Christopher Callahan, 56, from Narberth, Pennsylvania is a pensive man; economical with his words. Despite a soft spoken persona, Chris has a profound and settled presence. He talks very little of his work believing that good art should stand on its own, that a painter's experience is separate from that of the viewer's.
A self taught outsider artist, Callahan has been drawing and painting for nearly 35 years. Christopher attributes his art education to having worked at the Barnes Foundation in the mid 70s and late 90s. A Violette de Mazia protégé, Callahan is intimate with and conversant on one of the world's foremost private art collections. Apart from the inescapable influences of the Old Masters, Callahan believes that discovery, over time, has nurtured his results. Exacting remarkable freedom yet with a definitive direction, his work evidences diversity, painting form, figure and abstraction. Further subdivisions of his work include folk art, impressionism, structuralism and a hybrid form of cubism. Liking the formalism of Charles Demuth's "My Egypt," Chris began supplanting the rigidity of line with the softness of organics.
Consistent use of bicycles, cars, houses, suns and moons as subject matter, Callahan's establishes a metaphorical and iconical symbolization of our finite, limited, horizontal and grounded earthly existence. Callahan's Ascension, a retrospective body of work, is very much about our collective want for a vertical and heavenward experience. Blocks of bold color, shapes, scratches, heavy line and exaggerated form are pervasive.