TIME, ART, LOVE, MONEY is a sampling of over four decades of work produced by Steve Carver. In that span of time, “the studio” has existed in many locations, from his native Oklahoma, to Southern California and finally here in Upstate New York.
The pictures shown represent three distinct phases in the career of a working artist, and they are grouped according to those years and the type of work produced.
Art for Commerce. From the late 70s through the early years of the 21st Century, Carver was a practicing graphic designer and illustrator, and these pictures represent work produced for magazines, book publishers and record album covers. In pursuing these projects he joined a long line of artists who began as illustrators: René Magritte to Wayne Thiebaud, Edward Hopper to Andy Warhol.
INTERMISSION. These larger works represent the years following Carver’s “retirement” from the graphic arts. The typographic focus of these paintings show that the years spent combining images with letterforms continued to inform his work.
The larger scale indicates a short-lived rebellion against the small, detail-oriented pictures he had produced before, often under tight deadline pressure.
Return to Form. The last ten years of work show that the smaller scale, highly detailed painting is where Carver feels the most at home. He began a few pictures returning to his earlier technique simply as a way to defeat “painter’s block” and discovered he missed working in a more intimate format.
Steve Carver / Artist’s Statement:
As a graphic designer for many years, I was a storyteller, but the stories I told were not entirely my own, and there was the necessity of making the message clear and unambiguous. With my paintings, I’m still telling a story but the person viewing the picture is an equal partner in the telling.
Word play, like that utilized in the Surrealist parlor game “Exquisite Corpse”, is an important aspect in arriving at a visual solution, whether in one of my typographic paintings or my more pictorial work. This is not painting to a pre-established title, but a way to expand and identify elements I want to use in a particular piece.
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Illustration clients included: CBS Records, EMI Records, Mark Taper Forum, Zoetrope Studios, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Times, Newsweek, TIME, Rolling Stone, The Atlantic Monthly, Entertainment Weekly, Doubleday, Bantam Books, St. Martin’s Press, Penguin Books.
Carver’s paintings have been shown at Fowler-Mills Galleries, Santa Monica, CA; Anthony Brunelli Fine Arts, Binghamton, NY; Herbert Williams Gallery, CFAC, Syracuse, NY; Arnot Art Museum, Elmira, NY; State of the Art Gallery, Ithaca, NY; Corners Gallery, Ithaca, NY; Palmer Museum of Art at Penn State University and The Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.
Steve Carver is represented by Anthony Brunelli Fine Arts.
TIME, ART, LOVE, MONEY will be on view April 22 - May 20.
Join us for the reception on April 22, from 4 -6 pm.
