I would argue that change is the most daunting challenge for a human being. Leaving the warm cocoon of the known to enter the harsh world of uncertainty takes courage.

This is especially true of the arts, where fans expect a certain style from the artist, and get annoyed or even angry when the artist has mined one vein of inspiration and turns to another.

Yet, as the exhibition, "Clarence H. Carter: Realism to Surrealism," through Aug. 9, David E. Rodale Gallery, Baum School of Art, 510 Linden St., Allentown, shows, the career of Clarence H. Carter is all about change.

In 1904, Carter was born into an America that valued homey and familiar scenes of farms and countryside and he enjoyed a successful career exploring those themes: first completing art school in Cleveland, traveling to Europe to study under Italian masters and settling into a teaching position at Carnegie Tech in Pittsburgh (now Carnegie Mellon University). Sales were brisk and he enjoyed all the awards his peers and fans could give him.

But after World War II, the tastes of America changed. Abstract art, which had been all the rage in Europe since the turn of 20th century completely mesmerized American artists and the art of the regional painters seemed suddenly old-fashioned.

Carter was mesmerized too, but he was much too controlled a painter to give into the serendipity of allowing paint to dictate the final form a canvas. For years, he quit painting and took advertising assignments from big banks and corporations like Alcoa.

When he started painting again, his vision, still incandescent with natural light and color, transformed into pared down-creatures water buffaloes, cicadas, pigeons peering over walls that separate us, and eventually changed even those creatures into the graceful ovoid forms which haunt his later work.

The work of Carter being shown at the Baum School has examples of the work that defined his long career: early watercolors (including one of his son Blake my former husband, incidentally as a child in a snowstorm, and a slaughtered wild boar on the table of a French eatery), later collages which clearly show the artist's humor, and ecstatic paintings of mandalas.

Baum School of Art gallery, free and open to the public: 9 a.m. - 9:30 p.m. Monday - Thursday, 9 a.m. - 5 p.m. Friday; closed Saturday, Sunday.