Front cover: Moonscape (detail) 2023, acrylic on canvas, 40 x 40 in.
Simon Carr Just Beyond Seen
NOVEMBER 12 – DECEMBER 14, 2024 robert&elainesteingalleries
Early Spring (Riding Lessons) (detail) 2023, acrylic on canvas, 36 x 60 in.
The preparations for this show have been marked by the passing of two people who were very close to my life.
The first is the art historian and critic Martica Sawin, who was a friend and mentor for many years. In honor of her memory, a catalog from a 2020 show at Bowery Gallery in New York has been reprinted for the Wright State show; it includes her essay and an interview we did together.
The second is my brother Caleb Carr. Our relationship was not easy, especially in the last few years. But we shared a love for a place we both had known for our whole lives together. I know that place and his love for it was a consolation to him at the end. He is missed particularly by his nieces and nephews, in whose lives he played such a big part.
—Simon Carr September 2024
Giotto di Bondone
The Adoration of the Magi c.1320, tempera and gold on wood, 17¾ x 17¼ in. Metropolitan Museum of Art
Simon Carr and Glen Cebulash: A pre-exhibition conversation
Glen Cebulash and Simon Carr exchanged frequent email messages in the two years leading up to this exhibition. What began as a discussion of the details of putting together an exhibition soon shifted to talk about artists they admired, and why, with attached images illuminating their points.
Simon Carr: Hi Glen, speaking of Leland Bell: I recently caught up with another Parsons student, Mimi Stafford, who reminded me of a lecture (among many) we had with Bell at the Met. We were standing in front of the Giotto Adoration (his almost favorite, along with the Dűrer St. Anne, the ones he would grab if the museum were on fire, he used to say). He was going on about how stupid it was
to hang the work in historical order, for instance why not hang Matisse next to Giotto so one could see how much they had in common. Then he spotted a curator walking through the gallery. A young Keith Christiansen, I think.
“Hey! Excuse me! Could we talk about the hanging in the museum?...etc.”
Loud and clear! Whoever it was slunk away.
We were so in awe of Bell! He was so upfront about painting and how much it meant. He taught us to be outsiders in the place that was our home, the museum. To always maintain our independence as artists who saw and felt in unique (and important) ways.
Glen Cebulash: I remember Bell speaking about the differences between how Renoir and Cézanne painted. He referred to the almost casual way Renoir and some of the French painted vs. Cézanne’s anxiety, doubt and sense of futility. That aspect of Cézanne, assuming one accepts the premise, seems to have moved across the ocean and settled in New York, sometime in the ‘30s I suppose. I was just thinking about the way Marquet has this quality—pitch perfect with his tones and colors and application. It all seems so matter of fact, ringing all the bells.
S.C. Quick trip to Baltimore. Here is a Marquet in the Cone collection, not in the regular white-wall galleries, but in the “period room” that recreates the sisters’ living room, with paintings and bric a brac and overstuffed couches.
But it really sings out on the wall. We were only at the Baltimore museum a few hours but saw the terrific big Van Dyck they have. The Van Dyck was a monster, I wasn’t prepared for it, I’ve always been ok with him, especially English portraits, but this was a surprise. That big piece of red in the center! I wish I had had more time with it.
Roman mosaics, yes.
Of course there are a lot of Matisses. Sorry, he is very hard for me. I can always hear him thinking, almost laughing at the viewer. But there were some Nice period ones that really were terrific.
There was a very nice Bonnard, and next to it a Vuillard. Maybe both as calculated, I’m sure, as the Matisse, but both made Matisse look somehow insincere. Both B and V seemed committed, full engaged. I don’t know if that makes sense.
I know this is a ridiculous minority opinion, so ignore me!
