DENVER ART MUSEUM AQUISITIONS AND SHOW 2014-15

In June 2014, The Denver Art Museum purchased 4 drawings from my studio for their permanent collection.

In April of 2015 , two of the drawings were exhibited in the Museums drawing gallery on the second floor of the new building.

The show “collections” also included work by:
JOHN ALTOON, KEVIN APPEL, ALICE AYCOCK, RICHARD CARTER, AGNES DENES,

JAMES DRAKE, NICOLE EISENMAN, JACKIE FERRARA, KIKI SMITH, SUSAN ROTHENBERG, KEITH TYSON,

SANDRA VASQUEZ DE LA HORA, KARA WALKER, ABRAHAM WALKOWITZ, AND H.C. WESTERMANN

The following are the notes the Museum used to introduce the Drawings to the Museum staff…

“Three of the drawings that the DAM purchased are from a series of drawings done around 2005.
At the time I was very interested in painting and drawing the night sky and deep space imagery adding my own twists to satisfy my imagination. At the same time I was doing research on some imagery from the study of Particle Physics.

Of particular interest was the images generated by the collisions of electrons in a Particle collider.
In earlier pre-digital research of these collisions, the imagery of the reaction to electrons colliding was photographed in a solution of fluids in what was called a bubble chamber. What happened was the electrons would collide and spin of hundreds and thousands of new particles…usually protons… that would leave traces in this fluid medium and that allowed the researchers to generate photographic images of the reacting sub particles.
I searched on line to find many many sources depicting the results of these experiments. The images were incredible…high energy arabesque coils and jagged decomposing lines… incredible fan like forms of particles eminating from a single point and flying off in hundreds of directions before decomposing into scattered random marks that depicted things I know not.
All of this sometimes superimposed on a grid or with crosshair registration marks.
But all of it was an abstract wonderland of beautiful marks that seemed to me a fine subject for rendering in graphite on Hot Press watercolor paper.
In some cases I would stain the paper first with an acrylic wash and then draw over the color. In others I just worked over the raw paper. I would lay in the rough lines of a random sample of these images and than work up to those lines leaving the white or color to show thru. Other times I would use a smudger to soften the lines and forms to resemble what I was seeing! from the research photos.

The image of the Tree is a later drawing form 2012 and is part of a series of drawing done about various natural phenomena…Lightning strikes, Icebergs, Crows, and Trees .
This piece is under painted in acrylic wash and the tree is pencil drawn and the background sky is rubbed graphite powder. The “hatching” objects emanating out from the tree are erased from the background using a fine electric eraser. It is a very magic drawing and is inspired by my childhood fascination with fireflies while growing up on the East Coast. In this case they seem to have a common mission. I don’t know what that mission is however. ”

R.Carter 2014

The Drawings