About Charles

Charles Parness is an American contemporary painter and art educator dedicated to self-portraiture. Born in Staten Island, NY in 1945, he studied Fine Art at Parsons School of Design and Art Education from New York University. In 1966, he received his MFA from the Pratt Institute. Since 1976, Parness has painted exclusively self-portraits, an extreme variation on a theme that has allowed him to explore and chart his path through the world.

Grounded in absurdity, Parness’s self-portraits fall into two categories. The first is an ongoing series of small 20x20 oils and pastels, and the second is a series of large narrative paintings. In the small canvases, Parness portrays himself with an endless assortment of props and disguises. He wears an old aviator's cap around toy planes, guises behind a pig mask in the tropics, and acts out the monkey’s roles of “hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil.” Though small, these works are not studies. Instead, each one is a finished painting inspired by the zany comedians of his childhood.

Starting in 1983, Parness began his investigation into situational and allegorical paintings on larger canvases. The artist is seen beside inflatable dinosaurs, monsters, and robots, completing impossible tasks. He copies himself, with clones stumbling down the stairs surrounded by falling teacups or his face as the center of every sunflower in a field of sunflowers. These often comedic images pass between representations of his mirrored and often disguised likeness to depictions of strange events. Often, these allegories are transliterations of real events. Fantasies are triggered by an assortment of real-life situations, formal maneuvers, and responses to the past.

When considered en masse, Parness has written an autobiography of his life in paint. As described by curator Donald Kuspit, “Parness is a master of what might be called populist expressionism – expressionism with an abstract sensibility, but existing in the service of humanity at large as well as the great ego  of the artist. Indeed…Parness is an emotional primitive who uses art to represent a self that is still something of a sacred mystery, if also all too human.”

Parness and his wife, fellow visual artist Janet Fish, now reside in Middleton Springs, VT.