Perhaps I paint places where I would like to be, unreal or not.
Sarah Lawrence College, B.A. Visual Arts, 1997
New York artist Ian Carpenter was born in Thailand and grew up overseas experiencing multiple cultures and their visual arts. When recollecting primary art influences from his early years, Ian vividly remembers various colorful paintings from the Caribbean, Asia, South America, and Europe.
Ian graduated from Sarah Lawrence College with a BA in Visual Arts, but returned to painting in 2005 with a new-found respect and passion. Throughout the years he grew to deeply appreciate modern painters like Paul Klee and Nicolas De Stael, art collectives like the Fauves and The Society of Six, and various outsider artists like Joseph Yoakum and Anna Zemankova.
All of these influence what Ian does with paint and the waiting surface. His paintings, with their playful use of color, can be viewed as either lyrical abstractions or vague remembrances of dream world landscapes.
Ian Carpenter creates vibrant paintings of imaginary places. Transparent gouache on panels allows the wood’s grain to show through, adding another element of the unexpected to his imaginative pieces. These playful arrangements of unfamiliar objects suggest reality - or at least challenge the viewer to decipher and interpret the scenes at hand.
