Barbara Carter was born in Livermore, California. When she was 2 her family moved to Los Angeles, where she grew up. Her great love was always art, but she had great aptitude in science and math as well as the arts. She elected to study science in college as the more financially practical choice. This led to graduate studies in astrophysics, first in Chicago, later in Boston. In the early 2000s she finally returned to her first love, art. Carter moved back to Los Angeles in 2006, where she lives today with her fiance and two dogs.
My paintings involve organic geometries, dots, and symbols. To me, the most interesting art acknowledges tradition and then does something original and different with it. In my work I play with hard-edged geometric abstraction by adding a softer, organic, human component to it. I like to use universal symbols that everyone can relate meaning to.
Sometimes there's a background painting under the painting. It sets the tone of the piece. Usually it's a poured-paint "flow" painting. These are fun to do, but they're astonishingly messy and the outcome is always somewhat random. There are a lot of do-overs before I'm happy with the results.
The shapes I like to use tend to walk the line between rounded and squared-off. I often use a quatrefoil shape, a personal sigil I adopted years ago while studying Medieval Europe. It's a shape that nicely bridges the divide between the geometric and the organic. Another shape, or shape-idea, that I enjoy using is the intersection between a square grid and a circular (annular) shape. This often gives rise to a cross-like form, which I appreciate greatly for its historical significance, particularly in Medieval European art.