LIC Space - In Memoriam: AGhost

Walter Carpenter Honored In Art Exhibit

May 8, 2010 / LIC Long Island City / Queens Buzz. Last night I attended the LIC Space first Friday reception entitled AGhost. This month they paid tribute to Walter Carpenter who passed away unexpectedly late last year. Walter was a Baltimore artist who oftentimes visited Queens and lived for a short spell in Astoria. Walter was an accomplished artitst, commissioned by the city of Baltimore to beautify the city with his creativity and art. He also was deeply involved in the artistic community of Baltimore. Today his work still enhances and helps beautify some of the public spaces in Baltimore.

Click here to view the rest of the story including a slide show of Walter Carpenter's AGhost art exhibit at LIC Space in LIC.

LIC Space - In Memoriam: AGhost

LIC Space - First Fridays Exhibit: AGhost

Continued The LIC Space exhibit showcased Walter’s work over the past decade. I was struck by the intense, bright beauty of Walter’s pieces, which contained vivid colors and clear geometric lines shaped in imaginative contorted ways. It was as if Walter had previously worked in nature’s kitchen, making snowflakes. Each piece delicately crafted, beautiful and totally unique.

There was an intense quality to Walter’s work that reminded me of a movie I had seen about famous cartoonist, Robert Crumb. The movie, entitled Crumb included a segment dedicated to Robert Crumb’s older brother, Charles, who was a major influence in Robert’s life. Charles used cartoons / graphic art to express himself throughout his life, just as Walter Carpenter had done throughout his.

Art Exhibits In LIC / Long Island City

In the movie segment about Charles Crumb, we see beautiful and interesting imagery, and this is where I saw some interesting parallels with Walter’s work. Like Charles’ work, Walter’s was highly geometrical, eye-catching, vivid in its complexity and intensity. Unique and beautiful, like the colored veins in a natural rock, containing the purity found only in a perfect diamond stone.

In the days and weeks leading up to Charles Crumb’s suicide, he drew a lot of incomprehensible lines in his sketchpad. It was almost like the graphical depiction of losing a radio signal, whereby random noise continually creeps in, until the random noise is all that is left. It was if he was graphically depicting his own slipping grip in this world, fading to black, crossing into the ether.

LIC Space: Artistic Community In Long Island City

We, the living, don’t know what it’s like to see the world become so overwhelmingly dark that we think the best option is to cause ourselves to leave it. And perhaps that’s why, while we’re living, we can’t create worlds so intensely vivid, bright and beautiful in their originality and complexity, like artists ... like Walter. Walter Carpenter could capture the beauty and be overwhelmed by despair. And like Charles Crumb, he eventually decided to create his own exit.

Walter Carpenter’s work, in the exhibit ‘AGhost’, will be on exhibit at LIC Space until through May. His work is for sale and the proceeds will go to his family and LIC Space.

The following is a slide show of photos taken at the opening reception of the exhibit. $element(ophoto,photo_slideshow,72,550,,5.00,fade)$

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