I was born in a small town in New Hampshire where we used to swim in the abandoned granite quarries. We had pigs and chickens and rambling barns. I’d walk home from school along the branchline rails of the Boston & Maine, and read the names and slogans on the box cars that’d roll by: “The Nickel Plate Road,” “Santa Fe All The Way”.....When they put a highway bypass through our barns, my family returned to the house built by my great, great, great grandfather in Vermont, where my Great Aunts lived. We made (and still make) maple syrup there and had (and still have) a handcranked cider press which makes amazing cider but can remove a finger if you’re not careful (just ask Uncle Andrew). My Dad was an occasional minister who ran a small print shop. There was always a lot of paper and drawing stuff around. I was lucky enough to get to go off to college and study art and design; afterwards, I got a job designing tour posters for acts like The Clash and REM and The Jerry Garcia Band. I got to design a lot of album covers.

A few years ago what I paint and how I paint it started to all fit together and make sense in a very simple way: I paint what moves me, as honestly as I can. I like to paint what nature does to what man creates. I like to paint outside. I tend to use a monochromatic ‘earth palate’ blend of ultramarine blue, viridian, yellow ochre, naples yellow and burnt sienna. Only after completing a bunch of paintings did I become aware how this color world and style evokes old photographs. I like that interplay. The brain wants to think it’s seeing 1920, but wait, that’s a 2004 Toyota Tacoma! What’s up?

I live in a small old mill town along the Connecticut River in Southern Vermont. A couple of years ago I took over the vegetable garden up at the family homestead, 20 miles away; we figure it’s been there well over 100 years. I’ve been traveling out to New Mexico for 20 years or so, visiting friends or volunteering on the Cumbres & Toltec Scenic Railroad in Chama (my job is lettering freight cars). I always try to take the train from Chicago to Lamy if I have time. I’ve loved the small towns and the stations that one passes. They have a quiet and a dignity to them, and the way the awesome New Mexican light hits them is heartbreakingly beautiful. I feel lucky that I get to portray these, to bring them to life on canvas. I hope these images move you the way the real thing
moves me.

—Charlie Hunter, 2010

Selected Publications:

Here, in Bellows Falls, a small mountain village of 3,200 along the Connecticut River in Vermont’s southeastern corner, plein air alla prima painter Charlie Hunter paced about....brow furrowed in enthusiastic concentration, rambling about Mondrian. “He formalized negative space,” he said of the artist who revolutionized Hunter’s love of painting at age five....He made me realize that abstraction was the next logical point from realism.”

It may be strange for a seemingly monochromatic painter of rotting American infrastructure and hazy, lonesome trailways to speak of Mondrian’s color fields as a primary influence. The worlds Hunter creates are populated by scenes like those from his studio windows — New England’s hollow, post-industrial corridors and their gentle actualization of memory, rendered in a warm burnt sienna mash-up pregnant with veridian, yellow ochre and white undertones.

“In my work, there are a lot of abstract elements, though many people may not think so,” Hunter explained while pulling out a piece he’d completed two days prior: “1899,” an eerie study of a train tunnel as viewed from a steadily departing back platform. “The eye wants to believe fictions....Give the eye an anchor, and it will fill in the rest of the story...” Pointing to the angular upper right corner of the tunnel in “1899,” he continued, “This is the only sharp detail in the painting, but if a person’s eye focuses on it, the eye will make near-photographic realities of other areas of the painting, even though it’s just a hazy area of drips.” Thus, Hunter imbues actuality in his works through the fogged negative space blanketing our sense of time and locality. And in Hunter’s estimation, time and locality are more interesting when they represent a complex tale of long ago.

Growing up in Weathersfield Center, Vermont, Hunter experienced the decline of the area’s tool industry and saw how it impacted the way of life. “I don’t want to romanticize nor claim that the way things were was somehow better. But I do think the huge changes in economy and how folks make a living are terribly important. Some handful of people worked hard to build these things (abandoned gas stations, warehouses, train yards, etc.), and now nature is reclaiming them; they’re an afterthought to society, but they hold a story involving many lives.”

“The natural world is something much more beautiful than anything man can create. So what nature does to these silly little creations is endlessly fascinating.”

—Featured Artist, Clara Rose Thornton,  
Artscope Magazine, Dec/Jan, 2010
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....This narrative element is anything but simplistic.... These places, these objects, feel at first quite abandoned.  There is a quiet you can feel.  But then you notice – fresh tire tracks in the dust.  Someone has been here, but you don’t know whom or why.
 
—Christy Woods, ArtScope Magazine, Gallery Talk,
September, 2009
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....[Hunter’s] lines of perspective are so perfect that it’s surprising to learn he paints en plein air. A viewer’s first thought may be: These have got to come from slides. But Hunter is just that good - really a master landscapist...The chromatic richness of Hunter’s actual harmonies imparts subtle variations of depth and atmosphere...Charlie Hunter suggests we think of his paintings “as photographs pulled out of a box 40 years from now.”  Fortunately, we don’t have to wait that long...

—Marc Awody, Seven Days Vermont, March 2006
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Charlie Hunters work is simple and honest and straightforward and real....With a sharp eye and a deft hand, Hunter presents those pockets of the countryside that subtly meld the contemporary with the past...Hunter presents a Vermont landscape that is sparse and beautiful, old and new, and filled, if not with physical objects, with the intangible feeling of passing time.

—Ben Finer, Art Map Burlington, 2006
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This is not the Vermont of fall leaves and covered bridges the tourists come to see, but the Vermont of abandoned Plymouths, lost industries and declining family farms. Charlie Hunter captures that everyday beauty with realism and sympathy, his eye eager for the telling detail, the unusual viewpoint, and the unexpected angle.    

—Robert Smith,  Art New England
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View Selected Exhibitions, Selected Collections, Awards and Honors

View Charlies Work