Charles Dwyer
Born in 1961 in West Bend, WI, Charles Dwyer graduated Valedictorian from the Milwaukee School of Art & Design in 1984. He enjoyed early recognition when the West end Art Museum exhibited his work 1985. This success led to further exposure and exploration. Soon his creative passion led him to Europe where he was influenced by Egon Schiele, an Austrian painter and a teacher of Gustave Klimt, and by Sonia Delaunay, a French painter whose palette affects art and design to this day. Other influences from this journey included Alexei Jawlensky, a German expressionist from the Der Blaue Reiter group (including Kandinsky, Franz Marc, and August Macke) and Matisse. It was during this trip that Dwyer developed his fascination for the Expressionist movement, the decoratis. Typically, to arrive at his finished works, Dwyer positions his model within a complete tableau, which includes costume design; make up, backdrops and props. He then captures the image using a camera with a 6” x 7” or 4” x 5” frame . This is the starting point for an individual & idiosyncratic exploration of the image in which color, pattern, and art historical and pop culture references are combined with Dwyer’s exquisite drawing skills. In the end, Dwyer’s women are beautiful, enigmatic, colorful, reflective, inviting, dazzling, but always just beorical locations, from a dome in the Cathedral of Notre Dame, Indiana to the murals of the Waldorf Astoria, NYC. In a symbiotic relationship, Dwyer has taken the skills learned from this experience and applied them to what has been his signature portraiture work.