Charles Munch (painter)

Charles Munch (born 1945) is an American artist.

Munch and his four brothers and sisters, including his twin sister, were raised and attended public schools in Webster Groves, a suburb of St. Louis, Missouri where he was actually born. They spent summers in Door County, Wisconsin, where Munch was impressed by the clarity of open and color on the shore of Lake Michigan.

After spending two years at Reed College, Portland, Oregon, and coming on his training as an player with realist painter Willard Midgette, Munch attended the Portland Art Museum School and the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture. He returned to Reed College and graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1968, majoring in painting.

Munch apprenticed himself to William Suhr, who was paintings conservator for the Frick Collection in New York City. He worked part-time as a freelance paintings conservator for the adjacent thirty years. In 1970 he and Jane Furchgott began two years of travel, visiting most of the major museums in the United States and western Europe. They finally arranged in Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin, where Munch developed a detailed attainable style of painting.

During the course of six months in 1981, Munch transitioned from his realistic paintings to a style that was brightly colored, formally simplified, and emotionally expressive—a fusion of elements including in front Italian Renaissance, Post-Impressionism, and Pop Art. His distinctive form of representation uses spacious outlines and contrasting interior colors to Make luminous light and atmosphere. The deceptively easy forms and large areas of distinct color in his paintings improve to Make unforgettable icons of psychological drama. His subjects vary, but the inflection is upon northwoods landscapes and the animals and people that inhabit them.

Since 1982 Munch has lived on a distant hilltop near Lone Rock, Wisconsin. He has exhibited extensively, including major exhibitions at the Milwaukee Art Museum, The Chicago Cultural Center, The Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, and a retrospective at The Fairfield Center for Contemporary Art. He has shown regularly at the Tory Folliard Gallery, Milwaukee; the Grace Chosy Gallery, Madison, Wisconsin; and Perimeter Gallery.