G.C. These are great, thanks for sending. I too really like the Van Dyck and don’t recall seeing it before. Very Venetian to my way of thinking…Titian, Veronese. Definitely a painting you could get lost in I appreciate your disdain
Anthony van Dyck
Rinaldo and Armida
1629, oil on canvas, 92½ x 90 in. Baltimore Museum of Art
Albert Marquet
The Bay of Chingoudy 1926, oil on canvas, 19⅝ x 24⅞ in. Baltimore Museum of Art
for Matisse and I take it seriously as well. My devotion to him isn’t slavish, but my disposition is admittedly sunnier. The way you speak of him reminds me of how I often feel toward Picasso—also a giant, but not someone that is ever very “go-to” for me. My appreciation for Vuillard is limitless, with the possible exception of some of the larger canvases—the ones in Chicago come to mind, though the large one owned by the Met is pretty great.
S.C. Maybe because Matisse was interested in “flat,” color becomes arbitrary and not truly spatial. Most of the other Fauves seem very classical in the way they approach depth in the paintings, foreground, middle, back, and circulating between, especially Derain. That makes their use of color even more exciting to me. The Fauve show (at the Metropolitan) is misleading in the sense that it sets Matisse up as the Master and Derain as the student. It was the opposite. And Vlaminck gets lost.
Duccio di Buoninsegna Madonna and Child c. 1290–1300, tempera and gold on wood, 11 x 8¼ in. (framed) Metropolitan Museum of Art
But those arguments are all gone now. Time passes, and we watch museum and art historians digest and regurgitate history. That why it is so important to pass on the identity of artist to students! We believe what we see and can make use of, our unique way of seeing, not what we are told by “experts.”
Yes, I think Matisse has an intellectual approach that led him to flatness. It was an intellectual approach that led him away from profound emotion. At least to me a J.F. Millet landscape carries more weight, more depth visually and emotionally, than a Matisse. And Millet’s drawings! He really looked, really felt weight and form.
But Matisse. when he is good, especially goldfish or Nice period. But I guess it’s always hard, as with Cézanne, to separate the artist from the art theorist and art historians who use them to invent “modernism” or whatever else they want. Derain or Marquet seem interested above all in painting in the world, not copying, but seeing into the world . They seem to venerate the traditions and take their place among them.
We did get programmed with French nineteenth-century painting as students. Yes, I saw English paintings as my way out, I guess my solace for my awkward eye. Sickert was the beginning very long ago. There is something about the off -handed clumsiness in English painting, the slightly awkward naïve pursuit of the motif that I really felt at home with.
Hogarth as a painter really pushed me on, though I understand he is difficult. Gainsborough is wonderful in landscapes, even if the heads float sometimes in the beautiful portraits. And the very great black/greens of Constable. The power of dark! It’s a long list, and in the twentieth-century figurative painting was never lost, the strange British insularity refused abstraction in large part. A.J. Munnings and Laura Knight, even Lucy Kemp-Welch! Oh well. The tradition, Bomberg, Kossoff, Auerbach.
G.C. For me, real solace has always come from the old masters, especially the early Renaissance painters. I was in Italy this past summer and was blown away by the Duccios in Siena. I’d seen them all before, but you know how that goes…you come back to them always a different person from whoever you were the last time you saw them. I couldn’t get over them. Cimabue, Giotto, Piero, Sassetta, Fra Angelico et al. Those painters always knock me out and always make me very happy. I’ve only ever broken down in tears in front of paintings twice in my life and one of those times was Giotto in Padua (the other was Matisse at the Hermitage). I cried like a baby—it was a bit embarrassing! Of course, I like the northerners too and the minor Dutch painters. I do love the moderns and the French especially, but the joy they bring is different. Hard to nail this down precisely. I was swooning in front of the Duccios.
S.C. This is a very beautiful letter! Your personal involvement and the clear light it shines on your work. Makes me see I have been caught up in the more post eighteenth-century moderns. I remember the Giottos from very long ago (forty years?) but your description brings them back vividly.
I remember when the new Duccio came to the Met, what an event that was, such beautiful clear space in the gestures all around hands and feet. The space he points out pulling aside her veil, the tactile feeling of her cheek and neck and behind. So much appreciate what you said about Duccio. Here are two Poussins, I seem to trip over him no matter what motif I am working on. He keeps the ground plane down, not like Brueghel’s amazing point of view, always up.
