Charles Dix - February 5, 1939 - February 2, 2005
I attended Rhode Island School of Design and Layton Art School but am primarily self-taught. I have been inspired by color since boyhood and have always been known as a colorist. It was a natural phenomena - the interplay of 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 control of hues and deft lines in watercolor carried over to acrylics with sharper skill in close value blending.
From the 1960’s, when depicting the vast galactic upheavels, 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. Dix approached the design of the house in much the way that he might do a painting or a piece of sculpture, actually the house-gallery, in his mind was a piece of sculpture by extension.
Dix’s gallery, which he called “Moon Walk”, is pictured below. He said “It was the solution as to whether he would live in a gallery or show his work at home”. It was also a tourist attraction and site for fundraising galas
