Living Color
When it comes to selling himself to the art world, Big Al draws the line

By Mary Battiata
Sunday, May 21, 2006

"Yo! Put the phone up -- I said put that phone up!" Allen Carter is sitting in the front of his classroom and calling to the back, where a favorite student has a cell phone cemented to his ear. "You know you not supposed to have that thing on in here."

"But, Al," the boy says.

"No buts," Carter replies. "This is a time for art!"

The boy pulls the phone away from his blond dreadlocks. The classroom of Allen D. Carter, the artist otherwise known as Big Al, Al, or just plain Big, is now in session.

Carter sits behind a long wooden table littered with curls of drying clay, plastic wrap and the gray forms of several half-finished student works -- a fish, a gnome and two teddy bears.

A second student, Veronica, a quiet 19-year-old and a new mother, sits beside Carter, smoothing one of the teddy bear's sides with a wooden tool. The bear is for her daughter. Once the sculpting is finished, she will need to paint it before firing it in the kiln.

"Big," she says, "I heard that if you mix all the colors together, you get black. Is that true?"

"Nah, not really," Carter answers, and then raises his voice so the whole class can hear. This is an opportunity for a lesson about color theory, but, like most of the information and ideas Carter unleashes in his Arlington classroom, it will also contain a lesson about life and, along the way, a brush stroke of self-portrait.

"Listen up," he says. That all-colors-equal-black thing is a myth. The truth is, if you mix all the colors together, what you get is a kind of deep, rich brown. His color, he adds. "Look, look," he says: "People ask me: 'What are you? Who are you? Are you black, are you white, are you Indian? Are you a printer, are you a painter? What are you?' And I say: 'I'm a burnt-umber man. I'm the burnt-umber artist.'" At this, Carter emits a huge, window-rattling groan of a laugh. His students, by mid-semester accustomed to this kind of eruption, look simultaneously impressed and inspired by this sound. Burnt umber. The color from the crayon box. Exactly.

This description, with its skillful sidestepping of the question of racial identity -- is a kind of statement of mission. In 30 years, Carter has produced housefuls of paintings, prints and sculpture but has resisted the conventional corridors of success in order to go his own way, to the frustration of his former dealer, his collectors and other admirers. Despite this, he is not unknown. The Corcoran Gallery of Art has two Allen Carters in its collection. In 1985, he was nominated by a Washington curator to the Sao Paolo Biennial, a large and prestigious international art show.

For 25 years, he has shown his art as far away as Richmond, Georgia and the Carolinas, but never in New York City, the great, career-making capital of the American art world. Instead, to make ends meet, he has taught art for more than two decades in Arlington County public schools. Monday through Friday, he shuttles among three centers for continuing education (one a renovated former funeral home), working with students who fell between the cracks in regular high school and want a second chance at a high school diploma. He starts teaching at 8 a.m., quits at about 3:30, drives home for an egg sandwich or some Chinese takeout, naps if he can, and then descends to his basement studio, where his second workday begins. With his jazz or blues records and CDs playing, and sometimes taking breaks to play along on cornet, he works -- sketching, painting, carving and etching. Very often he stays up all night, then showers, drives to school at about 6 a.m. and, once there, naps in the driver's seat of his Ford van until the school day begins.

He is a particular type of Washington artist, someone who was understood by peers to have the promise to make it in New York, but who for one reason or another -- temperament, taste, fear, arrogance or some combination -- decided to stay here and fashion a different, quieter career and life. Now, on the eve of another regional show -- in Wilmington, N.C., where he will be part of an exhibition of five African American artists, including master painter and collage maker Romare Bearden -- Carter, 58, is busy sifting through decades of work.

This afternoon in the classroom, his fingers are coated in chalk dust. He mentions that he feels a little wrung out from the night's work, and also because he hasn't been eating right lately. (His diabetes sidelined him for several weeks last year.) But he's also watching his students intently and waiting for his moment. Now he rises and calls out an assignment: Take a piece of paper, and draw something. "Anything you want," he says. "And don't rush! Take your time."

When the time is up, Carter begins a walk around the classroom to inspect the students' work. One has drawn a rose, but the stem is as thick and stiff as a ruler. Carter shakes his head. "If you draw a rose, it must look like a rose," he says. "Look at that stem. That stem is big enough to hold 100 roses." The other students smile, but there is no joy in it. They know they are next. "If I had to grade you on that, I'd give you a D," Carter says, continuing. "But if you go deeper into it, think how a leaf is bent. You have to start thinking."

