From S Chuck McCarter

ARTISTS STATEMENT

Art is my mind at play. Colors, shapes, surface textures are my sandbox from which my content emerges. I enjoy making art. It soothes my soul and allows me to escape into to the world of my experiences real and unreal. The concepts for my work come from childhood stories, fairy tales, ancient historical epics, the Bible, stories from Native Americans and observations of daily life and its oddities that I find interesting. I enjoy observing people, animals, nature, etc., and incorporate what I see into my pieces, combining disparate elements to make a whole. Colors and shapes of Mexico and ancient artifacts from Egypt, Europe, Africa, and the United States provide me with infinite subjects.

I mainly work intuitively, letting the piece tell me what it wants to become. Many times I will start on a piece with a specific concept or drawing in mind, and as I am creating the piece it will evolve into something different than what I had first envisioned. In a sense a dialogue is established with the work and myself. In the end, it all comes together.

Being a painter, color, texture, line and shape have always been the focal points of my existence. Growing up impoverished, I needed my imagination to escape the drabness of my childhood. The vivid pictures in my head replaced the bland images of my immediate surroundings. Color and shape have always helped to bring objects to life, for me, more than any other aspect of its being. Size and mass and texture have always taken a backseat to hue and line. The majority of my work encompasses my own beings. While not an original subject, these beings serve to illustrate my content. These beings are the most alluring, mysterious and beautiful muses that I know. There’s a reason so many people are captivated by the challenge of bringing their own vision to an old source of (history, epics) inspiration! It’s those beautifully compelling subtleties of these forms, barely perceptible to the inattentive eye, that are the stuffs of my work: the arch of a neck, the angle of the head, large black eyes and brown skin, large expressive lips, the line of a stance, the hand as tools for conveying or touching. These nuances are the things that have me RUNNING, anxiously and breathlessly, to my easel, paint brush in hand. Detail is wonderful. For me, though, creating artwork with a LACK of detail has always been tremendously inspiring and challenging. Simple shapes and delicate but powerful colors intricately balanced. This is the goal. Any observer can make out a forest if every leaf and branch is painstakingly rendered. In my mind, such overstatement is an insult to the aesthetic observer. Adhering to the ‘less is more’ tenet, I invite the viewer to bring their own experiences in their interpretation of something to which I aspire as more than just a pretty picture. I convey my vision with as much emotion as possible, via the elements, with as little detail as possible. Endeavoring to accomplish that delicate balance…. that’s the hard part…. that’s the fun part. It’s that ‘fun’ part that yearns me to paint every day.