Toward Mansion House Painting

Carpenter was born in 1953 in Greenville, Delaware, U.S.A. He studied with the painter Tom Bostelle near home and then went to the Rhode Island School of Design, where he earned a BFA in Film, in 1976. His work has been shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver, P.S.1, New York, and the Centre Pompidou, Paris. Carpenter's painting style is a cross between old master techniques and expressionism. He makes marks with flicks of a fully-loaded palette knife, but to a precise rendering of hue and tone in a representational image. The image is built up in countless layers of oil glazes, much as Vermeer worked, only in thick impasto. Peeking through the layers are often the transparent traces of a map or poetry. This idea is borrowed from pentimento, the inherent feature of oil paint that, as it dries, it becomes more transparent, revealing what's underneath.