Chuck Chamberlain

When he was about 30 years old, Chuck Chamberlain’s sister offered him a free “Famous Artist’s” painting course. As an employee, she decided that rather than take the course herself, she’d pass it along to her brother.

As a young man, he was more interested in athletics and social pursuits. With no art background, Chuck found this very challenging. But after just four lessons, he was hooked. He traveled the rural back roads of central New Hampshire: fishing, hunting, and photographing landscapes, barns, covered bridges. He decided researching and trying to recapture these images motivated him more than the course assignments. He challenged art just as he did athletics: observation, research, fundamentals, and practice.

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To learn more about Chuck, his work, and upcoming events, we encourage you to visit his website.

As he re-learned how to see, he noticed the multitude of colors in the sky, a tree, or a stone wall. He observed the light direction and its effects, what was interesting and what was not, and what to eliminate or add. He evaluated, and he critiqued.

Originally from southern Connecticut, Chamberlain graduated from UConn in 1960, and had a long career as a physical education teacher and doing social work. Early in his painting career, Chamberlain experimented with watercolors and oils, but has since settled on acrylic on Masonite board as his favorite medium.

He creates with a fanatical attention to detail and authenticity, which he calls “getting the small brushes out.” The tiniest branches on a line of trees in a painting he calls “Moonstruck” and the details in a large landscape of Steelhead Falls demand just as much attention as the folds in a sheer tablecloth beneath weathered ballet toe shoes in a still life called “Few Dances Remain.”

During the summers of his teaching career, Chamberlain sold his art to wealthy vacationers in his affluent New England town, so that when he was 55, he retired from teaching and moved to Arizona, where he kept on painting, and kept on doing his research into seeing. He now lives in Bend, where he continues his artistic journey.