courtesy Abel Contemporary Gallery
Oil painting of a deer running through pine trees chased by a wolf.
"Deer vs. Wolf II" captures a moment without an obvious resolution.
Simplified, brightly colored landscapes are populated with often stunned-looking people and animals, often deer. Something is happening here, but it’s not obvious what. The symbolic paintings of Wisconsin artist Charles Munch tug at the viewer’s subconscious, but defy easy explication.
Both animals and landforms — hills, trees, bodies of water, even fire — are outlined, suggesting styles as disparate as pop art and Australian Aboriginal painting. The title of Munch’s upcoming exhibit at Stoughton’s Abel Contemporary Gallery, “Miracles and Mysteries,” sums up his work’s vaguely unsettling vibe nicely.
“One of the reasons I make them is that they allow me to deal with issues I can’t put into words. I sometimes discover answers through them,” he says.
Munch’s paintings were the subject of a major retrospective at the Museum of Wisconsin Art in 2019; it was followed by another show, “Parallel Worlds,” at the Tory Folliard Gallery in Milwaukee in spring 2021. “Miracles and Mysteries” will feature about 35 paintings, 18 of them new works, says Munch, surrounded in mid-August by many of these new paintings, still in his studio on the second floor of his home in the Driftless.
The Wikipedia entry for Munch says he lives on “a remote hilltop near Lone Rock,” but it’s less than an hour from Madison’s west side and the road to his place is dotted with farms; he even shares part of his driveway with a neighbor. That said, it’s a long drive to his house from the road. When asked how he plows it in the winter, Munch, 77, says he does the whole length of it himself with a snowblower, though he concedes he might not be able to handle that task for too many more winters.
It’s a down-to-earth attitude typical of his modest, can-do approach. His studio has a blind with a pulley system he designed himself that he uses to adjust the light that streams in from its high south-facing windows. On a table there’s a pile of pieces of aluminum foil that Munch has molded into paint palettes, with his mixed colors matching specific paintings, each in a separate indent. That comes in handy for touch-ups or other fixes — “if I can remember which goes with which painting.”
Wall space is taken up with the paintings that are headed to Abel; the rest of the studio houses an archive of his older works filed away neatly in a vertical storage area. Near the windows, cloves of garlic from his garden rest on the floor to dry. Elsewhere there are piles of CDs, tubes of oil paint, brushes, an old light fixture, sticks (from trees), crayons, watercolors, and a set of antlers.
This show highlights more recent works including several created during, and in response to, the pandemic, including “Expulsion from Hell,” which was painted fairly early in the shutdown. The imagery plays off a standard motif in Renaissance painting, the expulsion from Eden. A man, a woman, and a deer standing erect face the viewer, a wall of flame behind them. “The idea is they’re happy to be expelled and are emerging into a new world, changed,” says Munch.
Another work from the pandemic period is called “Hope.” It’s less clear to him what this one is about, except he was “feeling hopeful” when he was working on it. A man and a woman embrace outside of a house.“The clouds are still heavy, though,” he observes. “It’s not over.”
Munch is sometimes grouped with such upper Midwest artists as Tom Uttech, Randall Berndt, Barry Carlsen and John Miller, as a kind of “northern mysticism” school of painting, but it is really nothing so formal and he is probably the least realist of the group. “It’s not just northern, it’s a certain attitude toward landscape,” Munch suggests.
Munch starts a work with a sketch done in good old Crayola crayons and watercolor, with the crayon outlining the objects and the watercolors helping him “think about color.” For his real work he paints in oils on unstretched canvas that he tacks to the wall. “That way I can push against the wall,” he says. “I like the resistance.” He starts with glazes, very thin paint, in large areas. Details and the outlining is added later with a brush. The result is flat and smooth; the viewer can barely perceive a brushstroke. He’s looking for “clarity and freshness, as if I did it all at once, although I didn’t.”
He tends to paint the same tableau several times, as with a new painting headed for the Abel show called “Deer versus Wolf,” which depicts a deer being chased through a forest by a wolf. “Freezing a moment,” he says, “that’s how you create suspense.” Considering the scene, he says “It’s not clear the deer will escape. I don’t want the picture to tell that story. I intentionally create the mystery.”
He starts with a small painting, then recreates much the same image again on a larger canvas. This one he painted yet again, on an even larger canvas that’s closer to square than rectangular. Each depicts the same action but ends up with subtle differences in feeling or mood. “I try it until I’m satisfied,” he says. “With each enlargement I have a chance to improve. I get a lot of satisfaction out of making the painting more like what I envisioned.”
Other pieces, like his “Mammal Polyptych” are not clear stories but intended for meditation. “I wanted the human figures and the mammals to be clearly confronting the viewer,” he says of the four-panel work, which depicts a man, a bear, and a woman and a deer under a moonlit sky — all standing erect except for the woman, who is sitting. He compares it to altarpieces in Italy from the Renaissance, “but made in the present for Wisconsin.”
There has long been a sense of looming ecological catastrophe in Munch’s work. He’s been termed an environmentalist — “and I mean, I am, but I never thought of that as being part of the paintings,” he says. He acknowledges there’s a “grimness” about what’s happening that is only getting worse, though he’s not sure it filters into his work. “It’s not something new for me to think about,” he says. “Maybe there was a time I was more angry. Maybe I’ve mellowed.”
Surveying his work on the studio walls, Munch sums it up fairly optimistically. “The beauty of nature, growth, animals — everything that happens seems miraculous to me.”
“Miracles and Mysteries” opens at the Abel Contemporary Gallery in Stoughton Sept. 16, with a reception from 5-8 p.m. Munch will give an artist talk Oct. 1 at 2 p.m. The show runs through Nov. 6.
