Highway 1979

Clarence Holbrook Carter created this work, called "Highway," with flat planes of color, likely using stencils or masking techniques. You can almost feel the smooth application, the way the colors sit neatly beside each other. I imagine Carter, carefully layering these colors, working from dark to light, orange fading into pink. There's something very calming and utopian about this composition. It reminds me a little of Stuart Davis's hard-edged style. The painting shows us buildings receding into the distance, getting smaller and smaller, a trick of perspective that pulls you into the scene. The road rushes forward in a similar way, using a few simple white lines, suggesting a world of movement. The color is doing a lot of the work here, I think: the black is really black, the pink is very pink, and that glowing circle on the horizon pulls us in. You can imagine the artist figuring out how to create that simple, impactful illusion. It’s as if Carter wanted to show a world stripped down to its essentials, and he invites us to keep it in mind.