I can’t seem to resist tilting the ground plane up, sort of adult eye level looking down but I think something else is at work. Does eye level ever effect your painting/drawing? Does abstraction escape the “eye” in that sense?
G.C. A very interesting question and one that I hadn’t really thought much about. So, I do need to think on it a bit more. That said, my initial response is to say no, it’s not really a consideration. There are aspects of perception that do intrigue and concern me as an abstract painter (light, color weight, volume, scale), but I think something like eye level would make the painting
Fra Angelico and Fra Filippo Lippi
The Adoration of the Magi c.1440/1460, tempera on wood, 54 in. dia. National Gallery of Art
almost mock-perceptual, if that makes any sense. I’m not sure this is totally related, but one of the things I really like about pre- and early Renaissance painting is the multiplicity of spatial readings. I’m attaching this Angelico/Lippi tondo from the National Gallery that I’ve always liked. I guess one could say there’s something like an eye level in this image, but it’s either all over the place (as is the scale—the manger in and out is nuts), or not perceptual. Anyway, like I said, I have to think about this more. You put a real bug in my head!
S.C. That’s interesting, your interest in Italian painting sidesteps perspective formalized in Florence. What a terrific insight! The freedom of it!
G.C. Running out the door, but do have to share this little detail from the from the Maestà in Siena, especially since you mentioned the hands. Talk about drawing! And sympathetic form. I can’t look away from it. Also attaching a little Fra Angelico I’ve been digging the last few days. Talk about solace.
Glen Cebulash was born and raised in Hackensack, NJ. He received his BFA from Boston University and his MFA from American University. He is currently a professor of painting and drawing at Wright State University in Dayton, OH, where he has taught since 1996. Glen is a member of Bowery Gallery in NYC.
Duccio di Buoninsegna Maestà Altarpiece (detail) 1308-11, tempera and gold on wood, 84 x 180 in. Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, Siena
T hese paintings from the last 20 years or so share a certain sensibility. But this falsifies my life in the studio. There was no straight line from here to there; there were false starts, distractions and other experiments not included in this show. I paint more landscapes, animals, flowers and other subjects than appear here. But hopefully “Just Beyond Seen” represents the mainstream of my studio life.
—Simon Carr January 2024
Bill in the New Field (detail) 2021, acrylic on canvas, 21 x 27 in.
Being and Place
by Alice Gauvin
For most of his life as an artist, Simon Carr has been painting the landscape of Cherry Plain, a hamlet in upstate New York where the his family has kept a residence for generations. “That particular landscape is so ingrained in me, it’s so accessible,” remarked Carr at the beginning of a conversation in February 2023. “My whole life has been there.” Working from memory in his studio, he continually reshuffles the landscape he knows so well: mountains and fields move, trees go up and down and in and out. Horses also appear in Carr’s Cherry Plain scenes, populating pastures and hillsides, often rendered in deep shades of red against green, gold, or flesh-colored fields. In many paintings, these horses are accompanied by riders, usually his wife or his daughter. For Carr, horses have become an integral part of the landscape in recent years: “they’re so much a key to the landscape, and so much a way into the landscape,” he says.
Carr was raised in the West Village of Manhattan in the 1950s. Despite having grown up during the Abstract Expressionist boom and borne witness to the parade of artistic blockbusters for which the city has become (in)famous, narrative painting has been the bread and butter of his career as an artist. Along with landscapes
Saddle Up (detail) 2023, acrylic on canvas, 22 x 30 in.
of Cherry Plain, Carr’s recent works include a series of paintings from the city: river walks, farmers markets, subway rides, and other scenes from in and around the West Village. Carr’s ingrained understanding of Hofmann’s “push and pull” color theory (he studied under Jim Gahagan, a former Hofmann student) and his confident brushwork (he uses house painting brushes) create an integrated whole picture that is brimming with an almost kinetic energy. Take the creamy blues and yellows in Moonscape, or the pastel pinks and purples of Three Trees: in both paintings, even such soft colors take on an assertive quality, and seem to leap off the canvas and towards the viewer.
