Living Color

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Living Color
What does the inexhaustible creativity of Big Al Carter say about fame, success and the meaning of art?

"When I Get Inside," a painting that has particular meaning for him, hangs over the fireplace. Years after Carter had established himself as an artist, his mother picked up a paintbrush and said, "Let me try." His mother had mellowed by then, he says.

She made a small portrait, in oil paint, of herself, and one of her husband, both in their formal Sunday clothes. Carter glued both works onto this larger painting of his own, its title taken from a hymn his mother sang, called "When I Get Inside Heaven."

"I put her [prosthetic] leg in there, too. You can see it," Carter says. "When my mom had diabetes like that, and her foot was cut off, I sat upstairs, and I could hear her crying. I said, 'Aw, Mom. Oh, God.' And I did 90 drawings in one night -- I just went crazy."

One of the back bedrooms has been converted into a photographic darkroom. Another has drawings and printmaking material. In Carter's own bedroom, dozens of paintings and drawings hang alongside deer-hunting bows and two quivers of arrows, yard sale finds. (He hunts deer each fall, and recently bought himself a secondhand, 20-foot fishing boat with an outboard motor. He is known to some fellow teachers for his bluefish recipes -- baked with kidney beans or grits.)

Carter is restless tonight, anxious about the North Carolina show. The curator will be coming soon, and he hasn't decided which works he wants to exhibit. There will only be room for a few pieces. He opens a small door in the narrow hallway and flips a light on, then eases himself down a Lilliputian, green metal staircase like a man descending into a mine -- or Heaven.

Below decks, the house is packed tight with still more work, as well as some old tools and saws, and a heavy iron printing press. There is a wooden swastika, made for placement on top of a planned Holocaust series, and about 100 pen, ink and watercolor drawings. There is a large piece of granite, from which he is carving a stone statue of Jesus. In another corner, there is a large wooden figure, an Indian head, carved from a boat rudder that was retrieved from the studio of the late Louise Nevelson, a sculptor Carter greatly admired. A Washington curator doled out the wood to a dozen local artists and commissioned them to create their own pieces for a show.

"Could It Be the Shoes?" is down here, too. The painting's surface is a carnival ride of bright greens, blues and reds, carved wooden dollar signs and plastic pinwheels planted in the middle of silhouettes of Michael Jordan on the basketball court. It is a commentary on professional sports, advertising and young children. Actual baby-size athletic shoes have been glued to the clotted and iridescent surface of the painting.

"I really need a bigger studio," Carter says. He was disappointed when he discovered that the North Carolina show would take only a handful of pieces. But not for the predictable reason. He was hoping the curator's haul would open up some badly needed work space.

He climbs back up the stairs and settles into a chair between the front door and the kitchen. The real work of the night is about to begin. He picks up a new painting, a small canvas, about 20 inches by 20 inches, three fishermen under a bridge. He stares at it for a minute, then picks up a brush. He is using what looks like a child's watercolor set -- a small, plastic case with eight disks of color. He jabs a brush in a plastic soda cup filled with water already clouded in color and begins to swirl the paint around. As he dabs at the painting, the anglers, apostles of the river, come into being. A look of concentration settles over Carter's face, and his body sags into the chair.

When he is on a roll, he lays low, doesn't answer the phone, lets people call him. Sometimes he goes out -- to hunt, fish, shoot hoops or visit a museum show -- but mostly he doesn't, staying home, isolating himself to protect his art-making time, guarding against the loss of focus and energy. "People call me and say, 'Big Al, rainbow trout running over near Springfield Mall.' I say, 'No, Allen stay right here.'" It's about midnight. He picks up the fishing painting again. "It's strange, you have shows down in North Carolina, but up here, it's like you don't exist," he says, settling in for the night. "Well, I've been right here all the time. Just Big Al. Same old Big."

For most of his career, Carter has sailed against the prevailing tides of contemporary American art. In the early 1980s, when Abstract Expressionism was still king and critics had long declared that traditional painting was dead, Carter was filling his paintings with recognizable human figures. While the Washington Color School -- the city's fabled abstract art movement of the postwar years -- spawned descendants such as painter Sam Gilliam, Carter kept his distance. When Howard University developed a vibrant black nationalist art scene (more music and sculpture than painting), Carter was not part of it. In the early 1980s, when the market for contemporary art was white-hot and major art careers blossomed overnight in the sleek galleries of SoHo, Carter actually passed on an invitation to meet with the most powerful art dealer of the day, kingmaker Leo Castelli. At the time he gave a cryptic and unconvincing explanation that New York was far away and he was afraid of air travel.

Carter makes pictures on canvas but also on TV trays, lampshades, boat rudders, room screens, even the silver surface of a retractable home-movie screen. But his canvas paintings and drawings have the spooky and lyrical mysticism of Marc Chagall. In other works, however, there is the antic, pop-culture commentary of 1980s postmodernist painters Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring. His pen-and-ink portraits have a brooding emotional intensity that recalls Rembrandt. And the faces on his ceramics, with their thick black lines, recall the religious, deeply humane faces of the French painter Georges Rouault.