Charlie Busler – Oils

Charlie Busler’s explorations of composition and color are a modern interpretation of the pointillist tradition of the French neo-impressionist Georges Seurat.

Whereas Seurat’s pointillism rendered the material world radiant with rare depth and volume, Charlie’s technique renders the material world transparent and the ethereal world apparent. The immaterial solidifies and matter evanesces. The boundary between the two is light hung on color, laid upon the canvas in gradient and contrast sets. It pulls us from subject-object duality into the perceptual category of pure energy, transiting from matter to spirit and back again.

“I paint from memories,” says Charlie. “With color and composition, I try to convey the inner feelings of a place or experience.”

Charlie’s oils invert the perceptual realms of experience. He aims at solid matter and “phases” it, unveiling the energetic principle or spirit that pervades all matter. Energy is light. Light gives us passage to both matter and spirit. It wicks in and around the luminous form of an amber-vermillion sun over water. It spreads a fiery-red course through a stand of pale-indigo trees, spare of leaves. It rises up ex nihilo in the shape of a blue, feminine personification observing her creation. It illumines the spherical and spiral geometries of an inner world, evoking memories of inter-planetary space. It shows a rarified sky, laced with cerise, red-violet, oranges and yellows, and ways through it to other realms.

The luminescing landscape-continuums that Charlie puts before us are myriad. We see the “macro” of the cosmos, the “micro” of the subatomic stratum, the “inner” of the personal, the “mythic” of personified spirit and the “geography” of the embodied earth-field. Whatever landscape the light illumines, it pulls us to liminal places, barely discernible, ephemeral in their boundaries; places where sky and earth, water and air, myth and history, spirit and form intersect.

Charlie, whose interest in art began as a child, has had eight one-man gallery-shows. He has been featured in numerous group, invitational and competitive exhibits. In 2001, the Meridian Council for the Arts honored him with the Artist Achievement Award, one of many awards he has received over the span of his career. In 2004, his “Past and Present Works” exhibit at the Meridian Museum of Art covered the work of a lifetime, including one piece painted at age seventeen and several pieces painted for the event itself.