James Richard Carpenter, 69, of
Gainesville, Florida, died on August 9, 2016.
Jim Carpenter, as he was always
known professionally, was born in Norwalk, Connecticut, on January 3, 1947. He
was the second son of John Richard Carpenter, a conductor on the New York, New
Haven and Hartford Railroad, and Helen Budnick Carpenter, a nurse at Norwalk
Hospital. As a young boy he was discovered to have a talent for dancing, which
the adults in his family encouraged and nurtured. He was trained as a tap
dancer and went on to dance in and eventually choreograph stage musicals. He was
to dance, act and sing on stage well into his thirties.
He graduated from Sacred Heart
University in Fairfield, Connecticut, with a degree in English literature in
1969 and soon began a career as a public school teacher in Charles County,
Maryland. First at Lackey, then at La Plata High School, he taught English, and
occasionally Latin, but, over the course of almost 30 years in the classroom,
he was best known as a drama teacher. He took graduate courses in dramatic arts
at the University of Connecticut. Back in Maryland, he excelled as a director
of musicals, 20th-century comedies and dramas – and Shakespeare. He was a
fervent advocate of teaching Shakespeare through performance, and he had the
reputation of taking students who initially found Shakespeare’s language
daunting, casting them in Shakespearean roles, teaching them to interpret the
text of the play in question – and turning them into skilled, confident readers
of Shakespeare. He had come to understand that theatre was “all about text” –
making text accessible to audiences in all its richness. At the same time, he
was a master at using light, color and space to guide the eye of the spectator.
His repertory extended from the medieval morality play Everyman to the spoof on operettas Little Mary Sunshine.
A prize-winning teacher, Carp, as
he was called by his students, stressed collaboration in the performing arts,
and dialogue in the classroom. His 1994 Ph.D. dissertation at the University of
Maryland examines the reading, rehearsal and performance of Hamlet in one of his productions, and shows
him constantly listening to and learning from his students. Although many
considered him one of the most talented people they had ever met, he set little
store by talent alone, and stressed the importance of training,
self-discipline, risk-taking and hard work.
Late in his career as an educator,
he left the classroom for five years to work in county-wide administration and
eventually served as Specialist for the Fine and Performing Arts for Charles
County. In his last year in Maryland he returned to the classroom and once more
directed students on stage – and for the Port Tobacco Players directed a
spectacularly successful production of You
Can’t Take It with You. The production won eight awards at the Washington
Area Theatre Community Honors, including best play and best director.
In retirement Jim Carpenter began
a new career as a painter. He had taken courses at the Art League School in
Alexandria, Virginia, in the 1990s, but it was not until he moved to
Gainesville, Florida, in 2003 that he had time to paint. He studied for five
years with Linda Pence and took workshops given by other leading watercolorists
and acrylic painters, including Carole Barnes. He began as “a painter of
flowers” but in 2008 transformed, almost literally overnight, into a powerful spiritual
and figural artist, working mostly in acrylic. (He partly attributed this
transformation to his practice of the ancient Chinese art of qigong, or energy
cultivation, which he eventually also taught.) Many of his paintings have
theatrical themes. His work was juried into numerous national and international
exhibitions. He was a member of the Gainesville Fine Arts Association and the
Melrose Bay Art Gallery, and a Signature Member of the Florida Watercolor
Society and the International Society of Acrylic Painters.
The first of his works to attract
wider attention, Toreador, Toro, Tra-La,
brings together “on stage” a matador, a clearly theatrical bull, and a flamenco
dancer. (Who will upstage whom?) It was the first of his paintings he found
sufficiently distinctive to submit to the Florida Watercolor Society for its
annual exhibition. It was accepted, in 2009, and this was the beginning of a
relationship that was to last for the rest of his life.
He discussed his work both before
“live” audiences and on the blog accessible via his website,
JimCarpenterFineArt.com , which reaches thousands of readers and followers
world wide. He travelled in more conventional ways, too. An early visit to
Spain awakened the passions he later transformed to paint Toreador, Toro, Tra-La, and he returned from Japan with new ideas
of how to stage Macbeth. In
retirement he honeymooned on the Via Veneto and the high seas. By the third of
his many trips to London he was so at
home there, especially in the streets connecting Covent Garden (home of the
Royal Ballet) and the National Theatre, the Old Vic, the Young Vic, the
flagship Waterstones bookstore in Piccadilly, the Royal Academy of Arts, the
National Gallery and the National Portrait Gallery (his essential London “ports
of call,” top honors going to the National Theatre), that Britons asked him for
directions, not the other way around.
