Triptych of Richard Carter Op Art Paintings

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Set of three Richard Carter original paintings in custom acrylic frames, all with provenance from the Weingarten Realty Investors Corporate … Read more Set of three Richard Carter original paintings in custom acrylic frames, all with provenance from the Weingarten Realty Investors Corporate Art Program and Kauffman Galleries (Houston, TX) en verso.

Richard Carter arrived in the Roaring Fork Valley in 1971 from New Jersey after graduating from Villanova University in 1969. Carter did not study at an Art School but grew up in a culturally aware household and he is a self-taught painter. He spent from 1972 thru 1978 working as the studio assistant to former Bauhaus master Herbert Bayer in Bayer’s Red Mountain studio. This included projects in painting, sculpture, printmaking, tapestry design, exhibition design, and environmental works as well as architectural projects. At the same time, he worked a steady schedule on his own paintings in his studio in the west end of Aspen.

Carter credits trips to Bayer’s studio as inspiration to spearhead the movement (in 1976 with two other Aspen artists) to convert the old Holy Cross Power House into the Aspen Center for Visual Arts; the name later changed to the Aspen Art Museum. Mr. Carter served on the board for five years, and was president for two years. During this time, he had numerous solo and group shows locally and nationally of his own work. He has always been active with local arts non-profits, including the Anderson Ranch (known for its renowned artist residency program) in Snowmass (serving on the board and playing an instrumental part in starting the ongoing annual art auction). He served on the board of the ARTBASE in Basalt, CO and the TACAW board to bring the Arts Campus at Willits, a performing Arts facility, to reality. His work is in all the Visual Arts Museum collections in Colorado and during the 2020-2024 period, Mr. Carter showed new work at the ARTBASE in Basalt CO., the Hexton Gallery in Aspen and the William Havu Gallery in Denver.

In March 2022, he was honored by the Colorado Business Council for the Arts with the John Madden Lifetime Achievement Award for his "legacy of outstanding work in promoting the Arts in the Roaring Fork Valley".

His work is in the permanent collection of the Denver Art Museum, the Kirkland Museum, and the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center at Colorado College, as well as in the corporate collections of Bank of America, IBM, Prudential, and AT&T, among many, many others.

Mr. Carter's art is both geometric and organic; he mines the laws of physics for his visual language and is heavily influenced by geology, various forms found in nature, and the cosmos. He actually titles all of his artworks based on the book Annals of the Former World, written by Princeton professor John McPhee (which won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction in 1999).

McPhee penned the following remarks about Richard’s work, writing:

“Richard Carter’s work is so absorbing to look at, trying to discern what was in his mind as he transliterated palatial effects, the structure of geophysical hotspots, magnetic anomalies, and so forth, he reminded me of Paul Klee, not at all in an imitative way, just in the imaginative way that Klee turns stratigraphy into items befitting the walls of a museum.”

Exerpt from an interview with Mr. Carter:

I did not study art at university. I studied on my own—basically, the library was my resource for art books. It wasn't really a great art library. I think the first art book I read as a freshman was Man Ray's autobiography, and then I would read Art in America every week.

I started in engineering, but I really couldn't cut the math. So I just wound up doing general social science and, since it was the 1960s, I studied a lot of things. You could do that then.

The work I was interested in was constructivism—I don't know why, but it just struck me. I was painting on my own. After college, I had a very strange job with Pfizer for a year. And I just hated life.

So my wife and I came out to Aspen in April of 1971. And there was nobody here. There wasn't a stoplight. There wasn't a sidewalk. There were lots of empty lots with rusted cars in them. Aspen then was really great.

I had a lot of luck. First of all—asking for introductions was a really smart thing. I was really up against it in New York, because all the young artists had an art school cadre around them—right—and I didn’t. But I was introduced to Herbert Bayer’s studio assistant, and I went and interviewed with him and he hired me.

But, of course, I'm nervous as hell, because I'm not a trained artist, in the sense that I didn't go to art school. But, I showed him my work, and he liked it, so he just said, “I don't care if you’re trained or not, you'll learn by what we do.”

Getting attached to him was a huge thing for me. Suddenly, I had this validity of working, for a “real artist”— you know, a real Bauhaus artist. My work was sympatico with his. I loved working for him, and it was really a great job.

I also started working in film accidentally in the mid-80s. I was living in San Francisco at the time, temporarily, and I was totally broke—I mean, really struggling. A friend of mine who was an art director came to town to do a commercial and she called me up and said “I'm desperate for some help. You want to work? I'll pay you 100 bucks a day,” which was great in 1984. So that's how I got into the film business.

As years went by, I started working for other people, but there were a lot of assholes in that business—directors, especially producers, just really bad people. But, then I got a job in the early 90s with Christopher Guest.

I ended up spending 35 years working for Christopher Guest and I wouldn't work for anybody else after that, because the guy was so nice and so even-tempered, as well as being a great director and comedic genius—and we just had so much in common.

I believe in mentorship, I sponsored a mentorship program at The Art Base here in Basalt. We take high school juniors every year and pair them with a local artist to develop a serious piece of work.

Working with Bayer gave me credibility. Working with Christopher Guest in the film business changed the entire job for me. Suddenly, when I walked in the room, I was treated like a human being.

So yes, you know, bathing in the glow of good people sometimes can really help.

Richard Carter’s 50 year career has been guided by intense curiosity, a drive to master his craft, and by intriguing themes that captivate him and ultimately define his bodies of work. His creativity has typically (though not always) come to life through unique geometric abstractions centered on fully developed concepts and philosophies. He has exhibited in the Denver Art Museum, the Institute of Contemporary Art LA, The Aspen Art Museum, the Aspen Institute (Aspen and Berlin), the Colorado Fine Arts Center, Aurora Arts Center, and the Santa Monica Museum. Carters paintings are in a number of these institutions’ permanent collections and he has been represented by eminent galleries across the U.S. See less