Clarence Holbrook Carter was born in Portsmouth, Ohio. He studied at the Cleveland School of Art from 1923 to 1927. He then studied with Hans Hofmann in Capri, Italy in the summer of 1927. Throughout the 1930s and 40s he was known for his realist painting of rural America and the burden brought on Americans by the Great Depression. By the end of the Second World War, he had adopted a more surrealist approach to painting. Accomplishments in the field of advertising design encouraged experimentation and abstraction in his work. During the 1950s and 1960s, his work took on an increasingly surrealistic style with monsters and imaginary animals stalking fanciful landscapes. He had a series of paintings of oversized animals leering at the viewer over a large wall. In later years he depicted floating, transparent ovoid shapes transposed onto architectural landscapes, representing the Carter’s conception of the human spirit striving for perfection.
The second picture is not exactly a Carter painting. It is a copy of one of the pictures on the Portsmouth, Oh flood wall and shows a mural Carter painted in the Portsmouth Post Office. The flood wall mural was designed and painted by Robert Dafford,a world renowned muralist, and depicts Carter in a studio as if that is where he painted the mural. Sue Welty
ReplyDelete