Carr’s use of color agitates and electrifies these scenes, but also poses a bit of a riddle for the viewer. When sandy paint and vigorous brushwork combine to create particularly craggy surfaces, exact hues and shades can be difficult to pinpoint. A close look at Saddle Up reveals that a single green in the field actually
Moonscape 2023, acrylic on canvas, 40 x 40 in.
takes on two or three different shades as the rough texture creates shadows on the canvas. This three-for-one visual effect becomes complicated by the fact that Carr uses several shades of green paint in his rendering of the field, and then further complicated by occasional streaks of black paint, and even faint flashes of white, subtly nestled among the greens. The real shadows created by the paint’s granular texture play into and against the painted shadows of the horses and figures, teasing the viewer’s ability to discern material and pictorial realities and blurring the boundaries between “real world” and “painting world.” The same forces are at work in the fleshy colors of the sky—with a just perceptible blue underpainting—and create a shimmering effect, although the acrylic paint is in fact completely matte. Integrated into this shuddering landscape, figures, horses, and shadows in equipoise truncate the picture space in a simple, elegant weave.
The brushwork in Carr’s paintings simultaneously animates and orders the scene. In Yellow Field, each visible stroke is essential to the undulating, self-contained balance of the landscape, and yet the whole painting feels immediate and spontaneous. I had come to associate this unstudied, organic quality with Carr’s tiny paintings on blocks of wood, bonbons as he refers to them, which average about three by six inches; achieving this quality at three feet square must be a considerably trickier feat. When I asked if anything came especially naturally to him when painting, Carr remarked, “If anything’s easy, it’s probably wrong,” but admitted that these “big pieces of color,” the bold strokes of orange or yellow or green when rendering a field (as in Yellow Field, or even more so, Brother’s House)
Saddle Up 2023, acrylic on canvas, 22 x 30 in.
Drawing #11
Working
2023, ebony pencil, 13¼ x 15 in.
Four Horses in a Field 2024, acrylic on canvas, 26 x 30 in.
Rolling Fields
2023, acrylic on canvas, 40 x 56 in.
Drawing
Working
#16 2023, ebony pencil, 12 ¼ x 13 ½ in.
felt like “homebase” to him. The challenge, as Carr sees it, is “being able to take that sensibility of color and shape, which is essentially very abstract, and apply it to what you’re seeing, apply it to what you’re experiencing.” As he paints, he balances two primary concerns: maintaining contact with the painting and the landscape itself—not just the visual reality, but the holistic experience of place.
So what do his scenes of Cherry Plain tell us about the place itself?
In each painting, a few simple answers are provided. We have a sense for the hills, fields, and characters: Misery Mountain, Little Egypt, a horse named Pig and another named Luna—all are revealed to us through Carr’s graceful depictions.
But these works are most eloquent in their expression of the enduring and everchanging relationship between a person and a place. The warm sense of concord created by the pairs of humans and horses in That One, the looming of the dark oversized creatures in the foregrounds of Spring Grass and Counting, the stormy change in light across the fields of Walking with Pig—each work reads like a first-
Spring Grass 2023, acrylic on canvas, 36 x 50 in.
person narrative, permeated by memory and feeling. These scenes, painted in a landscape so familiar that Carr joked that even his paintings from France ended up looking like Cherry Plain, offer a privileged view of a place known by heart.
