PLAINS, Ga. (AP) â The world knew as a president and humanitarian, but he also was a woodworker, painter and poet, creating a body of artistic work that reflects deeply personal views of the global community â and himself.
His portfolio illuminates , his spartan sensibilities and his place in the . And it continues to improve the finances of The Carter Center, his enduring legacy.
Creating art provided âthe rare opportunity for privacyâ in his otherwise public life, Carter said. âThese times of solitude are like being in another very pleasant world.â
âOne of the best gifts of my lifeâ
Mourners at Carterâs hometown funeral will see the altar cross he carved in maple and collection plates he turned on his lathe. Great-grandchildren in the front pews at Maranatha Baptist Church slept as infants in cradles he fashioned.
The former president measured himself a âfairly proficientâ craftsman. Chris Bagby, an Atlanta woodworker whose shop Carter frequented, elevated that assessment to ârather accomplished.â
Carter gleaned the basics on his fatherâs farm, where the Great Depression meant being a jack-of-all-trades. He learned more in shop class and with Future Farmers of America. âI made a miniature of the White House,â he recalled, insisting it was not about his ambitions.
During his Navy years, chose unfurnished military housing to stretch his $300 monthly wage, and he built their furniture himself in a shop on base.
As president, Carter nurtured woodworking rather than his golf game, spending hours in a wood shop at Camp David to make small presents for family and friends. And when he left the White House, West Wing aides and Cabinet members pooled money for a shopping spree at Sears, Roebuck & Co. so he could finally assemble a full-scale home woodshop.
âOne of the best gifts of my life,â Carter said.
Working in their converted garage, he previewed decades of Habitat for Humanity work by refurbishing their one-story house in Plains. He also improved his fine woodworking skills, joining wood without nails or screws. He also bought Japanese carving tools, and fashioned a chess set later owned by a Saudi prince.
Not just any customer
Carter frequented Atlantaâs Highland Woodworking, a shop replete with a library of how-to books and hard-to-find tools, and recruited the worldâs preeminent handmade furniture maker, Tage Frid, as an instructor, Bagby said.
Still hanging near the store entrance is a picture of Frid, who died in 2004, teaching students including a smiling former president at the front of the class.
âHe was like a regular customer,â Bagby said, other than the âSecret Service agents who came with him.â
Carter built four ladder-back chairs out of hickory in 1983, and Sothebyâs auctioned them for $21,000 each at the time, the first of many sales of Carter paintings and furniture that raised millions to benefit The Carter Center.
It was rarely about the money, though. Jill Stuckey, a longtime friend who would have the Carters over to her home in Plains, recalled seeing the former president carrying out one of her chairs.
âI said, âWhat are you doing?ââ she recalled. âHe said, âItâs broken. Iâm going to take it home and fix it.ââ
He was at her back door at 7:30 the next morning, holding her repaired chair.
Carter compared woodworking to the results of his labor as a Navy engineer, or as a boy on the farm: âI like to see what I have done, what I have made.â
âNo special talent,â but his paintings drive auctions
Carter employed a folk-art style as a late-in-life amateur painter and claimed âno special talent,â but a 2020 Carter Center auction drew $340,000 for his painting titled âCardinals,â and his oil-on-canvas of an eagle sold for $225,000 in 2023, months after he entered hospice care.
Carterâs work hangs throughout the centerâs campus. A room where he met with dignitaries is encircled with birds he painted after he and Rosalynn took on bird watching as a hobby.
Near the executive offices are a self-portrait and a painting of Rosalynn in their early post-presidential years, hanging across from a trio of Andy Warhol prints showing Carter in office.
Carterâs earliest years predominate, with boyhood farm scenes and portraits of influential figures like his father James Earl Carter Sr., whose death in 1953 led him to abandon a Navy career and eventually enter politics in Georgia.
Some of his subjects, including both of his parents, are looking away. Carter's likeness of as a 70-year-old Peace Corps volunteer in India. Jason Carter said the piece was particularly meaningful to his grandfather, who lost reelection at a relatively youthful 56.
âWhen he got out of the White House, she was standing there saying, âWell, I turned 70 in the Peace Corps. What are you going to do?â Jason Carter said.
One Carter subject who meets his gaze is a young Rosalynn â they married when she was 18 and he was 21. He described her as âremarkably beautiful, almost painfully shy, obviously intelligent, and yet unrestrained in our discussions.â
Another who doesnât look away is Rachel Clark, a Black sharecropper who had hosted the future president after they worked in the fields. âExcept for my parents, Rachel Clark was the person closest to me,â Carter wrote of his childhood.
âJust a word of praiseâ
â even a novel â but was most introspective in poetry.
On his first real recognition of Jim Crow segregation: âA silent line was drawn between friend and friend, race and race.â
On his Cold War submarineâs delicate dance with enemies: âWe wanted them to understand ... to share our love of solitude ... the peace we yearned to keep.â
Rosalynnâs smile, he gushed, silenced the birds, âor may be I failed to hear their song.â
Perhaps Carterâs most revealing poem, âI Wanted to Share My Fatherâs World,â concerns the man who never got to see his namesake sonâs achievements. He wrote that he despised Earlâs discipline, and swallowed hunger for âjust a word of praise.â
Only when he brought his own sons to visit his dying father did he âput aside the past resentments of the boyâ and see âthe father who will never cease to be alive in me.â
Bill Barrow, The Associated Press