Bill Frisell, lived in Seattle for a decade before moving to their quiet home near Rolling Bay two years ago.

It’s a long way from central Italy, where d’Inverno was born and raised.

Growing up poor, she said, made the life of an artist seem out of reach. Her world, however, was flooded with creative influences.

“My generation’s the first one that actually went to school, but in Europe you grow up with so much art around,” she said. “It permeates life so you don’t have such a need for a formal education in it.”

D’Inverno met American jazz musician Frisell, then performing on tour in Europe, when she was in her early 20s.

The couple married, and d’Inverno moved to Hoboken, N.J. with her husband when she was just 23.

She liked New World freedom.

“You can change here,” d’Inverno said of America, “and reinvent yourself.”

She has also felt welcomed on Bainbridge.

“It’s a great little community,” d’Inverno said, “with an interesting bunch of people.”

That kind of environment feeds her art, d’Inverno says.

“I stare at a lot of people and I think, ‘Someday I’m going to paint you.’”

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Carole d’Inverno’s paintings will be shown in Seattle this month. Her work can also be viewed on Bainbridge by appointment. Call 478-2238 for information on the gallery showing.