"Look out that window!" he commands, turning left to face a wall of glass that looks out onto Lee Highway. "Look at that church. Look at it!" he commands, his voice keening. "What happens to it out there? It's so beautiful." He surveys the class, voice sharper now. "Talk to me! What do you see? You see sunlight hitting it! Dark and light! Ansel Adams, that's what he was doing with those photographs. Dark and light." He walks over to the chalkboard, where he has drawn a black bowling ball, a rendition that appears so remarkably three-dimensional it seems ready to roll off the chalkboard. He made it using only two pieces of chalk, one black, one white.

"Dark and light," he says. "There are 10 different shades of black here. Ten! You are blessed with eyesight. Some people don't have that. You have to think and look! Go deeper!" He turns to the would-be rose portraitist and commands, "Now give me another one," like a drill sergeant ordering a set of push-ups.

Later in the class, Carter tapes a piece of large, white paper onto the freshly painted cream cinder-block wall. "What do you see?" he asks. "This is negative space. You have to fill it." Working quickly with a thin, square-sided stalk of compressed charcoal, Carter sketches an oval for a face, a long slashing diagonal line that becomes a pair of shoulders.

"Watch what I do," Carter says, sketching quickly, smudging the charcoal lines into a field of black. He uses the heel of his hand to rub in shadows and light, and, on the paper, the face of a handsome African American man with a short beard begins to appear. The man's expression is solemn, intelligent, dignified. "I go lighter, and darker. And, all of a sudden," he says heavily, and holding up the slender wand of charcoal with an air of triumph, "this is an instrument that becomes powerful."

GROWING UP IN THE PUBLIC HOUSING COMPLEXES of South Arlington in the 1950s, Carter went to sleep and dreamed about colors. His father, an insulation installer, would hear him calling from the back bedroom: Blues! Use blue! Greens! Red! Add red!

His parents had a different source of inspiration. Three times a week, every Sunday, Wednesday and Thursday night, his parents bundled Carter and his brother and sister into the car and headed west, past Gainesville, Va., to the small Golden Church of God of Prophecy, where his parents, both preachers, proclaimed a fierce and uncompromising gospel. In winter they arrived after dark and stayed until after midnight, sleeping in the car on the way home and tumbling into bed at 1 o'clock in the morning. Devotion was for God, not sports. His parents regularly pulled him off the football field -- he played guard on the team at Wakefield High -- and off the pitching mound in the local Jimmy Dean baseball league to attend church services.

"I was a sports nut," he says. "But if you rebelled against the churchgoing, you got spanked."

But he also remembers being swept up by the shouting and excitement of those church nights. The echo of that time can be heard on the outgoing message on his answering machine, where he declaims in ringing tones: "I seek the time of day when the stars cry out in the heavens above and the river gives way to the sun. No one can see the power of God's hand as it moves the soul of man. I cry thee, I cry thee, please, Lord, bless this land. Leave a message, please."

He felt that same passion for art. For as far back as he can remember, Carter had an overpowering urge to sketch. "I couldn't stop drawing. Anything that was white I had to draw on it." His eyes banked images all day, every day, no matter how many times the teacher shouted at him to stop looking out the window. Birds and leaves, the bark of the trees, the faces of the people he passed on the street registered as dazzling puzzles of shadow and light. He went to bed clutching blank rolls of paper. Sometimes he couldn't eat his dinner until he'd sketched what he had in his head. When he didn't draw, he told friends later, his head would hurt.

"When I drew on something, my parents said, 'Give me your hand!' Bit-bat-bit," he says, mimicking the staccato of a series of quick slaps. "But I was gifted in art, so I never stopped. There weren't any gifted and talented programs back when I was coming up. So they all just thought I was weird."

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.

"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.

But being a Renaissance man, several curators say, may not be a wise business move in an age when contemporary art is a commodity and art investors can be twitchy and afflicted with short attention spans. Churning out many different kinds of works can dilute an artist's impact and confuse the curators who assemble corporate art collections. Through the 1980s, Carter was the subject of glowing reviews in the Washington and New York press. Carter's paintings "suggest boundless, uncontrollable freedom . . . a complex world of reality, dream and art," wrote the New York Times in a review of a 1990 group show in North Carolina of African American artists. Because he often includes untraditional materials in his paintings -- shoe brushes, violins, popsicle sticks -- and because he is African American, Carter occasionally is mistaken for a folk artist. But he is not. Rather, say curators, he is a fine artist, highly trained and highly conscious of the history of art, Western art in particular. And he also is something of a hybrid -- a modernist, concerned with abstract matters of color and line; a postmodernist, using his paintings to talk about racism, injustice, hypocrisy of all kinds, and what it means to be black in America. He is also a traditionalist, freely dropping human figures and faces and other recognizable things into his work, the creator of fine and sensitive portraits and drawings. And he is an Expressionist and expert with color, using exuberant streaks and streams of finely calibrated pigments to communicate feeling.

