ABOUT kaline
Kaline Carter was born in 1974 in Kingston, NY. After a brief and notably unsuccessful stint at Parsons School of Design in the early 1990s, he found himself in a creative dry spell for about two decades. Then in 2012, he met Ann Crouch, an artist and the owner of Sunset Art Center in Amarillo, TX.
Carter was working in advertising for Southwest Art Magazine, and Ann was one of his clients. “Every time I visited, she asked if I was an artist. And every time I responded with, ‘No, absolutely not, not me.’” Then on one visit, she asked if he would keep her company while she painted. When he got to her studio, she had an extra easel set up with a blank canvas. She suggested that he let her squeeze a few colors of paint onto the canvas and then he could push the paint around with a palette knife or brush. He did just that, and then did it every time he visited Ann for the next several years.
Ann passed away unexpectedly in 2017. Carter was heartbroken, and felt that it was his responsibility to continue creating art, or else would lose it again for another two decades. It felt like Ann was watching and guiding him. That day, he made it his mission to keep a sketchbook. He also started snapping pictures of things that inspired him when he couldn’t take the time to sketch.
Eventually Carter stumbled on a few articles about painter Agnes Martin, and then read her biography. It turns out that Agnes and Carter have a lot in common: two tries at making it in New York City; mental breaks that put them in the same New York City hospital; escaping to New Mexico; attending the University of New Mexico; and, of course, a passion for the square and lines. Carter has “always liked the fact that, when Agnes returned to painting after a long break, she completed her first set of new paintings the same year I was born.”
Carter loved every Agnes painting he found, and wanted to explore the grid more. So, he bought vellum and graph paper and started to sketch some grids, and came up with color combinations based on favorite album covers. He made several grid paintings with gouache on paper, but they were painstakingly slow.
Meanwhile, he had begun looking at everyday scenes differently—particularly glimpses of architecture, aerial views of cities and farmland, and shapes found in nature. Carter was fascinated with the vast universe of color combinations that can be applied to patterns. His sketchbook was filling up, and he wanted to explore other ways of turning those sketches into paintings.
In early 2019, he started to research painting techniques with acrylic on canvas and found many ways to paint hard-edge geometric paintings. Carter ran into more influential artists like Ellsworth Kelly, Frederick Hammersley, Frank Stella, Bridget Riley, Ad Reinhardt, Carmen Herrera and Barnett Newman. Carter considers them to be his teachers, and has taken a bit from each of their practices.
“By paring down my observations of the world around me, and then applying the techniques I have learned while studying my favorite artists, I have found a style I am completely comfortable working in. This work is as much about the process as it is about the final outcome.”