Carr has spent many years in attentive looking—and not merely at a landscape. Carr’s new Cherry Plain works also testify to his loving study of John Constable, in whose Brighton Beach (1824) we find echoes of the luminous palette and transparency of Carr’s Moonscape. We find evidence of his affection for Walter Sickert and Georges Braque as he continues their explorations of surface texture and its animating possibilities for the picture space. We can perceive the influence of Jean Hélion, particularly his 1937 essay “Poussin, Seurat and Double Rhythm” in which Hélion remarks of Poussin’s pictures, “Once your eye is on a spot, the graduation of its color takes you somewhere else, and you are due for a marvelous voyage that never passes the same way at the same point”1—an observation that leapt into my mind upon first viewing Carr’s Bringing Luna Home and That One, in which the rhythms of color and form direct the eyes through gates, up hillsides, between clouds and back into fields again. Speaking to Carr about these influences, Rembrandt earned perhaps the highest honor: “When you spend time with a Rembrandt, seeing and understanding what that is, then you turn and see the world, and understand the world. It’s space and form, but it’s so much more than that. It’s like a shaft of existence. It confirms you’re alive.” What a task to set yourself as a painter.
“Read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest,” said Carr, quoting from the Book of Common Prayer. These new works by Carr on view are perhaps his most intimate narratives to date, and are the products of such efforts and reflections.
He has painted in the same studio he’s had there since he was a teenager, where (years later) his children would interrupt him at work. Now, it’s his grandchildren who wander in while he paints. These scenes read like precious memories: momentary, sensory, saturated with feeling. They can exist only through decades of being and looking.
This essay originally appeared in the catalog for the exhibition “Being and Place,” on view May 11-June 18, 2023 at Alice Gauvin Gallery.
1 Jean Hélion, “Poussin, Seurat and Double Rhythm,” in Double Rhythm: Writings about Painting, edited by Deborah Rosenthal, Arcade Publishing 2014, 48
Working Drawing #15 2022, ebony pencil, 10½ x 13¼ in.
Early Spring (Riding Lessons) 2023, acrylic on canvas, 36 x 60 in.
Yellow Field 2022, acrylic on canvas, 39 x 36 in.
Bill in the New Field 2021, acrylic on canvas, 21 x 27 in.
Working Drawing #13 2023, ebony pencil, 12½ x 15½ in.
Two Horses in a Field 2024, acrylic on canvas, 24 x 36 in.
These paintings from the last 20 years or so share a certain sensibility. But this falsifies my life in the studio. There was no straight line from here to there; there were false starts, distractions and many other experiments not included in the show.
—Simon Carr
Late Bus (14th St and 8th Ave) 2006, acrylic on canvas, 16 x 22 in.
Window Seat 2008, acrylic on canvas, 18 x 36 in.
Unswept Floor #1 (for Bess) 2012, acrylic on canvas, 36 x 60 in.
Working Drawing #5 2017, ebony pencil, 14 x 17¾ in.
At the Bakery 2017-19, acrylic on canvas, 48 x 54 in.
Posing by the River 2016, acrylic on canvas, 18 x 24 in.
All Stirred Up 2012, acrylic on canvas, 18 x 36 in.
Working Drawing #4 2023, ebony pencil, 11 ¼ x 24 in.
Over the years I’ve worked on various series: city scenes, horses, hunting, Bible paintings, children playing. Each becomes, usually without my volition, the center of my studio work. All require preparatory drawings that accumulate until they cover the walls.
14th St Transfer 2007, acrylic on canvas, 24 x 32 in.
Harlequin and Pierrot (Homage to Derain) 2008, acrylic on canvas, 30 x 30 in.
Victory Dance 2023, ebony pencil, 24 x 19 in.
A letter from Paris
by Deborah Rosenthal
As an introduction to this recent series of paintings of children playing, the painter Deborah Rosenthal has allowed me to use a letter she sent reacting to my exhibition “Play Ground,” on view last March at Bowery Gallery.
—Simon Carr
April 26, 2024
Dear Simon,
Hi from Paris! Just getting around to some emails now—there’s a lot to see and do here!
