Charles Wish
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Charles Wish (b. Frederick Charles Peters VIII, Los Angeles, California, March 18, 1971, BFA University of Arizona, 1993) is a California artist best known for visually fusing American Regionalism styles with 16th - 19th century South Asian, Tantra & Buddhist motifs (debut show Detroit, Michigan, 2005).
Seasonably confronting the information age challenges of extreme, cultural contrariety and cross-cultural interaction, Wish draws from a diverse range of influences to deliver his style of "Surregional” paintings. Sighting local giants like Grant Wood and Thomas Hart Benton, as well as the many anonymous artisans of a foreign, primal world, he lovingly combines the esoteric ontology of a nonage civilization with some of provincial-America’s most selfsame symbols and scenes.
“Americans suffer from an extreme, cultural schizophrenia. We are all, born and raised, diehard xenophobes, while we work like mad to sustain a nation where the opportunities for progressive eclecticism abound. If we can pick-up on the benefits of both sides of this coin, if we can learn to temper elective-freedom with our backwoods ways, the future of American culture will shine like no other culture before.
Brimming with the byproducts of idiosyncrasy, a balancing act of intuition and imagination, from the boundless marriages of acquired and innate motifs, beautiful mutants shall be born… If Heidegger (a leading exponent of 20th century existentialism, but also a staunch critic of advanced, technological society) could have only lived to fully experience the irony, what a confused smile he would have had.”
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- - Charles Wish (2003) from "Pirates of The Electric Church"
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After spending four years (1999-2003) at a Ramakrishna, Hindu monastery (as a student of South-Asian symbolism and iconography) Wish would return to the San Fernando Valley, California not far from where he spent his formative years. It is here, along with his wife Abbigail, where he continues to reside and paint today.
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[edit] Sources
- CPop Gallery Rick Manore (Director), Detroit, Michigan.
- The Detroit News Joy Hakanson Colby (Art Critic), Saturday, July 2, 2005.
- L'Imagerie Gallery Debi Jacobson (Director), Los Angeles, California.
