Charles Rosenthal

Originally from New York City, I have been drawing and painting continuously since earliest childhood. At various times over the years, I have maintained a practice in New York City; London, UK; La Rochelle, France; Los Angeles, CA; Tucson, AZ and, most recently, in Santa Fe, NM. It has also been my privilege to have spent more than twenty years, albeit intermittently, working all over the world on a variety of wildlife conservation projects with several different species. My work appears in private and public collections on four continents.

My work concerns the relationship of humanity to nature and the way our understanding of that relationship mediates the way we move about and engage with the world around us. Whether it be in studies of plants and animals, vivisectionist depictions of the human body, or in portrayals of animal carnage in slaughterhouse surroundings, I try to draw attention to the living and dead matter, the material physicality—the flesh, blood, and bones—of the Earth. The natural subjects of my rumination are portrayed in a variety of ways. I paint them amid the ongoing natural motion of their lives, but also butchered and decapitated and decomposing back into nothingness. From this perspective, my art can be seen as a critical engagement with and rejection of humanity’s anthropocentric world view. Hundreds of paintings, prints, and diagrams expose the aporias of the nature/culture binary characteristic of anthropocentric thought, illustratively subsuming human activity in a broader assemblage of natural and materialist forces that always seem to be operating beyond the control of humanity. My work reveals that humans are not separate and apart from nature, but are conduits for the creative yet destructive forces of a primeval natural world that is forever thrown into motion. Pending ecological catastrophes and the manmade apocalypse rounding the bend of the planetary horizon foretell not only death and collapse but also the cyclical renewal of a planet moving through its sixth mass extinction. When examining nearly fifty years of output in the aggregate one begins to see that I have not been treating the natural world as a mere object of disinterested artistic or pastoral contemplation, but rather, to both question and make a statement about humanity’s fraught relationship to the Earth.

There have, of course, been many detours and one-offs. In recent years, unprecedented events have conspired to compel me to focus my point of view on more immediately topical issues regarding massive problems facing contemporary society, such as the polarity of the current sociopolitical landscape, the rise of Christian Fascism, and the ubiquitous manmade climate catastrophes that now occur almost daily across the globe.

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