Charlie
Callahan

The Painting Process

The Painting Process Charlie Callahan's process begins outdoors. The Point Reyes National Seashore lies right beside his home and studio in Bolinas, and he treats it as a working library: shells, tide pools, the lagoon, the creatures of the coast, even the bottle caps and litter that wash up on the beach. Much of what later appears in his studio starts as something found and studied at the water's edge. His central subject is the sea urchin. When an urchin dies and loses its spines, its shell reveals a radiating, circular pattern, and Charlie reads that pattern as a mandala. He paints it again and again, in many styles, letting it act as an icon of circular energy and as a reminder of a creature that has outlived earlier extinctions. Rather than holding to one technique, Charlie experiments. He works with pigment, polymers and resin, building up surfaces on wood and canvas, and he also paints directly onto walls. Some works use phosphorescent paint that only fully reveals itself under black light, so a piece can change completely when the room goes dark. Often a painting grows beyond its frame. For Returning Gold to the Sun at the Bolinas Museum, a six-foot urchin mandala was painted onto a curved wall sculpture made of individually cut, recycled redwood pieces. Seen in a darkened room, the glowing pattern seemed to float, and only as visitors walked around it did its shape and contour appear. Sound, video and found objects were set into the walls around it. He calls some of these spaces shrines: installations fitted into existing raw architecture or temporary rooms. Each piece, large or small, carries the same idea, a new mythology in which wild animals are honoured, and their survival depends on how we choose to live.