Charlie Hunter

Charlie shares his emotional resonance of what nature does to what man creates, smiling all the way.

Charlie Hunter. Photo credit: ©Rachel Portesi

Charlie Hunter is a world-renowned painter living in Vermont, being originally from New Hampshire. He’s won numerous awards, featured in books and magazines, had multiple solo shows and has works in homes all over the world.

He is also an art educator and has produced numerous educational videos.

He now lives in Bellows Falls, a resurgent mill town on the banks of the Connecticut River in Vermont. His studio is in an old paper mill, where he “likes to paint what nature does to what man creates.”

Tonalism.com: Do you call or think of yourself as a tonalist? How or why / why not?

Charlie Hunter: If one thinks of “Tonalism” as a movement active 1880-1920, as Wikipedia does, under that definition, the fact I’m currently alive dictates that I shouldn’t.

When folks call my work “Tonalist,” I’m initially surprised, but then -if they’re making a cogent argument as to why they think it so- I tend to nod, sagely, as if I knew what they were talking about all along and go, “um-hmmm, that’s right.”

Honestly, I really try not to define my work as any one thing, because I don’t want to limit where it can go. To willingly hop into one particular bin seems self-defeating, and kind of delusional. What if I got it wrong? What if I thought of myself as a neo-regionalist (if there is such a thing - I have no earthly idea) but instead it turned out I was a post-classical formalist?

I just paint stuff, and if people want to look at it, I’m honored. And if somebody wants to associate me with any particular movement or school, have at it.

But, sure, I use some Tonalist techniques, and I know that there are some parallels drawn between Tonalism and the New England Transcendentalists, and I’ve always liked those folks, so, sure! And if you accept the idea of Tonalism being at least somewhat a reaction to the rise of the machine age, I could see being a Post-Tonalist, as I certainly see my work as a response to the deindustrialization and hollowing-out of small-town America in the last quarter of the 20th and first quarter of the 21st centuries.

Charlie Hunter, EASTERN TOWNSHIP, oil on panel, 2019, 8 x 10, courtesy William Baczek Fine Arts

Tonalism.com: What is your definition of Tonalism?

Charlie Hunter: Well, generally if it’s a drifty, dreamy romanticized 19th century landscape that wouldn’t perc very well, that’s pretty definitely Tonalism. I know we call Whistler a tonalist; Inness, Twachtman, Ryder - but  Homer - is he tonalist? Some of his stuff is certainly seems to be.  It seems to me that pretty much any canvas that you don’t clean for a hundred years starts having some real tonalist qualities….. so, what does that tell us? I guess that I think “tonalist” refers to keeping the majority of the chroma at kind of the muted end of things; relying more on values than on pure color to get the job done.

If you go by David Cleveland’s definition (and why not? He’s gone to all the trouble of writing a book about it), he’s got 12 characteristics that, I guess, if you match a certain number of them, gets you - or your work?- considered Tonalist. Some of them I like and find very interesting (…“an emphasis on the broad, graphic, ultimately abstract reading of major forms….a predisposition for the elegiac poetry of landscape, reflecting the trauma of the Civil War”), and some strike me as ludicrous (“various greens, purples, blues, and grays that are restful and easy on the eye”).

Charlie Hunter, MILK BARNS, MIMS RANCH, oil on panel, 2018, 12x24, private collection

I mean, I could probably find a DeKooning that was mostly “greens, purples, blues and greys,” and I would argue that Franz Kline certainly utilized “broad, graphic, ultimately abstract reading of major forms” in his work, but nobody runs around calling those dudes “Tonalists,” and “easy on the eye” sounds kinda sloppy. And boring.

Tonalism.com: What’s been the story of your journey as an artist?

From my earliest memories, working things out in a visual language has always felt very natural. As a little kid, there was always a lot of paper and cool stuff to play with around the house. Even though my mom couldn’t draw her way out of a paper bag, both my parents were very encouraging of visual expression - there was a big bulletin board in the kitchen that was very heavily used, both for the drawings of us kids, but also stuff we’d cut out of magazines and change each season of the year. 

My father was a small-town printer in New Hampshire and, later, Vermont. In that world, you have to be a jack-of-all-trades - know-how to run a printing press, sure, but also compose and distribute type, do paste-up and layout, run a copy-camera, etc. etc. etc. I never learned how to run the Multilith (the offset press that was my dad’s baliwick only), but I could run the Little Giant after a fashion, which was a flat-bed letterpress press that weighed so much it started to cause the floor of the shop to collapse until we put a bunch of support joists down in the cellar, and I could -or thought I could- do most of that other stuff as well.

