Stories are being told here: about art, about history, about identity. 

There is a desire to comment on contemporary events, to protest and rage at today’s news, but also to avoid making work that is instantly yesterday’s fading headline. Use of the confirmedly historical with contemporary themes allows ripples of time to flow both ways. To participate in the exquisite corpse of the world narrative, disparate themes and images are merged. In a world of endless information, how can we find the essential?

Charles Browning makes paintings about personal dichotomies of female and male, mind and body, history and the present, life and death. Styles are chosen for each project as needed. Each piece is a commentary on a topic, but also a self-portrait embodying it. There are personal references to journey and struggle, art history, separation, isolation, and symbolic decapitation - all speaking to the artists’ path. The reoccurring frontiersman is a proxy for the artist – moving forward, exploring – but also, as the white male in America’s fraught history, consuming and destroying. Lastly, a sense of humor and of the surreal link the work together and offer entry. They ask for a bond of strangeness and estrangement: of the impossibility of perfect resolution and the difficulty of being human.

Charles Browning’s work has been shown in group and solo shows nationally. He teaches painting and drawing at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia.

Everything in nature is lyrical in its ideal essence, tragic in its fate, and comic in its existence.   - George Santayana