Charlie Hunter
Bellows Falls, VT
Charlie Hunter is a cheerful guy who paints drippy portraits of decaying American infrastructure in Bellows Falls, Vermont.
MessageThe source material for this is a photo from a book my mom wrote, called THE WILLIAM AND CHARLES MUSEUM. The plot is basically that my brother collected lots of stuff, and called it a museum (today we would call that "hoarding") and I, as an infant, went along with it. This is a picture of my brother and his little friend Catherine, down by the skating pond, with our barns (on the left) and our farmhouse (on the right). It was a great place to be a kid, until the State of New Hampshire put a highway bypass in that demolished the barns and we moved back to the family homestead in Vermont, where my Great Aunt Mary put the kibosh on any unproductive fooling around. Ah well - tempis fugit. In terms of the painting itself, this is on muslin, mounted on a hollow core door, an idea given to me by the great Utah painter Doug Fryer. I love painting on muslin for my plein air work, where generally the largest size I'll do is 12x24, and the grain of the muslin is perfect for my reductive-tonalist technique (if you can call it that). When working this big, the tooth of the muslin is maybe a bit fine for the more painterly passages; I'm in the middle of prepping another hollow-core door now - this time I'm using a medium-weave canvas. I went into eye-glazing detail about the painting process on this piece a couple of weeks ago on THE REASONABLY FINE ART TALK, my weekly blooveration Tuesdays at 1:45 pm Eastern at @CharlieHunterStudio on Facebook, or anytime at all on YouTube.
- Subject Matter: Landscape