Over the years, his work has been more often acquired by white collectors than African American, his former dealer Gail Enns says. And his challenging style and subject matter, say Enns and others, probably have never been an easy fit with the conservative taste of Washington's monied collectors.

"Allen Carter's work -- it's powerful, it's visceral, and it evokes an emotional response -- it draws on certain folk art traditions," says Leslie King-Hammond, an art historian, artist and dean of Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. "People can't help but look and think: 'How do I relate to this art? What is it saying about my life?' What you get are images that challenge you to think hard. And when people have to think hard, they get scared, and that's when they shut down."

There is a challenging nature to Carter's subject matter, agrees Enns. "Al's work asks big questions. His paintings are confrontational. And, in some ways, they're scary."

IN A NARROW AND ELEGANT DINING ROOM in Georgetown, decorated with crystal candelabra and a banister carved in the shape of deer antlers, Mary Swift, a longtime collector and admirer of Carter's art, has given one of his paintings pride of place. Now in her late seventies, Swift, a photographer, art historian and a longtime editor of the now defunct Washington Review, spends most of her time at her farm in Upperville, Va., but in the 1980s, she was at the center of Washington's contemporary art scene, and she remembers Carter well.

"Howdy Doody," an oil painting bigger than the gleaming dining room table, hangs directly opposite an Andy Warhol silkscreen of Chairman Mao. Strong as they are, the deep, drenched blues and tropical greens of the Warhol portrait do not overwhelm the Carter on the opposite wall. In fact, the two paintings, one by a 20th-century art superstar and one by a relative unknown, seem to joust across the dining room table with equal strength. The vigorous swattings of candy-apple red, orange and yellow paint seem to dance on the canvas of the Carter piece.

"It was because of the [Vietnam] war -- Al went with someone to the airport, and the caskets were coming in, and he was very affected by that," Swift says. "What he was saying is [soldiers] were all puppets of the people in power. That's where Howdy Doody comes in."

Despite its playful forms and strong colors, the painting's underlying message is fierce and uncompromising. On one half of the canvas, nine small Howdy Doody faces are laid out in a tic-tac-toe-like grid, three across. Each face is in some state of obliteration. One is stamped with an X, one has a giant land-mine button clamped over it, another has an eye mask through which a pair of eyes, with a faintly Asian cast, peer out. In another face, the features have been wiped off in a violent smear of paint. Behind each face there is the suggestion of a flag. Only the center face is not maimed, but its right cheek bristles with hairs that seem animal-like, and its jowl and jaw are held in place by a pin. Above the grid of faces, the words "Veteran" and "Paralyzed" float in white letters against a dark background, and near them, in darker paint, much fainter, other words, including "Employment."

The other half of the painting is dominated by one large Howdy Doody face that fills the frame. On that face, the hands of a clock hang limply from the tip of Howdy's nose, giving him the look of a hapless and doomed puppet. The time is 6:30, but the clock is broken. In a 1983 interview with D.C. painter Michael Clark, Carter said that he had been moved by sympathy for the recruits and returning soldiers, and by the knowledge that one of the caskets on the runway could have been his own. The clock hands, he said, represent "being manipulated; kids being told to 'Go jump in that ditch and shoot people.'"

"I thought it was a major piece of Al's," says Swift. "I bought it for $1,200," in the early 1980s. "I tried to give it to the Corcoran, but they didn't have room." "Howdy Doody" was displayed with a lot of other artists' work, until a team of top New York decorators who specialize in placing art sifted through dozens of works in Swift's collection and decided, very quickly, on the Carter and the Warhol.

Carter's relationship with Swift goes back to the early 1980s, when Washington's contemporary arts scene was being electrified by the force of nature that was curator and renowned art scout Walter Hopps. He arrived in Washington from California and took a succession of curatorial jobs at the Smithsonian and Corcoran. Hopps, who died last year, was by all accounts brilliant, unconventional, fearless and, above all, passionate in his tastes. He also was distracted, often behind schedule and was eventually fired from his curating jobs for failing to observe deadlines and other bureaucratic necessities. He decamped to Houston, where he led the Menil Collection to great acclaim, and his proteges are now in positions of power at art museums across the country.

