I strive for my paintings to reside in an uneasy calm, halfway between a photograph and a dream.
The held memory of iconic photographers such as Lange or Evans resonate in manner similar, yet distinctively different than, say, the paintings of Edward Hopper, Joseph Stella or Franz Kline. All, however, reside in our collective aesthetic, what we think of when we think about visual language.
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 the halftone screens and benday dots of classic photographic reproduction, my work plays upon familiar visual tropes that the viewer notes almost subconsciously. Concurrently, the thin, semi-transparent paint film allows quasirandom mark-making to appear almost photographic in detail.
The limited palette, near monochromatic nature of many of my paintings are analagous to the stripped-down writing approach of a Raymond Carver, attempting to eschew extra aesthetic verbiage for imagery that is pared to sinew and bone.
Charlie Hunter was raised in rural Vermont and graduated cum laude with a BA in Art from Yale University in 1981. He worked as a graphic designer and artist manager in the music industry, creating scores of tour posters for acts such as The Clash, REM, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Bob Dylan and the Jerry Garcia Band and managing acoustic artists such as Chris Smither, Fred Eaglesmith, Richard Shindell and Dar Williams. Since 2003, his company, Roots on the Rails, has organized music trains across the US, Mexico and Canada. Now working full time as a painter, Hunter’s work has thrice been included in the American Masters show in Manhattan (2018, 2017, 2016), and he has won top awards at events around the country.
