Charles Dix

I am primarily self-taught.  I have been inspired by color since boyhood and have always been known as an adept colorist.  It was a natural phenomena - the interplay of color on color, color transposed, color taken to such a point that it fringes on the unrecognizable.  My intense interest in space and man’s involvement with the exploration of it is coupled with this premise.

My earliest work was mostly in watercolor.  My themes have always been visionary, but my approach has radically changed from buoyant brush stroked abstractions influenced by action painting, to views with suggestion of sky born imagery and hard edged strongly defined compositions that were fancifully drafted as planetary places and devices.  My fine control of hues and deft lines in watercolor carried over to acrylics with a sharper skill in close value blending.

From the 1960’s, when I depicted the vast galactic upheavals, to sun baked planetary landscapes, to later paintings in my “transitional” period, I used tightly controlled acrylics on which hard edged areas of “close valued” color unexpectedly but smoothly made the transition from one point in the visible spectrum to the other.

Later paintings show astral vistas, solar explosions, fragments of forgotten civilizations, and vagrant objects floating lazily in galactic space.  Many of the paintings done in this period are hauntingly similar to later photographs taken by Voyager I and II and current incoming images from the Hubble space telescope.

My recent work reflects my continued interest in color and space.  I continue to explore the realms of space – seemingly with an unending flow of inspiration.  Indeed there is not enough time to portray completely the ongoing flow of images.  My projected work is to continue the saga of unexplored space, cosmic forces at battle with inexplicable objects, and the glory of the unknown.

I have pioneered in the use of bronze powders suspended in various bronzing fluids as a painting medium.  The combination of the bronze and layered acrylic paint has propelled me into a two-year project of creating 40 - 5’ x 5’ paintings that will be a chromatic inter-related series.  In some paintings, subtle textures will suggest cosmic upheaval, in others surface tensions will create a depth of field that will draw the viewer into a world of color in nebulous form, with one painting leading to the next as if traveling through time and space into a continuum of color not normally visible.

In 1970, I designed and built my own gallery in order to exhibit my ever increasing out put of larger and larger paintings.  In 1981, the gallery was expanded to twice its size.

I have maintained my daily existence by the sale of my paintings and have never had to resort to any other means of support.

Above photograph on left taken in "The Timmel Collection's" Sculpture Garden right to left is Charles Dix, Joel Timmel, and Saugatuck photographer Vicky Stull.  Two images on right and left are of Charles' two beloved dogs, Pip and Blitz.