One of Hopps's most legendary exploits was a 1978 show called "36 Hours," an art happening that he dreamed up after an artist friend criticized him and all major museum curators for being entirely inaccessible to ordinary artists. In reply, Hopps borrowed a downtown Washington gallery space and declared that he would display one work from any artist who showed up. The line of exhibitors filed around the block, and each artist could legitimately claim on his or her résumé to have been in a show curated by Walter Hopps. It gave many local artists their first big-name show. It was Carter's second, and Hopps became a vocal fan of Carter's work.

Swift speaks of Carter with a mixture of respect, fondness and slight exasperation for the way in which he has kept himself at arm's length from the commercial art world and failed to play the self-promotion game that is almost always necessary for a commercially and critically successful art career.

"Al is a little cranky -- he can't stand heights, he won't fly," Swift says. "Some artists stay here and wait for someone to tap them on the shoulder -- they are not going to go to New York and slog around from gallery to gallery. I think Al is very hard to help."

After the "36 Hours" show, Swift remembers, she wrote an article for the Washington Review describing Carter's contribution to the exhibit as "Rauschenberg-esque," an admiring reference to the way Carter, like Robert Rauschenberg, had included sculptural elements -- objects like Rauschenberg's ladder or goat's head -- in his paintings. "He was furious," Swift recalled. "I thought it was a compliment."

Carter hears such comparisons as an implication that his work is less than original. He himself expresses ambivalence about seeing the work go out in the world as a commodity, something to decorate a room, and he talks darkly about the high percentage of the sales price that dealers take. Similarly, he's resisting the entreaties of Gail Enns, who relocated to Northern California, to join her new gallery out there.

"She still calls me, but I want to handle myself, because it's getting to the time where -- uh-uh, I'm tired," Carter says. "You got to give up too big a percentage. I say, yeah, I can handle it myself. It's true that artists are so involved in creating, their minds are not really on selling, so they get a little lost with it. It's a little like that with me."

Carter says he has sold "two or three paintings" in the four years since Enns's Anton Gallery closed its doors in Washington. He is realistic about the downside to representing himself. "You don't want to [sell your work] like the Hub Furniture Warehouse," he says. "And then there are the people who say, 'Gimme a deal!'" referring to bargain hunters. Still, he can't get past the 50 percent commission that gallery representatives charge. His dream, instead, is that Washington artists might organize and demand that dealers halve their commissions. "But that will never happen," he says.

He is unmoved by the argument of Swift and others that dealers make a long-term and relatively high-risk investment in any artist they take on, and shoulder the cost of years of promotion, and so might be entitled to a reasonable return if the artist becomes successful.

"People say to me, 'Why don't you do this, why don't you do that?'" Carter says. "But I think about what my father used to say: 'If your art speaks, people will run toward it. They will hear it all over the world.'"

IT WILL BE A DAY OF DISCOVERY at Allen Carter's house today. The curator from the North Carolina museum has arrived to choose the paintings for her show. Two of Carter's nephews -- one a high school shop teacher, the other a computer consultant -- are here, too, to help move canvases around.

The curator, Deborah Velders, is a slim, stylish woman with a warm manner. She is dressed head to toe in black. One of the first things she does is show Carter the design for the invitation to the show.

"Oooh, that's nice!" he says.

The card's design is an American flag, but instead of red, white and blue, its colors are gray, black and gold, giving the flag a vaguely African look. The five artists are African American, but the words African American do not appear. The title of the show is simply "Five American Artists."

Velders first saw Carter's art 20 years ago, when she worked in Washington as one of Hopps's acolytes. (She is now the sister-in-law of this magazine's editor.) She remembered Carter and put him on her short list for this show. After a brief visit to Carter's house and studio over the winter, Velders thought she would choose works that showcased Carter's love of unusual surfaces -- the paintings on screens and lampshades, the fishing scene on the retractable movie screen. But this morning, she also finds herself drawn again to Carter's large oil paintings, enormous canvases, five feet high and six feet across. First, however, she stops near the front door.

"Hi Yo Silver," Velders says, speaking aloud the title of a work painted on a folding screen. It depicts the images of two horse heads and a woman's face. "It looks like it was painted on bamboo . . ."

"Yes it is," Carter says. "It's mixed media -- house paint and acrylic."

"And when did you paint it?" Velders asks.

"I don't know," Carter says. "I just do things."

"So . . . when?"

"I don't know -- three or four years ago," Carter says.

"What about this one?" Velders says, moving into the kitchen.

"That one is 'Crazy Horse at War,'" he says. The painting includes an American Indian in tall feather headdress. It is half drawing, half painting, more delicate than the screen painting, which drips with bright primary colors.

"I like it. Your palette's changing a little bit with this one." She moves on to another painting, "Black Man in Maxton, North Carolina."

"When did you do that?" she asks.

Carter does not answer.

