Kaline Carter

Albuquerque painter, Kaline Carter found himself in a creative dry spell for about two decades after a brief and notably unsuccessful stint at New York’s Parsons School of Design in the early 1990’s. Only recently beginning to paint again, he takes snapshots from things we see every day- like glimpses of architecture and aerial views of crop fields- and pares them down into large, abstract, geometric shapes. “Looking back, I realized I have always been attracted to giant, geometric shapes and blocks of color,” he says. A few years ago, he filled a sketchbook with these compositions and began to study techniques used by artists like Ellsworth Kelly, Agnes Martin and Frederick Hammersley to turn his sketches into paintings. He uses hard-edge painting techniques with smoothly applied acrylic paint on both paper and canvas to achieve sharp, crisp edges. His work derives from his fascination with the vast universe of color combinations that can be applied to patterns making an infinite number of unique designs possible. Carter’s work is truly as much about the process as it is about the final outcome.