Anyway—I never got a chance to talk to you about your show; I hope it went well and that people responded to the work. I did: I particularly liked the large complex pictures with the kids grouped in upper and lower parts of the rectangle, forming what in my mind’s eye is a sort of parallelogram of space between them—space tipping backward and forward within
the rectangle. Do you know what I mean? Then there’s the play of glowing bits of color—the shapes of the kids’ figures. They seem to me to mark an “internal” rhythm within the bigger moves—something like Hélion’s “double rhythm” that you and I have talked about. Your drawings were wonderful, and the best paintings seemed absolutely rooted in the vigor and concision of the drawings. I questioned a bit the generalization and/or erasure of faces; something I think about often in my own work…don’t know what the answer is, really. The graininess of the surfaces was distracting in some of the pictures—a kind of distancing—but overall I appreciated how close to you the subjects seem, how tender the paintings are. Not an easy thing to carry off while sustaining formal rigor.
And speaking of which—the Hélion show here at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris is incredible! It’s a true retrospective, with major paintings and drawings from all phases of his career, and including three of the triptychs, which look fabulous. The museum has been quite spiffed up in recent years, and the galleries are capacious and the show sat well in the spaces… a huge feast of a show; much to think about there. Jacqueline Hélion, whose 99th-birthday party we attended last week, can hardly see any more, but was SO happy about the show… It was lovely that she’s lived to be there at the vernissage for what I think is the best Hélion exhibition I’ve ever seen (the encyclopedic type of show).
Well, must sign off. Work well!
Deborah
Deborah Rosenthal is a New York painter who received an NEA Critics Grant for her writing on art.
Dancing
2019, acrylic on canvas, 24 x 30 in.
The Chicken 2023, acrylic on canvas, 36 x 48 in.
Untitled (Study for “Chicken”) 2023, ebony pencil, 11 ½ x 13 ½ in.
Working Drawing #26 2023, ebony pencil, 19 x 24 in.
Playing with Horses 2024, acrylic on canvas, 34 x 34 in.
The difficulties are many. How to make paintings that truly represent, instead of being just representations? How can a painting open the world up for the viewer (me, initially), in a way that seems real and consistent, calling on experience and memory for validation, and then going beyond?
Crowded Day 2023, acrylic on canvas, 33 x 53 in.
Working Drawing #27 2023, ebony pencil, 19 x 24 in.
Study for “Trinity” 2023, ebony pencil, 12 x 12 in.
On Duty
2024, acrylic on canvas, 34 x 38 in.
On Method
by Simon Carr
Over the years I’ve worked on different series of subjects with lots of interconnections. Mostly the topics have been figurative, or narrative, but for brief moments they’ve become abstract investigations of landscape or anatomy. A certain subject comes to interest me, usually without any volition on my part, and becomes the center of my studio work. Each motif, whether city scenes, horses, hunting, Bible paintings or children playing, requires specific preparation. Mostly that means a lot of drawing, from life and from photos and other paintings. Studies of location, an interest in anatomy, (animal and human), and research on costume or texts are all necessary. The stock of topical drawings grows and covers the walls in the studio. I pull from them, develop compositions, and begin to paint. The drawings serve as a constant refreshment, a vocabulary of images and possibilities, and the wall continues to grow and change throughout the creation of a series.
The difficulties are many. First how to make them paintings (about form and color) that represent, rather than representations (or illustrations) of the subject. It’s a constant balancing act. How to paint animals, figures, the environment they are in, in a way that lets a painting open that world up for the viewer (me, initially)
Farmer’s Market II (detail) 2019, acrylic on canvas, 56 x 56 in.
to enter, in a way that seems real and consistent, one that calls on experience and memory for validation and then goes beyond it. Much of my studio time is immersed in that world, slowly letting it take shape. Much of the time too is engaged with an often-frustrating battle with the materials, with color, and above all with drawing. Drawing is the thing I love most and find the most difficult. But it is always just a step towards painting. Working from drawings in the studio calls on memory too, especially for color. I cant emphasize enough how much the paintings change as I work on them, there is never a simple transcription of the seen. Every painting has a moment of imaginary leap, where it goes beyond what the artist thought it was and becomes itself.