"Big," Velders says patiently, "I've got to get you to start putting dates on things."

This dance about dates will go on throughout the morning. Velders suspects that Carter knows more about dates than he is willing to let on, a common concern of older, so-called mid-career artists, who may worry about dating themselves and their work.

Another large work, "Cowboy Sam." Another: "Nude in a Small Boat." She peers on the back of the canvas. Undated. "You are funny about dates, Al, you really are," she says.

Velders inspects two large brightly colored canvases that will eventually be included in the small cache of works that will make the truck ride to Wilmington: one called "Rain Mist," a large canvas in blue, red and green; and one called "Nude 24," a fierce yellow painting of three nudes who may also be saints, standing sideways. "That was house paint, acrylic and oil paint," Carter says.

"Now, any recollection of approximately when?" Velders asks.

"Nah," Carter replies, "because you know what happens -- a lot of my paintings, I change 'em up."

She selects another work, a smaller one, called "Nude in a Boat," that shows a nude female figure standing in a rowboat in the middle of a stream, her back to the viewer and, in the distance, a low stone bridge, tall cypresses and a small house.

Carter explains the setting, saying: "Here in Alexandria, they used to have a place where they kept the slaves locked up -- and that was my interpretation."

"So you're re-creating. Do you remember hearing about William Blake, from long ago?" Velders says.

"You mean the artist William Blake?"

"Yes," Velders says. "The artist and poet. Did you ever look at him? You should. He believed in drawing from memory, too."

"I don't know," Carter says, shrugging. "Maybe I'm just different. I just knock 'em out. I could look at you today, and a month from now, I could draw your entire skeleton."

Velders borrows a tape measure and begins measuring and calculating. "Big, you really need better studio space; some of these paintings are getting dirty, and some of these are really terrific paintings."

Velders keeps moving through the corridors of art. "Here's one that's got a whole violin in it!"

"I Made a Step" is a large, chaotic canvas, flooded with color and feeling, and it depicts two worlds. On the right side, a real violin, rows of shoeshine brushes and the weary but dignified face of an elderly woman suggest the sober, workaday realm of shoeshine men and street musicians, its objects hearkening to physical labor and limited horizons. But on the left side of the painting, this grim tableau has exploded into a riot of sunny peach and green. There are tool-like shapes and forms that suggest steel girders. It is a world bursting with vitality, possibilities and the chance of happiness.

"I Made a Step," says Velders, reading the words painted along the bottom of the picture.

"Yeah," says Carter. "That means, 'I made a step unto the Lord.' That was for when my dad died."

"When did your father die?"

"Eight or nine years ago."

"What?" Carter's nephew Brady Chestnut exclaims on hearing this. "He died when I was 3! If I was 3, that means he died in 1978-79." Which means the date of Carter's father's death is more like 30 years ago. Dates, it seems clear, are not Carter's strong point, or interest.

But he is focused on explaining the painting and gives no sign of having heard. "It's about church, and people clapping," he says, eagerly. "If you go see someone polishing shoes, they clap the brushes. We had a church, and in some black churches, they clap."

Velders nods. "Well, in honor of your father, we're gonna take 'I Made a Step,'" she says. She chooses one more painting, another large canvas, called "Not for Rent," which Carter says he painted after he answered a classified ad for rental housing and was told by the landlady that she did not rent to "blacks or Spanish," he says.

The culling goes on for a few hours longer, but by late afternoon, Velders is winding up. "I think what we've captured with these works is Al's compassion, his sense of social responsibility, for family and community," she says. "And also his technical ability."

And the work will fit the show's greater theme, that these African American artists have something valid and important to say to the wider culture. "That's why we started with the idea of an African activist flag on the invitation," Velders says. "Asking is there something that constitutes African American art? Is there such a thing as a national art? A national anything?"

With the work done, Velders takes Carter and his nephews to lunch at a pizzeria. Everyone piles into Carter's van. Sitting in the front passenger seat, with Carter at the wheel, Velders is explaining that some curators believe the rise of the Internet may be weakening the stranglehold of New York as gatekeeper of contemporary art. Already, she says, the United States is no longer the only place to find important work. The art world now has many centers: Venice, Sao Paolo. So the idea, and the era, of "regional" art, of "regional artists" waiting for a visit from a godlike curator or critic from Manhattan, has begun to seem outdated. Artists can display their work online. "We're in a global art economy now," she says.

Carter, at the wheel and humming happily, seems to be only half-listening. "I like looking at my work," he replies. "It gives me other ideas."

Mary Battiata is a staff writer for the Magazine. She will be fielding questions and comments about this article at noon Monday at washingtonpost.com/liveonline.