About Carter RB

Born in 1947 in Alexandria, Virginia to a young Army family, RB sold his first painting at nine to a man trying to impress one of his female cousins. The painting was an abstract cityscape. RB was introduced to Architecture that same summer when an uncle by marriage encouraged him to watch while the uncle worked at his drafting board.

Being an Army brat meant we moved a lot. This fostered most of his nomadic attitudes to styles, people and places, never getting too attached to either. The most constant thing in his life was change and art; drawing, painting, coloring. Public education high school art and drafting were RB’s only “formal” training until college. Of the thirty-something paintings RB did in high school, only four sold to friends and family. They were mostly sea and landscapes.

The Navy afforded RB the opportunity to complete several female nudes that hung for a while in several bars around Puerto Rico.

Between Navy and college RB concentrated on the building trades, trying to understand the components of Architecture from the construction standpoint. Paintings were few due to financial constraints.

The College of Architecture at Virginia Tech encouraged its students to express their design process and thoughts in a broad range of media. RB naturally turned to painting. There RB also fell under the influence and spell of the Bauhaus, both artistically and architecturally.

In 1977 RB graduated and moved to Florida. Architecturally the first ten years were spent doing residential design; custom homes, multi-family projects and spec family homes. The late 1980’s through the mid 1990’s was a mix of residential and small light commercial projects. 1996 through the present has been spent doing large commercial buildings, office parks and industrial design.

RB’s paintings seem to have followed the same path in that paintings seemed to move from residential subjects and scale to commercial subjects and scale. His styles have migrated from Post-Impressionism to Representational Abstract Expressionism to non-representational Abstract Expressionism.

Just like in Architecture, RB enjoys working in a broad range of artistic styles, techniques and subjects.