"Over many years I have been drawn to several specific places in the north of England
and I believe that an artist is most effective when his experiences are linked with a particular
place and time. The attractions of Gunnerside in Swaledale, Askrigg in Wensleydale and the
North York. Moors, together with that rugged spectacular stretch of coastline between Redcar
and Robin Hood's Bay have acted like a magnet to the filings of my own being. And were God
to grant me three life-times, I could not visualise myself exhausting the drawing and painting
possibilities presented by such attractive places.
The reader should know from the outset that I love drawing as a way of seeing and that I
value the use of sketchbooks which I make myself and take wherever I go. Drawing is invari-
ably a jump into the unknown and it can result in surprises when something is born and
revealed that did not have a previous existence. When drawing I discover things about myself
as well as the specific location. A developing drawing may begin to take on a life of its own
independent of the subject and with relationships of line, shape, pattern and structure emerg-
ing from the actual experience of looking. Now this for me is the exciting part of the process,
when direct contact with the subject is transformed into Art. My aim then is to convey and
share some of this experience with other people.
Not all this drawing activity takes place in landscape- I also make drawings from the
Masters on regular visits to Art Galleries and Collections both at home and abroad. I do this to
learn more about Art because looking is simply not enough! I seem to learn more by drawing
and by careful analysis of what is there to see and understand. I feel a need to absorb the
past in order to contribute to the present and I'd like to think that my work is part of that tradi-
tion of English landscape painting.
Other than the Art Gallery, town life debilitates and denies me the seclusion and peace
which are essential to my particular mode of making drawings and paintings. I do like to
immerse myself in nature with a canvas, or with a sketchbook and have a dialogue with the
fascinating mixture of natural and man-made landscape. I'm interested in the marks made by
man on the countryside and stone walls, gates, hedges, ditches, quarries, barns and farm-
groups have all come under careful scrutiny at one time, or another."

John Carter, Winter evening, Eston Hills, oil, (detail)

John Carter, Gunnerside, Winter, mixed media.

John Carter, Evening, Kildale, watercolour

John Carter, Bridge of Muchals, Winter, mixed media.

John Carter, Beck Moorings, Late Evening, oil.