Barbara J Carter

I just stumbled across a wonderful video clip of the famous artist Wolf Kahn, speaking about landscape painting. You can find the clip here. (Be aware: it’s nearly an hour long.)

I greatly admire him. He paints with unabashedly bright colors, and his subject matter is the landscape, which he usually simplifies into color fields or semi-geometric forms. I enjoy his work, and I admire his success.

His speech was titled “Six Good Reasons Not to Paint a Landscape”. It’s a humorous piece, because of course he paints landscapes. But he does raise good points about the problems inherent in this genre. It’s a very old genre, and people tend to think “everything’s been done.” Given all its drawbacks, he said, “to be a landscape painter is to be a perverse individual.”

Hooray for perversity! Or at least, perseverance. I think this world needs more contrarians. How boring if we all did the same thing.

He also claimed to be a “color junkie.” I loved that. He said, “As I get older, the blue gets bluer and the yellow gets more yellow.” He uses bright colors, he goes on to say, because “I want excitement, I want intensity.”

That really resonates for me. I’m happiest when my paintings seem to vibrate with the intensity of the colors.

I’ve heard it said that young, less mature artists tend to use bright colors. As artists grow and mature (that is, get better) they use subtler, more neutral hues. A lot of grey in a painting is supposed to be the height of restraint and artistry.

Well, not for Wolf Kahn! At a nice mature age, he continues to revel in the childlike glee of vivid colors. By his own admission, his colors are getting even brighter as he gets older. And I say, good for him!

And I hope, good for me too. Because I’m a color junkie too.

I wish you a happy holiday and a bright new year!

“Gradient Hill”, 2007, acrylic on canvas, 14×11″

Everyone on my mailing list received a holiday card from me this year, featuring the above painting.

Did you miss out? You can sign up for my mailing list here!

If you include your email address I’ll email you VERY occasional reminders about my upcoming shows or other newsworthy items. (It’s a handful of emails per year.) If you include your postal mail address, you’ll get an occasional card from me, but probably not more than once or twice a year.

Whether you sign up for my mailing list or not, please do continue to visit my blog in 2008. Let’s have a happy new year together!

I just made a happy discovery. I’m #1 on Google!

That is, if you search on Google.com for “Barbara Carter“, the first result is my web site.

To be sure, these things fluctuate. I’ve never been #1 on Google before, and it might no longer be true tomorrow. But today I’m celebrating!

I never thought I’d make it to the top. When I began my web site, it didn’t even come up on the first page of search results. Actually, I think it came up on the 3rd!

The worst insult of all was that some other Barbara Carter had already snagged the “BarbaraCarter.com” URL for herself. And, obviously, was coming up top in any search. Drat!

This forced me to really think about how to set up my web site, what to call it, and how to optimize it for people trying to find me. The first thing I had to do was register a different URL, which I did by using my middle initial.

The all-important “J” in Barbara J Carter!

I began to use that “J” in everything. I had always signed my name with it, but now it became my identifier, the thing that sets me apart from all the other Barbara Carters. Believe me, there are a LOT of Barbara Carters out there. So, everywhere my name appeared, I made sure the “J” was included.

Slowly, over the years, I incorporated more and more SEO (search engine optimization) methods to enhance my standing on Google. I even took a class on SEO. Some of the usual SEO techniques involve using keywords, text links, alt tags, and incoming links. An art web site is especially hard to optimize because art is fundamentally about images, while search engines just look at words. It’s slow going, but apparently all that slow steady work has finally paid off!

Or maybe it’s just because the other Barbara Carter’s web site is down.

“Dirt Mulholland”, 2007, acrylic on canvas, 12×9″

The famous Mulholland Drive in Los Angeles is a long, scenic road that snakes many miles through some of L.A.’s most beautiful hills.

However, it is not possible to drive its entire length. Part of it is unpaved and closed to traffic. It is possible to walk it, and that’s just what I did to get the photo that this painting is based on.

The unpaved stretch is called “dirt Mulholland” by the locals, while on maps it’s referred to as “Mulholland Drive (dirt)”. Either way, it’s a beautiful place to take a walk.

The painting is available unframed $280, or framed $330. It is wired and ready to hang. Framing is optional, the edges are finished.

Email inquiries welcome: info@barbarajcarter.com

All my paintings are priced by size; prices increase periodically. If you are viewing this more than a few months after my posting, please consult my website for current prices: www.barbarajcarter.com