Carleton Wing’s creativity has its roots in childhood illnesses that kept him bedridden for extended periods of time. His imagination became his playmate.

Carleton is a self-taught collage and assemblage artist. He started creating found-image paper surreal story-telling collage in 1981. In 1999 Carleton retired from IBM/Lexmark as a Technical writer. He purchased an abandoned commercial building in Lexington, Kentucky and renovated it as an art gallery. He named it Wingspan Gallery in an effort to create a personal connection between art and the community. It had a main gallery with four smaller galleries. The 2nd floor was converted into his personal living space. Up until then Carleton had exhibited his Collages of social comment in many local and regional galleries.

Having his own gallery enabled him to concentrate on creating and exhibiting his own art with a new body of work once or twice a year. He spent the remainder of the time exhibiting local, regional and national artists as well as faculty artists from the Universities of Kentucky and Transylvania. He also feature no-profit exhibits for graduating art students from these universities. He continued to exhibit outside Wingspan Gallery for fund-raisers, benefits, and group shows.

Wingspan Gallery also served gourmet meals every Thursday night. Livia and Carleton were married in 2005. Livia’s excellent cooking and catering experience led them to the weekly four-course, fixed-price, fixed-menu dinner for up to 40 people, plus private parties. Guests were able to spend more time with the art both before and during dinner.

In 2006 Carleton began experimenting with digital collage. He found it to be very satisfying and challenging in a different way from found-image paper collage. Digital work allows him to be a lot more creative in his story-telling as well as in the artistic presentation of composition, color and texture.

In 2009 Carleton began working with 3-dimensional assemblage (his approach is the same as with 2-dimensional collage). Instead of combining images, he combines objects into a different context to create new meaning. He currently divides his time between digital collage and assemblage.

At the beginning of 2012 Carleton put his life on hold and moved to St. Petersburg, FL for a bone marrow transplant at Moffitt Cancer Center, as a result of Leukemia (AML). In the summer of 2013, eighteen months into his recovery, he was able to return to making art. This Web Site is dedicated to Henning Marks, a young German man who generously and courageously donated his stem cells to extend Carleton’s life and enable him to continue making art. He has enjoyed every minute of his studio time realizing fantasies he thought he might never see again.