Charlie Spear

Charlie Spear was born in 1948 in the Midwest. The era of Modern Art was in full swing with the Sixties generating an artistic smorgasbord of art styles and new media. Much of his early career was spent learning about art through teaching art. His imagery grew out of early television and graphic media. Spear paints both as a landscape painter and an abstractionist which characterizes his ecclectic tendencies. Philip Guston has had an influence on his art of recent. Exploring the art media’s physical qualities is an important element in his style coupled with an atavistic love of an expressionistic drawing style. The result is a charged surface of automatic line energy and raw cartoon color expressionism.

His work is a reflection of familiar events in a life among those six individuals who connect him to the larger human population. His imprinting from childhood via the funnies, hero/heroine-comic books and ‘good against evil’ Cartoon movies are mostly the visual underpinnings of his work. When I paint and draw enough concrete imagery remains to call the ideas expressed : ‘Illusionary Prose.’Recent inspirations have been drawing elements from the classical figure tradition. I find in these latter works simplicity and boldness of thought persistent with the classical beauty of the ‘drawn line.’

Recent work is based on the hyperbole and caricature as a vehicle for satire, humor, and wonder. He uses exaggeration of anatomy and landscape elements to emphasize a range of elemental emotions of expression i.e. recognition and cognitive reactions to familiar behaviors and places with a price of ownership.