Rising Stars: Meet Charles Wildbank of The Hamptons

Today we’d like to introduce you to Charles Wildbank.

Hi Charles, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today?
Since birth, life for me has been a dance, a partner to spin stories with. My eyes would carress everything including people and nature and distill all into a work of art. Some would call it capturing, i would dramatise it and offer such in presentation.

As a preteen, I recognized my purpose, to share my visual song among others. My art would resonate off the walls and speak to the people. However, along this path, there were challenges and some struggles to have been met

This all started when i was very young. Unable to speak then due to sensory deprivation from deafness, my crayons helped me speak my mind in full color. It only got richer over the years. I would reflect my love for life and everything contained within. The resulting demand for my art ever since only made it sustainable to this day. My art would invite people into my world where words would fail.

If all this was not enough, my art grew larger in size, larger than life. It is how I express my inner joy.

Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
Because I took boldly the self-taught route, it would pose challenges at every turn. It was very basic survival, all I knew and guessed from locating art materials to deciding what I wished to project. To test the waters, I would participate in the art fairs around the country starting with my home base in eastern Long Island, particularly in the Hamptons which was close by. As the art sales improved after many my confidence and sense of self worth mirrored those results. In time I find myself covering more territory as far west as California and Colorado, or south as Florida with new art commissions.

Unsure which themes to work with, I felt lucky when my first painting, a floral, sold in New York City in the windows of the shops along Fifth Avenue. More challenging was the inability to use the phone, so instead of giving up, I paid anyone on the spot to relay phone messages.

Communication in the art world posed this challenge. Often I was in the dark on many aspects of the competitive art world. Little by little as the years advances in great communication technology helped fill this deaf void. The TTY relay became replaced by a fax machine, followed by more compact digital devices, the iphone, the ipad, laptops, computers, closed captioning and more recently, a set of cochlear implants.

Lastly, there remains this unspoken challenge or riddle as I would face: will this art sell and what would it take to get there? Like finding a home for your litter of puppies. Viral or bust? My own personal conclusion is to not give up and to amplify what I love most.

Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
I specialize in large canvases and one highlight has been a commission to paint 20 foot high twin murals on canvas for the oceanliner Queen Mary 2.

The challenge was not just their size but that the shipbuilding architects required the canvas surface be flameproof per stringent codes. For this, I researched online and found a similar material to canvas called Trevira from Nurnberg, Germany. I ordered ten foot wide roll of 40 feet of this material. As a result I painted coastal scenes of England and America. The murals comtinue to sail to this day.

I paint somewhere in between in the colorful realism figurative style and lately in a more surreal style with that continued realism edge. My collection sizes now range from 3 feet to 12 feet.

We love surprises, fun facts and unexpected stories. Is there something you can share that might surprise us?
When I turned 70, I embarked upon a visionary quest and participated in psychedelics through plant medicine ceremonies in Peru. This has opened me up to newer worlds I never knew I had within. It was a moving world of colorful realms filled with awe and astonishment. This in turn perhaps influenced my recent works such as Emergence and Moon Dance.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://wildbank.com/
• Instagram: @charleswildbank
• Facebook: Charles Wildbank