Retirement for him, however, was
not primarily a time for leisure. He admired the book How to Be Idle by Tom Hodgkinson – but in retirement he had a clear
mission, which was to paint. And his painting was anything but a hobby, just as
his paintings were not intended as mere adornments or garnishes. He loved to
paint, but it was work. He spoke of his paintings as slowly revealing
themselves to him through a long process in which he painted, scrubbed, and
repainted, creating the effect of multiple layers and multiple eras. As in all
his other work, there was in his painting an element of surprise, even for
himself: “Although I am always present in the doing,” he wrote, ”I am always
surprised by the way a painting ends.”
In 2010 he married James Hulbert,
a writer, who had shared his life since 1991. They wed in Washington, D.C., and
a few days earlier, hundreds of Carp’s former students celebrated the forthcoming
nuptials at a party organized by them in Dupont Circle.
In April 2016 he saw one of his
paintings, The End of the Pilgrimage,
honored by the American Watercolor Society in its annual exhibition at the
Salmagundi Club in Lower Manhattan.
He learned only upon returning to
Florida that the lung cancer which had been diagnosed and treated in 2015, had
gone into metastasis, and only in July that it was not responding to further
treatment.
His admirers and collectors
include at least two Broadway stars, a fact of which he was proud but that he never
mentioned publicly.
He spoke most readily of his pride
in the achievements of his former students: the teachers, the soap stars, the rock
stars, the working actors, the techies, the parents who participated in their
children’s education, the business leaders, the hoteliers, the diplomats, and
of course the hoofers, the chanteuses, the belters, the bombshells, the wedding
singers, the writers… It was an
important part of his day to keep up on Facebook with the continuing lives of
his former students, now his friends – and not only in the conventional
Facebook sense.
Two experiences that deeply moved
Jim Carpenter, help to understand who he was.
In 2010, on a whirlwind visit to
the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., he moved past the Motherwells he
had come to re-study and was confronted – surprised – by a painting he did not
remember ever seeing up close: Van Gogh’s White
Roses. His heart pounded, his breath quickened, tears came into his eyes (just
as his own paintings frequently make others cry). When he tried to analyze the
experience online, he referred to it as an example of “the Stendhal syndrome” —
in which an observer is so overwhelmed by the beauty of a work of art that they
seem to become ill. What Jim Carpenter felt he was responding to in the Van
Gogh, however, was not formal or artistic beauty: it was the boundless courage
of Van Gogh, the total presence of the artist in the work, that gave it its
enormous energy.
In 2016, three days before his
death, his former students surprised him – again, a surprise – with a video in
which dozens of them speak candidly about how his teaching and his belief in
them changed their lives. Again, enormous energy. The video was played over
1000 times in its first ten days online. ( http://bit.ly/WeLoveCarp )
Jim Carpenter died peacefully in
his living room, surrounded by loved ones. He left a message for his friends
everywhere: “I love you all. I love life.”
He is survived by James Hulbert; his
brother John Joseph Carpenter and sister-in-law Kathy Carpenter (Clearwater,
Florida); nephew John Michael Carpenter (Oldsmar, Florida); niece Gina
Carpenter Kuchta (Mechanicsville, Virginia); hundreds of other beloved family
members; and thousands of students, friends, admirers, followers and collectors.
A celebration of Jim Carpenter’s
life will take place Saturday, September 24, 2016, from 12 noon to 3pm at Francesca’s
Trattoria, 4410 NW 25 Place, Gainesville, Florida 32606,
telephone 352.378.7152 .
To contribute to the Memorial for Jim Carpenter at the Florida Watercolor Society, please go to http://bit.ly/givecarp , click the “add” button, make sure the
“donation type” from the pull-down menu reads “Memorial for Jim Carpenter,”
then fill in the amount and other information as prompted.
In addition, Jim Carpenter would have
asked that you take a young person to a professional theatre or dance
performance, or an art museum.
