Charles Munch | Seeking a Way

Exhibition Highlights

 

One of Wisconsin’s most recognizable painters, Charles Munch creates vivid work that explores the complex relationship between humans, animals, and the natural world. By eliminating extraneous detail, he attempts to convey a distinct image by the simplest means possible. 

Since Munch usually paints from his imagination or memory, he starts with a small ‘seed painting,’ often a watercolor in his sketchbook, and ‘grows’ it from small to large to even a larger painting using oil on canvas instead of watercolor. Each subsequent version acts as a stepping stone for Munch to balance and refine the subject in terms of line, color, and composition.

Born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1945, Munch enjoyed summers in Door County, Wisconsin, where the landscape, flora, and fauna shaped his connection to nature. His fondness for art and painting led him to study at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, where he received a BA in painting in 1968. After college, Munch studied at the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting, and Sculpture and worked as an apprentice conservator of 19th-century American and 17th-century Dutch paintings. In the 1970s, he returned to Wisconsin, and his paintings became semi-abstract, more closely matching his inner vision.

Munch’s work has been included in numerous gallery and museum exhibitions around the country. His paintings are in the collections of the Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, WI; Museum of Wisconsin Art, West Bend, WI; Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, Madison, WI; and Chazen Museum of Art, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, among others.

Charles Munch has been represented by Tory Folliard Gallery since 1992.

 
 

DEER IN THE CORN

Oil on Canvas
52 x 37 1/2”
$8,500.00

Available in 28 ½ × 20” ($2,900) version
and 20 × 14” ($1,500) version

 
 

“I depict my subject with just enough description for recognition and then try to bring it to pulsing life through vibrant color relationships and dynamic compositions. My goal is to create images that are even truer to my vision of nature and my emotions than a realistic painting could be.”

-Charles Munch

 
 

DRAMA AT SUNRISE III

Oil on Canvas
10 x 14 1/2”
$900.00

Available in a 28 x 40” ($4,800) version

 

“I’m attracted to opacity, to darkness, to colors that touch without intervening lines.
I found myself interested in bas-relief or low modeling, ambiguous scale, paintings as jewel-like objects, and horses, of all things.”

-Charles Munch

 
 
 

MORNING VISIT

Oil on Canvas
28 x 40”
$4,900.00

Available in a 14 × 20” ($1,500) version

 

“I set rules for myself and put limits on the artistic tools I was allowed to employ. Use only broad lines and flat colors!  No shadows!  No linear perspective!”

-Charles Munch

 
 
 

HORSE, TREE, MOON

Oil on Canvas
38 1/2 x 31”
$5,500.00

 

“But for several years now I’ve begun to loosen up, thinking I’d learned enough from such restrictions. I could relax my long discipline and allow myself to be more expressive and emotional while still keeping an eye on the abstract underpinnings of my representational images.”

-Charles Munch

 
 
 

NIGHT WATCH III

Oil on Canvas
30 x 30”
$4,200.00

 

I let myself choose my formal means, my style, the mediums I use, in the same way I’d always chosen my subject matter: by inspiration, by opening myself to unknown influences in and outside of myself, by giving up control. Surprising things happened!

-Charles Munch

 
 

BLUE LAKE SUNSET I

Oil on Canvas
14 x 14”
$1,100.00

 

 “I had no desire to give up anything or to renounce my old ways, just to relax and see what happened -- to shake up the puzzle pieces and see where they fell -- to allow inconsistency.  This feels similar to some of what’s happening in the rest of my life and may be part of the larger group of changes that occur in old age.”

-Charles Munch

 
 
 

HUNTING AT NIGHT

Oil on Canvas
15 1/2 x 22”
$1,800.00

 

SAILING

Oil on Canvas
30 x 30”
$4,200

Available in a 20 × 26” ($2,400) version
and a 15 ½ × 20” ($1,700) version

To see more of Charles Munch’s available work, please click HERE