Things of God, Things of Man: The Low-Chroma Landscape
Workshop | Available
Charlie Hunter’s landscape paintings capture the quiet, melancholic beauty of "rural deindustrialization" using a near-monochromatic, modified tonalist style that feels both timeless and deeply personal. His work is acclaimed for distilling complex scenes into essential, moody compositions that blend photographic realism with abstract, textural mark-making. For this workshop, each day’s class begins with a demonstration painting in which Hunter explains the decisions and choices made as the painting evolves. Students then work on their own, with an emphasis on design, mood, and finding one’s true “voice,” before all gather for lively group critique and discussion. Sketching to work out compositional challenges, use of water-mixable oils and unorthodox tools such as window washer’s squeegees, patterned paper towels, and washes of thin paint to create unique, almost photographic textures are all discussed. Experimentation and laughter is encouraged. www.charliehunter.art; www.hunter-studio.com
Charlie Hunter
"Charlie Hunter has the uncanny ability to seize upon the most?ordinary things and transform them with his brush into bewitching jewels of design and artistic perception." - Richard Schmid
Using water-mixable oils and a tonalist technique, Hunter's work is simultaneously journalistic and subjective. He works in Bellows Falls, VT, 20 miles from where he grew up on the highland farm of his great-great-great grandfather.
Charlie Hunter is a nationally recognized painter of the post-pastoral American landscape. His distinctive, low-chroma work, exists, as he says, "halfway between a photograph and a memory."
Heavily reliant on a mastery of values, edges and composition, utilizing a variety of moderately unorthodox techniques; manipulating paint with a window washer's squeegee or impressing the pattern of paper towels into a painted surface to evoke halftone screens of lithographic reproduction, Hunter's work examines the pressures of modern urban and suburban culture upon small-town and agricultural communities, simultaneously celebrating "what natures does to what man creates."
Initially a graphic designer of tour posters for musicians such as the Jerry Garcia Band, Bob Dylan, The Clash, Eurythmics and REM, Hunter became a music manager and event producer, before turning to painting full time in the 2000's,
His work has been featured in numerous art and lifestyle publications, is in multiple collections and museums, and was the recent subject of a one-man show, SEMAPHORE, at the Brattleboro (VT) Museum, curated by fellow artist Eric Aho. With painter and designer Larry Moore, Hunter created the En Train Air painting train, a concept they hope to revive post-pandemic. Hunter's weekly live stream, REASONABLY FINE ART TALKS, has a fervent following.