Lance Avery Morgan
From Houston To San Francisco To Austin, This Artist’s Journey Reveals How Place, Spirit & Gesture Can Shape The Canvas
Photography courtesy of Sara Carter
There are artists who work with brush and canvas, and then there are artists who seem to be in lifelong conversation with beauty itself. Sara Carter is one of the latter. Raised in Houston and East Texas, seasoned by 25 years in the Bay Area, and now a vibrant force in Austin’s fast-rising art scene, Carter treats the canvas not as a surface, but as a meeting place between the self and the infinite. Curated Texan’s Lance Avery Morgan caught up with her ahead of her upcoming gallery show at the Lone Star Light House in East Austin, running October 21 through November 6.
“I can’t say that my creativity was initially sparked directly by my environment,” reflects Sara Carter on her Texas childhood. “Instead, my ongoing expression of creativity has always carried aspects of it. Creativity wasn’t something I adopted; it revealed itself.” The revelation came in what the family called “art making,” a practice that quickly grew into a defining language of identity.
Becoming Elsewhere
When life carried them west, to California, it wasn’t the Bay Area art world itself that left the most profound impression, but the sensation of displacement. “Being elsewhere was the catalyst,” she explains. “The merging of my Texas roots with my path in the Bay Area felt like a process of becoming; a maturation of self-expression.” This duality, rooted yet untethered, remains a constant undertone in her work.
Between The Personal And The Universal
Critics and collectors alike often describe these paintings as both intimate and universal, autobiographical yet cosmological in nature. The artist shrugs at the notion of needing to balance the two. “I experience it as spirit, or universal resonance, expressing itself through individual proclivities that exist in everyone. Take the color red. There’s no single way to read, feel, or experience it. Yet there’s a shared starting point,” muses Carter.
This is the paradox at the heart of the work: the personal is never separate from the universal. “Ultimately,” Carter says with conviction, “There is only the universe and the individual, made of the same thing.”
A Vocabulary Of Color And Gesture
Over three decades of painting, a visual lexicon has emerged; gestures and colors that function as a signature. “My work stems from a single idea: order and beauty as expressions of divinity present everywhere, always, and for everyone.” The result is a distinct vocabulary of gestures and hues, endlessly recombined, yet always unmistakably theirs.
It is this visual language that has carried the paintings from Los Angeles to Basel, Southampton to Germany, eventually finding permanent homes in collections as diverse as those of Memorial Sloan Kettering and the di Rosa Foundation. “Once the work leaves the studio, the artist says, its life expands. “I do think about how people interact with both the visual aspects and the overall gestalt of the work. That relationship matters.”
A Tale Of Two Cities
The move to Austin has added yet another layer. While San Francisco’s scene remains anchored in legacy institutions and world-renowned galleries, Austin feels thrillingly emergent. “It’s in the early stages of an exciting and dynamic shift toward institutional importance,” the artist notes, pointing to the city’s momentum in rapidly establishing itself as a national force.
Studio Rhythms
A typical day begins with contemplation over morning coffee on the screened porch, an unhurried ritual before stepping into the studio. There, hours unfold in intuitive rhythm, though never without structure. Lunch provides a pause, then it’s back to the canvases until evening, when work might wind down, or, on nights when inspiration insists, extend well past dinner.
As for knowing when a painting is finished, the artist laughs. “It’s like knowing when you’re in love. You know it when you feel it. And when the painting tells you it’s finished.”
Looking Ahead
What’s next is less a matter of reinvention than of refinement. “I don’t pursue new themes; the core impetus remains the same,” shares Carter. “Variations come organically, the result of experiments in technique layered atop decades of refined methodology. The excitement lies not in chasing novelty but in the deepening of a lifelong conversation with beauty.”
The Dream Dinner Party
Asked to name six artists they’d most like to gather around a dinner table, the artist can’t resist expanding the list to twelve: Susan York, Helen Frankenthaler, Helen Pashgian, Anne Truitt, Lee Krasner, David Simpson, Frank Bowling, Jack Whitten, Mark Rothko, Cy Twombly, Ad Reinhardt, and Morris Louis. The description for each? “Phenomenally and historically impactful,” Carter states emphatically. It’s easy to imagine the conversation flowing across the table; gestures, colors, histories colliding as an extension of the very resonance that fuels the artist’s own work.
And perhaps that is the real through-line for the artist Sara Carter: whether in Texas, California, Europe, or Austin, the practice remains the same, a quest to translate the ineffable into something both wholly personal and universally shared.