Charlie Hunter, THE WATER IS WIDE, encaustic and oil on panel, 2019, 4.25x12, private collection

As I hit teenaged years, I wanted to be a graphic designer - to design record covers, specifically - I had no real interest in being a painter; it didn’t even really occur to me. I took a year off after high school to earn money for Yale, where I had been admitted (much to the astonishment of my mother) and worked at home in Vermont as a not-very-good sign painter. When I went off to college, the deal with my folks was they’d pay tuition and room and board, but after that I was on my own, and I was lucky enough, my first day there, to land a job doing all the graphics for Toad’s Place, the preeminent rock club in New Haven at that time. It was a perfect fit - I could do all their paste-up and layout for their tickets and ads, and paint big show cards for the windows - and, as well as getting paid, and getting plus-one’d for every show, they gave me my own studio above the club. I was an art major with a concentration in graphic design - Yale did not have a designated program of study for undergraduate graphic designers; you had to meet with the deans each semester and agree on a course of study. 

Charlie Hunter, MOORE & THOMPSON 2020, oil, 30x80, private collection

I would love to say that I took full advantage of the incredible educational opportunities Yale provided, but -honestly- I was more interested in taking advantage of my access to rock and roll and concurrent female companionship. I would have preferred to build my schedule around those priorities, but the deans persisted and I ended up -despite myself- with a pretty good education in design, drawing and (conventional, late-20th-century) Western art history. The acting dean my senior year forced me to take a painting class.

I worked at the club for a year after I graduated, took the money I’d earned and went to France, living on the cheap for three months until the money ran out, then returned to the states, moved to Northampton, Mass, and fell into a job designing posters for touring rock bands. I loved that job, and did it for six or seven years, during which time I joined a life-drawing group and started painting recreationally. I then morphed into becoming a music manager for singer/songwriters, then moved back to Vermont in the early ‘aughts’ when I got sick of that. There I started promoting live music events, including running chartered music trains, and I began painting more seriously.

All of which is to say that I had inadvertently given myself a great background in what one needs to know in order to survive as a working artist; not an academic artist, but as a human being who makes their living creating art. I started showing my paintings regionally in the early 2000’s, and, after studying under Dennis Sheehan for a few years at Village Arts of Putney, just 12 miles from where I live, I was invited to join the Putney Painters in 2009. In 2011, Dennis, Richard Schmid, Nancy Guzik and a couple of the other painters urged me to get my ass out there and start working nationally.

Charlie Hunter, DISEMBARKATION POINT, HEART MTN. INTERNMENT CAMP, oil on panel, 12x24, private collection

Tonalism.com: What are the main objectives of your current approach?

Charlie Hunter: In my current artist statement, I say I want my paintings to “reside in an uneasy calm, half way between a photograph and a memory.” Memories can be hazy or clear, and we think of them as accurate, but they contain vast fictions.

I use a variety of moderately unorthodox techniques, such as manipulating paint with a window washer’s squeegee to achieve a suite of effects or impressing the pattern of paper towels into a painted surface to evoke the halftone screens and ben-day dots of classic photographic reproduction. I want these to be noted, almost subconsciously, by the viewer.  Concurrently, the thin, semi-transparent paint film allows for somewhat random mark-making to appear almost photographic in detail. I’m fascinated by that - how the absence of actual detail ends up implying a world of fictional detail. The more I paint the more I understand what Miles Davis was talking about when he said “it’s not the notes you play. It’s the notes you don’t play.”

Charlie Hunter, DEMO, SCOTTSDALE: LITTLE FALLS, oil on linen, 2019,11x14, private collection

I hate when people call my work “nostalgic”. I’m fine with “melancholic” or “drippy” or “depressing.” I grew up in New England as small-scale agriculture and local industry were basically dying; railroad branch lines were atrophying, once-vibrant towns were hollowing out, farm fields were going fallow. That just felt - and still feels - tremendously important, especially when one sees that the dominant narratives in the media are about stuff that has nothing to do with that. The challenge is not to be one-dimensionally nostalgic, but to strike a resonant chord that hopefully hasn’t been hit a thousand times before.

