Kirk Carter Biography

About Kirk Carter

I’ve been a radio announcer, television producer, cellular phone system engineer, entrepreneur, website designer and developer. I draw upon my wide-ranging experiences in making art, but I won’t claim it makes the work any easier.

My first images appeared in a darkroom developing tray. They were portraits of random people who would stand near a window for a minute. I’d press the shutter when they stopped thinking about how they might look in the photo.

For many years I photographed something like environmental portraits with the person framed out. The actions recorded in the things and places people have made, damaged, repaired, neglected, preserved or restored tell better stories than a smile or a pose.

Today I work in mixed media and printmaking. I like creating a sense of depth or form with flat shapes. There’s magic in silhouettes, in representing one texture with another, in simplifying almost to abstraction.

Just about any media could end up in one of my pieces. I work towards a mental image of the finished piece without regard to the method of getting there. In fact, I tend to invent a new process for every series. I try out new modes of depiction just to see what happens.

Sometimes word balloons creep in. Many of my recent works combine words with images, exploring that deep world that exists between the two. My pandemic project was a series of block printed postcards with 100-word stories on the back. The story and image together make something larger than either one could accomplish alone.