Its important to point out that to an artist of this sort a painting or drawing is not a “representation.” It is reality, more real than the visual world around us, which constantly changes and slips away. A painting is in the end a Reality that transcends change and time. That’s the secret of the cave paintings in Lascaux, and the basis of painting ever since.
There are artists I admire and continue to go back to to draw and paint from. From my earliest paintings I have admired and studied the work of Walter Richard Sickert. The methods described above are similar to the way he approached his work. More recently I’ve spent a lot of time with George Stubbs and Lucy Kemp-
Cave Variations 2023, ebony pencil, 14 x 17 in.
Welch, and learned a lot from them. Among my teachers the most important was Leland Bell. He focused my eye and taught me to understand painting through the study of painters. He understood painting and all of us as painters who could trace their lineage through back to the Paleolithic, not as just art history (a term he didn’t like), but as an investigation of form and depth, of rhythm and color. This visual language was in the end an investigation of the world, of an understanding of the world, of Being in the world. His sense of this profound lineage, and the insight it gave his students has nurtured many artists, and kept us looking, one eye on the world around us and one eye on the museum, on our common heritage. Somewhere in that tension we make paintings.
Finally there is the question of surface. I have used acrylic paint for more than thirty years, though I was trained in using oil paint. It allows me to build up surfaces faster and scumble across ground colors to create light and depth. My interest in the play between surface and depth was confirmed early on by study
Farmer’s Market I 2019, acrylic on canvas, 40 x 56 in.
of Sickert’s paintings. In the last ten years or so, Ive added sand to the paint, to make even deeper surfaces. I know that isn’t always easy for the viewer.
I’m writing this on the farm. I was back in the spring, and the horses are back on the studio walls. They are endlessly fascinating and the endless aggravation of trying to understand how they move or stand or graze or just look at me sends me right to the studio.
But they are more than the anatomy I study or the relation I have with each. They are a kind of ground, meaning both the figure and what they are standing on or in front of, but also the space around and through the figures, the World the subjects of the paintings inhabit, that we inhabit. Trying to unify and complete the experience of that world is what this is all about.
Study for “Abingdon Square” 2023, acrylic on canvas, 24 x 26 in.
Simon Carr is a painter and printmaker living and working in New York City and Rensselaer County, New York. He received an MFA from Parsons School of Design in 1981, where he studied with Leland Bell, John Heliker and Paul Resika. Since then he has exhibited widely at galleries and non-profit spaces.
Since 2015 he has been represented by Bowery Gallery in New York City and, more recently, by Alice Gauvin Gallery in Washington DC. He teaches Drawing in the Art Foundations program at Borough of Manhattan Community College.
More of his work and a complete CV available at www.simoncarrstudio.com
My deepest thanks to my wife Cristina, our children Lydia, Sam, Ben and Gabriela, along with their spouses and partners, and our grandchildren Malcolm, Finlay, Una and Calvin, my brother Ethan and his family and my mother, Francesca Coté. I didn’t understand how much my family are the world that surrounds me, but now I do.
I would like to thank everyone at Wright State, especially Prof Glen Cebulash and Rebecca Foley. Thanks also to Alice Gauvin and Deborah Rosenthal for allowing the use of their texts.
John Goodrich did all the photography and design for this and the second catalog reprint. John is a painter whose work I admire, and a lecturer on art who holds to the values of painting.
Two other artists I must thank are sculptor Mark Lariviere and painter Thaddeus Radell. We share a history and long-standing friendship. I hope they have found me as nurturing a friend as I have found them.
Over the last few years I have worked on a number of book projects with the poet Leonard Schwartz and Chax Press, Tucson, Arizona (chax.org). The most recent, Horses on Paper, interweaves my drawings of horses and Leonard’s poetry. Leonard’s intelligence and wit and our longstanding friendship have made for a very fruitful collaboration. Charles Alexander contributed a very elegant design. My thanks to them both.
—Simon Carr
Back cover:
After George Stubbs’ “Lord Pigot of Patshull Riding a Spanish-Bred Charger” 2023, graphite, 12¼ x 14¼ in.
