"SUMMER AT THE JERSEY SHORE"    2007

Charlie Dale
Contemporary Abstract Art

      From Navy Pilot to International Diplomat to Entrenpeneur and Businessman to Artist ... it has been quite a ride!
 
      I began my passion for art while living through the 1990s in Brussels, Belgium with its wonderful Musees des Beux-Arts and a stones throw from Reuben's home in Antwerp.  What an opportunity it was to study the history of art "up close and personal" in the legendary museums across the continent.  And I did.  From Paris to Madrid to Amsterdam and Florence, I took in the Old Masters and emerging artists, who are just beginning to make their mark, and everybody in between.

      And the biggest surprise of all -- the collapse of communism and the opening of the "East" and with it access, now unbridled, to the great collections and contemporary artists in Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union.  What good luck and good fortune it was to be in Europe during these historic times.  

      In 2001, I returned to the United States and moved into a historic home in Alexandria in the shadows of The Torpedo Factory and its Art League.  It was a fortuitous move that opened a new chapter in my personal and business life and, quite unwittingly, began my transition from admirer and collector of art to maker of art.  

      Back in America I also discovered the abstract expressionists and color field painters who put America on the world's art stage in the mid-1900s.  They are the inspiration behind much of my work today.

      I am a self-taught artist.  I am inspired by my life experiences, and the freedom that abstraction allows to interpret them in infinite ways, bounded only by ones imagination.   I revel in the creative process.  I have been unbelievably blessed and lucky.  I love life and I hope it shows in my art.