Contact Charles Bruce

Galleries

Charles currently exhibits in the following galleries:

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Biography of Charles Bruce

Most bios are boring. They usually tell more than most people want to know. So, here is my story:

I was born in the southern mountains of West Virginia. My wife and I had an advertising agency in Virginia Beach, Virginia, then opened a company to publish our series of historical fiction novels. The big city had become too crowded so we moved to a small city in the mountains of Virginia, and I began to concentrate on painting again. The paintings started to sell at the gallery. I was happy.

I realized that my work was changing and I that had the same objectives as did the Fauvists from the early 1900s, before 1908 when a lot of painters in the movement turned elsewhere. Artists such as Henri Matisse, Maurice de Vlaminck, Georges Braque, to name a few, pushed on to other styles and found more satisfying fits for their artistic philosophies.

Understanding Fauvist ideals as the beginning of modern art, followed them for as long as they lived. I think those artists abandoned the stated purity of their ideals a little too quickly; they probably just wanted to shake up the establishment of the moment. The adage about “creation following destruction” seems to easily apply here.

The “establishment” art world of these days has, in my opinion, gone completely overboard, so now they are at the end of the earth. They can no longer be shaken. They can no longer be pretty. They are sexually harsh or politically shrill. They have a message for us, but look to the other side of the coin; messages are many times written plainly there.

In the meantime, we “New Fauvists” see how these same ideas soar so effortlessly from our easels and we think that the time is right for a resurgence of such exciting, magnificently colored, and poignant images to come again.