Carlson came to the United States in 1884 with his family and settled in Buffalo, New York. He worked at a lithographic house there and studied art under John Mayer, an amateur actor and painter, and at the Albright Art Gallery school under Lucius Hitchcock. In 1902 he received a scholarship to the Art Students League in New York, where he studied with Frank Vincent DuMond and Birge Harrison.
Carlson first went to Woodstock, New York, in 1903 as a student at Byrdcliff under Harrison. In 1906, at Carlson's urging, the Art Students League established a summer school in Woodstock, where he became an instructor, and from 1911 to 1918, served as director. In 1913 he married a painter he met in Woodstock, Margaret Goddard of Plainfield, New Jersey. The couple spent part of each year in Plainfield. He was a cofounder of the Broadmoor (Colo.) Art Academy and served as its director from 1920 to 1922. The next year he established his own school of landscape painting in Woodstock. Carlson wrote Elementary Principles of Landscape Painting (1928), which was later reissued as Carlson's Guide to Landscape Painting.
A regular contributor to Academy exhibitions, Carlson won the Academy's Andrew Carnegie Prize in the winter exhibition of 1918. He served on the Council from 1935 to 1936.
