Living Color

The history of art is crowded with painters who drew and sketched compulsively. "Degas never stopped. Picasso drew incessantly. Sargent drew on anything," says Washington curator and print expert Eric Denker. All of those artists, and Carter, too, Denker says, are often as interested in the space around an object -- the void -- as the object itself. "They're trying to balance the voids. This is how a lot of artists think."

The void had a powerful pull upon Carter. "My brother would say, 'Don't draw on that wall; you know you getting a beating, man.'" But sometimes the lure of the house's blank white walls was too great. Faces, fishing rods and birds poured from his pencil. Even the threat of a crack from his mother's huge hands was not enough to stop it.

Carter went on to get his undergraduate education at Columbus College of Art & Design in Ohio. His mother was set against it, his father less so, Carter says. "My father used to say, 'A lot of people can talk a ditch, but can you dig one?'" There was no scholarship money. He got some help from his parents, but mostly paid his own way, taking jobs breaking up sidewalks, washing dishes. He ate a lot of oatmeal lunches and dinners.

As a student, Carter scrounged paint wherever he could find it. He squeezed it out of tubes other students had thrown away, he rifled through art store dumpsters for discarded cans that were still half full. To this day, he visits paint stores to collect whatever is being thrown out.

In Columbus, he walked the city and sought out commercial artists, becoming friendly with a photographer and also a sculptor, whom he persuaded to tutor him in exchange for drawings. Tom Nakashima, the painter and printmaker who taught Carter as a freshman and went on to teach at Catholic University, eventually recommended Carter for one of the most prestigious shows of his career, the 1999 exhibit that celebrated the 75th anniversary of the Freer Gallery. Carter discovered the Freer after college and became a frequent visitor, bringing his daughters there in the 1980s to see the paintings and the live peacocks and turtles that lived in the museum's atrium. He was particularly drawn to the art of James McNeill Whistler, especially Whistler's famous painting of his mother. He also loved the ecstatic intensity of "The Peacock Room," a drawing room that Whistler painted in its entirety -- ceiling, walls, shelves and furniture -- in a wild profusion of blue and gold, peacock feathers and birds. Whistler went far beyond the instructions, and the taste, of his horrified patron, the English shipbuilder who had commissioned him to simply decorate the room.

The show included one of Carter's etchings and a short catalogue essay in which Carter declared that what he loved about Whistler "was that he painted his mother, like I did my mom, and he put his soul into his art." One could look at the frenzy of ideas in the Peacock Room and ask, "Is this really necessary?" Carter conceded. "But I love that Whistler, like all geniuses, didn't know when to stop!"

IN A TINY, SHOTGUN KITCHEN, oil paintings and drawings are stacked six deep against every counter and the stove, too. In the back hallway, you have to turn sideways to sidle past the layers of art leaning against the wall. "I think I've got 20,000 drawings here," Carter says, pointing to several large plastic bags of paper scrolls jammed behind a pipe in the studio.

Carter lives alone. He and his wife separated about a decade ago, after 11 years of marriage. His wife, an accountant, took their two daughters and went back home to Ohio.

"It was a shock," Carter says. "But I knew it was coming. I saw it in a dream, two times. I saw my kids going back in space, getting smaller and smaller, and I said, 'Why?' So when it happened, I wasn't surprised."

But he was shellshocked enough. He moved back in with his mother briefly, then quit teaching and moved to Fredericksburg, renting an old cottage from a local lawyer and taking a job loading 18-wheelers at Yellow Freight trucking company. He stayed in Fredericksburg for several years, filling that house with art, too, and, as a history buff, making a pilgrimage to the "slave stone," the site of that city's antebellum slave auctions. (Slavery is a subject that appears frequently in Carter's work.) After several years, he returned to Washington, resumed teaching and eventually bought a house.

He is in frequent contact with his adult daughters, who live a few hours away in Hampton, Va., and tries not to feel too bad when they reminisce about their childhood and rebuke him for spending too much time on art, and not enough time with them. "They say, 'You never took us to carnivals, you never took us here and there,'" he says. "'With you it was always art, art art.'" ("We learned that this is our father, this is what he does," says daughter Flora Stone. "I remember waking up in the middle of the night, and he'd be sketching and hammering.") He is resisting their entreaties to move to Hampton to be closer to them and his granddaughter, for fear the move would disrupt his concentration, and output, for months, even years.

In the kitchen, a work called "Faith Fountain" has an old sink faucet erupting from its center, and a frame decorated with black fake fur. In the painting, a Madonna with a thin red halo holds her hands up to the heavens. Atop the small microwave, a collection of rusted iron farm implements have been stacked in a tower-like tableau. In the living room, ceramic busts of fishermen form the bases of several lamps. There is a stuffed lynx beside an old brass pharmacist's basin, two stuffed quails on the wall that stare glassy-eyed. The kitchen window is draped with bright blue and red plastic fishing lures.