Carol Carter, a trained watercolorist, spoke recently about incorporating stories and moods into her art at the Shwayder Art Building.

Carter is also a self-taught acrylic painter and lives in St. Louis.

She creates large-scale works that she exhibits both nationally and internationally.

She said she is inspired by life experiences and interests and creates series of paintings based on specific places and specific subjects or themes.

Although she paints from life, Carter takes hundreds of photographs of her subjects and uses them, taking something from the photo and also giving something to it to show a part of her. She likes to personify the objects she paints.

She presented her from the past 10 years.

The first series of works she showed was of sugar farming in Florida. In these paintings she uses many strong and vibrant colors and complimentary colors to give a balance to the work.

The viewer can experience the atmosphere in her landscapes, which are vast and show a long horizon line with an enormous sky above.

She is a linear painter and she sometimes even makes outlines of certain objects or people in her work.

In her sugar farming series, she portrays the workers on and off the farms and also their poor living conditions.

The paintings in this series create a visual documentary. This also creates a large scale of work, which Carter said she feels makes a panorama statement.

Another series she presented dealt with highways and driving.

In these watercolors, Carter tries to capture the light from different sources including the sky, street lights, and car lights.

Her preferred subject is the human figure and these more personal and private works include self portraits, which document her different states of mood and feeling.

Whatever stands out in daily life to Carter, she documents it.

She refers to her work as “animation and poetic imagery.”

Her color is intuitive and she changes the palette for each exhibition or series that she does.

Carter only uses six or fewer pigments for each painting. She rarely uses every color.

Carter said she is enthralled with employing different techniques of painting including airbrushing or putting varnish over each layer of paint.

Other series she has painted include a series made for an exhibit in Ecuador relating to the nature in that country, small nude paintings, which developed into another series of larger nudes, underwater nudes, and landscapes in South Carolina and Georgia.