Charlie Hunter, RADIATOR, EXNER BLOCK, pastel on paper, 1999, 16x24, private collection

Tonalism.com: What was the actual process or series of events that led you to paint as you do now?

Charlie Hunter: In the 80’s and 90’s, I had been doing very realistic pastels, working from photographs - see Radiator, Exnor Block - but I’d go to the Clark Museum, in Williamstown, Mass, and stare at Innes’ Home In Montclair, the Homers, the Sargents, and just feel frustrated, because their work was so exciting on a visceral level to me, but I had no idea how to do it.

After I returned to Vermont, I really rekindled my interest in painting. I wasn’t very good, but I started putting in my hours. What I was doing was going out almost every day, sometimes with watercolors (awkwardly) or acrylics (even worse) with the French easel my mom had gotten for me at a yard sale, and painting for an hour or two, four or five times a week. I had a storefront studio in my little town of Bellows Falls, Vermont, and one day Penelope Simpson and John Adams wandered in and recruited me to take classes from Dennis Sheehan. 

Charlie Hunter, ORCHARD, HOLLIS NH, oil, circa 2003, private collection

Concurrently, I ended up on the board of a local arts organization that would bring in artists for adult workshops, and I nominated myself for the job of “water boy” - picking up painters at the train and driving them around, say, or going and getting a student a tube of cerulean if they had forgotten theirs - and so got to take multiple workshops with artists who ended up having a huge influence on me - Shils, Paul Ching-Bor, Ray Ruseckas, Eric Aho, etc.

I mean, without any planning on my part, here I am living in small town Vermont - in the same town as Eric Aho, across the river from Ruseckas, 12 miles north of where Schmid and Sheehan are teaching, and I’m driving Stuart Shils to and from the Amtrak station! Pretty lucky.

In August of 2004, I had had a year or so of studying with Dennis, and was being water boy for Shils one weekend, and it all came together - this kind of moody, smeary, atmospheric mush. Shils gave me the courage to let go of chroma. I was doing a painting of a utility pole on the Walpole, NH green, and had mooshed all my colors together because I was not nearly as interested in the chroma as I was in the relative values. “That seems to be working pretty well for you,” Shils said, and I haven’t looked back since. Much.

Charlie Hunter, WALPOLE POLE, oil on wood, 2004, courtesy of the artist

Ten years of painting in the same room with Richard Schmid teaches you a hell of a lot about edges and values. I had the drawing chops from three years of life drawing for four hours three days a week at Yale; Sheehan taught me tonalist technique, and waterboying for Shils, Aho, Ching-Bor, etc. teaches you that there are a whole bunch of ways to get to your own truth.  I have had a marvelous education, or, as Thoreau would put it, “I have traveled widely in Concord.”

Tonalism.com: Please describe a little bit of your painting process.

Charlie Hunter: I have two pretty different approaches depending whether I’m in the studio or if I’m in the field. 

If I’m painting plein air, I’m usually doing so as part of a plein air event. I do these events because I love the camaraderie of seeing “my tribe” of working painters, it’s a skill I’m good at and therefore I tend to do okay financially, and most importantly, really, the challenge of painting journalistically for a week gets your eye-hand coordination and visual acuity in great shape. 

I’m trying to make good art at these events, but there are parameters. First, I’m trying to do two paintings a day. Secondly, they are going to be one of two - or at most, three - sizes, because I usually travel to such events and I send ahead boxes of surfaces and frames, ready to go, and I don’t want to be shipping back a bunch of unused stuff. Thirdly, these events exist for a reason - they are a fundraiser for the sponsoring organization, so I am not going to do my more experimental stuff; I’m going to try to hit a bunch of singles as opposed to swinging for the fences.

In the studio, it is an entirely different situation. My beloved is a superb singer/songwriter from Texas, Betty Soo (www.bettysoo.com), and she loves visual art, which is great, because I’m a visual artist who loves singer/songwriter music. We have talked about this a lot, and those discussions really helped clarify to me how my job differs in these two situations. 

Charlie Hunter, BLUE STREAK (PASSING TRAINS THAT HAVE NO NAME), oil on canvas, 2019, 18x36, courtesy William Baczek Fine Arts

In the studio, my job is to really push myself. I try not to repeat myself in solving a visual challenge unless it is trying to unravel the why of something, or finishing a show, where I’m trying to make a coherent body of work that hangs together as a whole. 

