Having art as a full-time career is a challenge, but local artist Carol Carter has made it work for 45 years. “I’ve never had another job, other than tiny little fill-in jobs here or there,” she says, sitting in her corner studio on Shenandoah.
Carter has painted in acrylics for much of her career, but her first love has always been watercolor—the medium she uses exclusively now. All of those years she spent painting large-scale acrylics, she says, “showed me that I could take a tiny mousy medium and make [my paintings] large and make them have impact.” There’s little doubt about that when you’re standing in front of a herd of her zebras or one of her 5-foot-tall florals: Her work demands attention.
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“Years ago, after graduate school, I realized that color was my gift. Every artist has a gift, and you have to learn to recognize yours… and push it to grow,” Carter says, “so I didn’t stumble or punish myself for not being a great draftsperson or not being a great representational artist.”
Carter often paints florals, swimmers, and other tropical images that hark back to her childhood in Palm Beach. She moved to St. Louis when she was 15 years old to attend Principia School and never left. St. Louis is a great place to be an artist, she says, because of its many amenities and affordable studio space.
But Carter’s had ample opportunities to exhibit and teach workshops all around the world. Currently her work is on display in the American embassies in Montenegro and Taiwan through the Art in Embassies program, and Carter offers workshops regularly, both in person and online. Typically she works with about 300 students over the course of a year.
In her own artwork, Carter is drawn to subjects that are meaningful to her, such as projects that highlight the dangers of climate change and the yearly portraits of her son, Evan, which she’s been rendering since he was born, more than three decades ago. “The best series really take about a year, but some series can be your lifetime,” she says. Instead of doing one painting and moving on, she likes to thoroughly “investigate” a subject, such as a horse, learning along the way to edit out parts of the horse while maintaining its unique qualities.
During the pandemic, Carter painted a series of 150 dogs, which bring people so much comfort in trying times. And recently she returned to a series of portraits of immigrants that was interrupted by the pandemic. She’d finished 10 of them, celebrating the ethnicities that make up her neighborhood and our country, when the pandemic started. She hopes to paint about 75 in total before wrapping up the series later this year.
Though she’s based in St. Louis, Carter takes a more global view of herself and her work. She was an early adopter of the internet and social media, which has helped her increase her reach, especially in Europe and Asia, where watercolors are more in demand. Today, most of her sales come from clients who discover her work online.
“I feel very, very grateful to be a working artist. I don’t take it for granted at all,” she says. “The key to being successful is perseverance. It’s not talent. It’s not education. It’s not anything other than showing up to the studio every day.”
