Well.... first blog post - little nerve-racking, haha. I'm hoping to try and do some art blogging and talk about all things art-related, but to start, I thought I'd tell you a little about myself and my story. So here goes...
I grew up in Brisbane, Australia, and I honestly had an amazing childhood. Australia has some stunning wildlife, and I built up a huge appreciation for the natural world and how beautiful it is, and I try to represent that beauty within my artworks. I was completely homeschooled (other than a short stint at a Montessori Kindy between the age of 3 -5) and I have loved and enjoyed every moment of homeschooling, as having that opportunity has allowed me to find what I am truly passionate about in life - ART.
My parents have always been incredibly supportive of anything I wanted to do; I was a competitive gymnast, took ballet lessons, learnt how to tap dance, joined the Qld Youth Choir, attended inspirational art classes, joined the Scouts, attempted to play the bagpipes (joined a band, albeit for a just a few weeks), joined the Navy Cadets, kayaked (my dad's an instructor so that helped), attend BJJ and Judo martial art classes, tried boxing for a few weeks, and basically fully supported me in anything I chose to do - it's only when you're older that you have a true appreciation for all they have done for me.
I have always been drawing and painting and creating from as early as I can remember (my parents have always said that I have a very strong imagination, and creative passion). When I showed an interest in doing art more and more, my parents bought me drawing books and supplies; anything I needed to help progress my skill in what I had a passion for. I don't remember what age I was when this happened, I think I may have been 7 or 9; but I was dead set on having a career as an artist - yes, I absolutely knew this was how I wanted to make my living in life. Then when I was telling my grandad that I wanted to be an artist, he told me that "artists don't make any money until they're dead!" Now, that was a huge shock for me, and it completely put me off doing any more artwork and looking back on it now, he probably meant that artists pieces only earn millions when they are really old and the artist is dead; no one explained to me at that time that artists do make money when they are living, just not as much as auction art, like Monet's paintings. I didn't tell my parents this at the time, and they probably just thought that their child had passed another fad.
I loved to learn about things that interest and excite me because I want to build up my knowledge of those things. If I didn't have an interest in it, I wouldn't really want to learn about it
In 2014, we moved back to England, went from house to house renting until we settled down in Lancashire, all the while still being taught the basics of knowledge and academia by my mum. Then, I reached a point of needing to learn more in order to pass my exams, so I was enrolled into an online homeschooling program (the reason I am delving into homeschooling a little bit is that there seems to always be so many bad things to say about it, but never really focuses on the good things about it, such as giving your child the freedom to enjoy their childhood by not being cooped up in a brick building with 30 other children in their class and them never getting the one-on-one attention they so desperately need.) Anyway, I was always much keener on learning things I wanted to learn, which by this point in my life was very heavily based around psychology, and so I was doing my own independent learning to understand psychology, but still having very little interest in learning things I didn't want to.
When I was 16 and had taken my exams, and was having my three-month break, boredom hit one day so I just grabbed a pencil and paper and started drawing. I have no idea what I found so enjoyable about going into trying to draw details on pictures I saw, but I was drawn into it. I had no interest in abstract works as I found they can be 'easy' to do, and there is no challenge within it; I guess it was the challenge of drawing what I saw which enticed me into it. After about a month of drawing, and me thinking they were actually pretty good drawings (even though they looked like a 5-year-old did them, see the first drawing I did here https://www.jamescarterart.com/gallery?pgid=k4shk9nc-28469cb0-1433-4d71-add7-647b83fb2efd) I remember just looking at all of these drawings by artists like Heather Rooney, NeeYellow, and Bethany Vere, and just thinking how I could never achieve a level of artistic skill like them, but I was determined to practice more because I enjoyed it. Soon, with my mum noticing my rekindled interest into drawing, she suggested perhaps looking into studying art at College, so after extensive research, I decided to enrol on an Art and Design Btec course. This spanned over 3 years (as I did not take Art as a GCSE subject I had to do Level 2 before I could progress onto Level 3). Thanks to the absolutely amazing support of my fantastic tutor at College, I have never loved learning more. I strive by pushing myself consistently, and I currently stand as a triple distinction star student who is studying what he wants to do as a career. After roughly a year of drawing, I decided to try and push my limits by drawing in colour, which I successfully did in a few of my animal drawings and then tried drawing portraits of people, and I am doing something in which I put 110% effort into every inch of the paper I draw on.
So yeah, that is pretty much my story of how I got into art and where I came from to be where I am now. This has been a very dulled down version of how I got to where I am now, but I do hope to go into it in more detail one day, and expand on the techniques and process I use to draw and paint and create the art I love.
Thank you so much for reading this - I really appreciate it.
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