So, then, let’s go with my in-the-field approach, as it is much more of a consistent thing. I just completed a new video, BREAKTHROUGH DESIGN FOR LANDSCAPES, where I go into great detail about all this, including exactly what brushes and tools I use, and why I think it is so important to maintain a daily sketching practice.

Occasionally I will do a quick thumbnail on site, but most of the time, I just dive right in to the painting. First, I’ve put in - and continue to put in - my hours drawing in the sketchbooks I carry with me. Secondly - I have four years of academic graphic design principles seared into my head. Thirdly - I really like the spontaneity of solving problems on the fly - it’s part of the appeal of plein air painting. I NEVER do a preliminary drawing on my canvas in plein air work (though not so in the studio).

I use Cobra water-mixable oils and have been using WMO’s for a dozen years or so, because the volatiles in conventional oils made me want to puke, and if you’re doing a lot of removing of paint from the surface - as us tonalists do - you’re going to be getting your hands wet. I hate wearing latex gloves, and since I don’t use cadmiums or cobalts or lead anything, water-mixable-oils made a ton of sense. They take some getting used to, because they don’t behave exactly like conventional oils, and I know that frustrates people.

But here’s my analogy - you can make a fantastic vegetarian dinner - just think of Indian food! But if you try to make a hamburger out of vegetables, and are trying to get carrots and lentils to have exactly the same mouth-feel as half a pound of ground-up Hereford, it just isn’t really going to duplicate it. You want a burger? Get a burger.

The Cobras themselves are basically the same as Rembrandt oils - they are artist-grade oil paints - it is just that the linseed oil which serves as the binder for the pigments has been modified to also mix with water. And water, when used as the volatile, just does not behave precisely like mineral spirits. That’s neither good nor bad; it just is.

Nowadays, in plein air work, my go-to color is a mixture of Cobra Raw Umber and Cobra Van Dyke Brown. Mixed together, it’s a mostly transparent warm dark brown that lets me tell the story I want. 

Charlie Hunter, FIVE FIVE EIGHTEEN, oil, 2018 (Winner, Quick Paint, Forgotten Coast Plein Air), 12x24, private collection

The way I work, is basically a Schmid monochromatic block-in melded with an adaptation of Dennis Sheehan paper-towel-tonalism. That is, you pretty quickly cover the whole canvas with a monochromatic watery slurry (you’d do it with Gamsol if you were working with conventional oils) to get the big shapes in, and push and pull and refine them with paper towel, and then use less and less water, until I’m working with straight out-of-the-tube paint, and by the end I’m doing my fat-over-lean with a little bit of water-mixable safflower oil.

I like how one can get a lot of watercolor effects using the water-mixables that I think would be harder to achieve with conventional oils. So you can have some nice, ethereal, drippy passages in a painting next to a lovely, built-up, gritty bit of oily density.

The Cobras are very buttery in consistency. If people like a stiffer paint, Holbein Duos are of excellent quality. There are numerous other brands -a couple I’d steer folks away from- but also several others with which I’m unfamiliar. I am an “ambassador” for Royal Talens North America, who manufacture Cobra, Rembrandt oils and pastels, and Amsterdam acrylics. That means I get free stuff, but it also means trying to educate folks about how Cobra paints work.

The Talens people are wonderful - they have real integrity and a commitment to quality and honesty and social justice. I am really honored to be working with them. 

My preferred surfaces, I make by hand - inexpensive muslin from the fabric store, mounted on gatorboard, hospital corners, cut to size. For big studio pieces, at the suggestion of my friend Doug Fryer, I have started mounting muslin to hollow-core doors. Either way, three coats of artist-grade acrylic gesso (currently using Amsterdam), to which I add a little Golden Liquid Acrylic Transparent Oxide Yellow, to give it a hint of warmth. I use a housepainting brush, and try to brush the gesso on pretty evenly, but I do not sand between coats - I like the subtle mark of the hand the brushing gives. 

Tonalism.com: Can you describe how you decide on a composition, what makes a piece feel 'right' to you?

Charlie Hunter: Any painting is, on one level, an abstract arrangement of shapes and values. The ostensible “subject matter” is just the way we -creator and viewer - step into that world. What I’m looking for, then, in a dispassionately formal way, is interesting lighting on an arrangement of objects that have enough emotional resonance to carry me into a more purely abstracted world. I think we, as artists, gravitate toward objects that have a personal resonance. Like my drawing teacher in college, William Bailey (definitely not a tonalist, btw), apparently had a great deal of personal resonance with pottery and the breasts of undergraduate females.

