Richie Carter | Balladeer of the Land

 

Richie Carter’s paintings sing poignant and beautiful songs of the Rocky Mountain West.

By Norman Kolpas

At a recent gallery opening to debut his latest oil-on-linen landscapes of the Rocky Mountain West, Richie Carter did more than merely share with guests the few well-considered words normally expected of an artist. The now 35-year-old painter picked up an acoustic guitar and, in his clear, honeyed baritone, delivered his own original songs inspired by each of his paintings.

Standing near the work BLEEDING LIGHT, for example, Carter sang a ballad of the same title. Its metaphoric lyrics were as moving as the dramatic dusk scene of a tree-shrouded lakeside mountain. One ridge is etched by a growing wildfire that sends flames and smoke into the darkening air. Part of his song goes:

Be partial to the bleeding light.
You start a fire you break the wood.
Now go plant a seed
where the tower stood.
* * *
So put out the fire
and cover the wood.
Now go find your treasure
where the tower stood.

That particular fire, he says, was an event he witnessed a couple of years ago and photographed “to help hold that memory in my head.” The scene, both beautiful and deadly, haunted him. “And then it took me about a year before I had the guts to try to paint it, because it’s so simple,” he says. “Seen from a distance, this insanely powerful, destructive force of nature looks like a tiny beam of light, while close-up it destroys forests and wildlife. But some seeds in the forest must reach a certain temperature before they’ll germinate, so you also need such destruction to bring new life. That’s such a beautiful metaphor for our own human experience.” (Find Carter’s “Bleeding Light” on Apple Music or Spotify.)

Writing songs to complement his art, and sometimes performing them at a show’s opening, aims to serve a deeper purpose Carter feels is integral to his work. “I don’t mean for this to sound pompously profound,” he offers in a charmingly sincere disclaimer, “but there is an emotion, a message, that I want to portray through my art. I love that paintings can allow somebody to feel a whole spectrum of emotions and, when they know someone else is feeling the same way, make them feel less alone.”

He continues, “When I get to share along with my paintings these songs that have very personal meanings, people are often moved, and they come up to me afterward and share something about their own lives. And I see an opening up, and healing happens. I want to create more with my art than just people looking and sipping wine. I want to create connection and allow people to feel.”

Creating art has held a special power for Carter since his early childhood years in the lakeside northwestern Montana town of Marion. “I always loved creating,” he says, “whether it was music or drawing or building something.” A favorite uncle of his was adept at drawing cartoons of dinosaurs and other creatures. Carter explains, “I was always mesmerized, watching him make a few lines on a piece of paper and, all of a sudden, this lifelike, three-dimensional thing would appear. I was captivated. I thought it was magic, something everybody still feels when they watch somebody paint. And I remember thinking to myself, I’m going to be an artist—that is what I’m going to do.”

Carter continued making art every chance he got. At Flathead High School in Kalispell, he says, “I took as many advanced art classes as I could.” But he was prepared to let his talent unfold in a more practical direction like being an illustrator, engineer or architect—until, that is, he was awarded at graduation in 2007 a “full-ride scholarship” to study painting at a small college in San Diego. Unfortunately, by the end of his first semester, he knew that institution was not the right place for him, and he returned to his home state to enroll in studio art studies at the University of Montana in Missoula.

In the process of earning his Bachelor of Fine Arts, he learned some unexpectedly valuable lessons. Carter found the art department at UM “very contemporary, postmodern and conceptual based, while all I just wanted to do was learn to draw and paint,” he says. “I just butted heads with every part of my education. But what they really taught me was to think creatively, to put a little bit more into my work.” Most instructive and inspiring of all, however, was the junior year he spent studying abroad in France, at a college in Picardy, about 70 miles north of Paris. Every spare day he had, Carter recalls, “I would go to the Louvre, and I would draw and paint watercolors of all the neoclassical sculptures.”

After graduation, he found work at a ceramic studio and gallery in Bigfork, and for a couple of years he considered focusing on that three-dimensional medium. Then, a friend alerted him to a five-day painting workshop being taught locally by the widely respected Utah-based artist and teacher John Poon. Carter enrolled, “and he gave me a language for all the things I’d been trying to figure out on my own. It just clicked, almost immediately, and I started painting again.” A coffee shop where Carter had been working offered to show the first five new landscapes he’d produced, “and a couple of weeks later a gentleman from Oregon came in and bought them all.” He painted more works, and those sold as well, all while he took two more workshops from Poon over the next two years. Since 2014, he hasn’t looked back.

The years that followed saw a snowballing of recognition for Carter’s work, like his inclusion in The Russell, the C.M. Russell Museum’s art auction in Great Falls, Montana; and, in September 2017, his selection as one of Southwest Art’s yearly 21 Under 31 that introduces young artists on the rise. Representation followed from galleries ever more prestigious and widespread—including, most recently, becoming a featured artist with Arcadia Contemporary in New York City. His show of 20 twilit European cityscapes, mostly of Paris, opens in May at the gallery.

Though drawn to the romance of Europe, Carter inevitably returns to depicting the Rocky Mountain West he knows and loves so well. Regardless of his subject, he has a wealth of reference works, some of them plein air studies and others photographs he takes while traveling the highways and backroads of his homeland.

Whichever source material he selects, he then paints a small study. He says, “I can work out all the drawing, all the values, all the colors and edges. Essentially, if I can paint that small one and it looks good, then most of the problems are solved” in advance of the larger, final work. Then, using a “very rough grid, so there’s no guesswork of where things are going to go,” he transfers the compositions basic lines and proportions to a primed canvas in a transparent warm undertone. Then, working mostly from darker colors to lighter ones, he gradually paints, refines and completes the scene in four to six layers of oil paints. “In certain areas,” he adds, “I build up paint to get more texture, and other areas I keep transparent, because I love that dynamic.”

Such a dynamic, in fact, may well add to the complex emotional impact his landscapes can have on viewers. And that complexity, paradoxically, is enhanced by the relative simplicity of his compositions. “They’re very simplified, almost starting to get abstracted,” he observes. “And they’re tonalist, with the very small value range you typically see right before the sun’s come up or right after it’s gone down. That’s such a fleeting time of day, with magical lighting.” Through his ever-more-self-assured technique, Carter has distilled the very essence of that enchantment inherent in his subjects. “Just looking at the landscape can be a very emotive experience that tells us stories about our lives.”

Norman Kolpas is a San Rafael, California-based freelancer who writes for various art publications. He teaches creative writing in The Writers’ Program at UCLA, UCLA Extension.

contact information
richiecarterfinearts.com

representation
Arcadia Contemporary, New York, NY, arcadiacontemporary.com
Settlers West Galleries, Tucson, AZ, settlerswest.com
Old Main Gallery, Bozeman, MT, oldmaingallery.com
FoR Fine Art, Whitefish, MT, forfineart.com. Cassens Fine Art, Hamilton, MT, cassensfineart.com

upcoming shows
Se Préparer, solo show, Arcadia Contemporary, Opening May 9.
Duo show of landscapes, Cassens Fine Art, Opening June 7.

This story appeared in the April/May 2024 issue of Southwest Art magazine. Subscribe today to read every issue in its entirety.