Tulip Paintings

Every six and seven-year-old child recognizes the style. The genus "tulipa" and the genius of children are the inspiration for these tulips with lots of spots and dots. Run, ramble and tiptoe among Charles Dunbar's tulips. (Tulip Variation #18, 40" x 30", acrylic on polyester canvas)

Women Paintings

Charles Dunbar paints these personality types in the same spirit that several Nineteenth Century Japanese artists depicted women of the "floating world." He takes a beautiful feature - an eye, a mouth, a nose, an ear - and paints it as if it were a collaged photographic fragment on the painting. Outrageous jewelry completes the mask of beauty. (Delilah, 40" x 30", acrylic on polyester canvas)

Machine Paintings

Charles Dunbar enlarges snippets of auto repair manual engine and mechanical illustrations stipping them of their context. Repeating the images gives them an altogether new meaning. They work like sequential film frames or different states of the same thing or mandalas or visual sentences. (00990, 22" x 22", acrylic on polyester canvas)

Landscape Paintings

The desert in New Mexico, USA, makes a strong impression - mountains, dry, prickly, windy, sixty mile vistas. spectacular sunsets, dramatic clouds, faded colors, hot sun, strange plants. In these paintings Charles Dunbar records his reaction to the desert. He wants to show the desert in ways different from the exhaustive and exhausted landscape imagery commonly seen in "Southwest" art. (Desert Rocks Roast in the Sun, 50" x 40", acrylic on polyster)

Joint Work With Edna Casman

In 2005 Edna Casman [http://casmanpaintings.com], an artist friend, suggested we try working together on the same image. Over the following months one joint effort lead to another. Finally, we armed ourselves with vine charcoal, black pastel and paper tacked to the wall. The process was quick and direct. We have used charcoal pencil, pastel, aluminum powder and a variety of erasers. We are over 150 drawings into this collaboration.

New Mexico Rail Runner Commission

In 2005 Charles Dunbar won the commission from the New Mexico Mid Region Council of Governments to create fifty two designs to be etched on the glass wind breaks at the first nine Rail Runner passenger platforms. He worked with representatives from each of the neighborhoods, towns, cities and pueblos where a station was to be located to create imagery representative of each community. Etchmaster Professional Glass Consultants sandblasted the images onto the tempered glass.

Whirligigs

In the fall 2006, I took a break from painting and thought I would try making whirligigs. It is my aim here to stay firmly in the uniquely American folk art whirligig tradition, the tradition of the wind toy whimsy. I do not intend these wind driven toys as “kinetic art.” I fashion the original designs from brass rods, tubes, industrial bearings, aluminum sheet, African mahogany, and paint them with sign paint. They turn in the lightest breeze, and I guarantee that they will cause a smile to spread over your face.