Seriously, though, I like when rules are either pushed (dropping the horizon line low, or pushing it high) or ignored (plonking things straight smack dab in the center of the canvas so that there is an inescapable staring match going on between subject and viewer). I like seeing things that are clearly thought through in their design. I had four years of extremely rigorous graphic design training by the spectacularly dour Inge Druckry (https://youtu.be/ldSkPqZKBl0), and that seared a whole passel of compositional guidelines into my head. 

I do think that the ‘rule of thirds’ is a really good one, though I often break it - but when I do so, I am doing it for a specific purpose. If I put an object dead-center in a painting, it is because I am very deliberately using the conventions of portraiture - I am saying to the viewer, “this is the subject of my painting.”

When I see paintings that read to me as just a bunch of painterly noodling of what looks like just-happened-to-be-in-front-of-l’artiste, I move on pretty quickly.

Tonalism.com: Could you name any specific influences on your work and are there any artists or books, creative practices or anything else that you’d recommend for the aspiring tonalist?

Charlie Hunter: I like genuine creativity. I like some music as much as I like any painting. Chris Whitley’s LIVING WITH THE LAW or HOTEL VAST HORIZON, Jon Dee Graham’s HOORAY FOR THE MOON, and much of Townes Van Zandt’s body of work moves me as much as anything. I love the short stories of Barry Hannah and George Saunders. I think James Thurber’s MY LIFE AND HARD TIMES is near perfect. I like photography - Cartier-Bresson to Lange and Evans and Winogrand. I love the paintings of Hopper and Joseph Stella and Franz Kline. I love the sculptures of Xu Bing. The Lascaux cave paintings are fantastic.

I couldn’t hold a candle to NC or Andrew Wyeth, and I love my fellow tribe of working painters. Last December, I invited Doug Fryer, Terry Miura, Patrick Lee and John Lasater IV to come up to Bellows Falls and we all painted together for a week in my studio. That was AWESOME.

I certainly studied Eric Aho a lot when I was getting serious about oil paint, and he’s going to curate a small museum show of mine here in Vermont next year, so that’s exciting. There are so many!

But, really, if it seems to have that spark of having to have been made, rather than it being something designed to be consumed, that’s what I am hungry to see, or hear, or read.

Eric Aho, Blue Ramsay Slope

Tonalism.com: Any advice for the aspiring painters / tonalists? (Eg staying inspired, areas to practice, keeping encouraged etc)

Draw. Draw draw draw draw. People want to do the cool stuff, and Tonalist techniques can be used to mask crappy art, but a) you won’t be fooling yourself, b) we’re going to be dead a long time and c) as my partner and I used to say in our music management days when feeling daunted, “if it wasn’t a challenge, it wouldn’t be a challenge.”

I would try to keep a bit of distance from too-slavishly copying another artist’s style. My concern is that, if one’s greatest aspiration is to paint just like someone else, then the best one can hope to do is be as good as something that already exists. We should all aspire to do something new, I think; to claim some minute bit of turf nobody has ever claimed before.

You know Don Demers’ painting, “A Gentle Edge,” of a little tiny wavelet lapping at a little tiny bit of shore? We’ve all seen hundreds of expertly rendered scenes of big waves crashing against big rocks. I couldn’t paint big waves against big rocks worth a lick - let me be very clear - but I have never before seen anybody expertly paint this tiny, insignificant little moment as if it were just as important as a big crashing moment. “His eye is on the sparrow,” indeed. That painting just made my jaw drop and realize that I am a lucky man to be walking this earth at the same time as Don Demers.

Don Demers, A GENTLE EDGE

Tonalism.com: Saving the big question for last: What is art’s purpose in the world?

For reasons I don’t understand, us humans seem to need art in order to feel connected and whole. Townes Van Zandt said that one of the things he felt good about in life was that much of his fan mail was from people in mental hospitals. Townes’ music went deep - way deep - and he was a really severe depressive, but his music has brought incalculable joy to others. So we soldier on, and try to do the best we can. I always have loved a quote from the 1960’s songwriter Phil Ochs. He was considered a “protest singer,” but his later music was more elliptical than topical. In the liner notes for one of his last albums before he committed suicide at age 36, he wrote “Ah, but in such ugly times, the true protest is beauty.”