Charles Lucas/Ubiquitous Serpentine

The Introduction to Ubiquitous Serpentine:


Nature’s Underworld

Born in 1953, Charles Lucas grew up in a middle-class family in Chicago, Illinois, where he developed an early interest in art. Bored by the rigidity of his formal education, he left high school before graduating and earned a GED. As a teen, he grasped the significant social change sweeping the U.S. in the late sixties, which led him to work for a variety of social causes in Chicago’s impoverished neighborhoods.

After stops in several other major U.S. cities, where he focused on spiritual work, Lucas arrived in Portland in 1977. He began working construction and remodeling jobs to pay the rent. Simultaneously, he mastered the demanding crafts of tile design and installation.

Introduced to Charles that same year, I learned to appreciate the artist’s expertise in all things ceramic—particularly his ability as a clay sculptor.

Recently, painting rather than sculpting has become Lucas’s focus. The thirty-five paintings on ceramic in Ubiquitous Serpentine have a prepossessing beauty that shimmers and pulses. Disdaining straight lines in his compositions, Lucas’s poetically stated ambition is to “enhance the serpentine,” by which he explains, “are those profound explications of the mystery inherent in nature.”

Lucas’s bold, color-laden brush strokes conjure mysterious, magical gardens. Expressively, almost impetuously drawn, the paintings reveal a cellular essence invisible to the naked eye. These are paintings to be felt as much as viewed, as one is drawn into Lucas’s vision of nature. Designed to inspire imaginations more than to present any cognitive interpretation, they confront us by charm and beguilement, creating a sense of the quixotic and, sometimes, of the foreboding.

Clashes of color and texture form a chaotic elegance balanced by a pronounced lushness of depth. Splashed, unexpected light counterbalances the considered formalism in each painting. To peer at them closely is to be taken into nature’s underworld, submerged in the possibility of what lies below the surface.

The strong spiritual sensibility the artist has embraced his entire life resonates throughout these works.

Round Bend Press is pleased to showcase them and celebrate this new direction in Charles Lucas’s art.


And I'm just as pleased to present this video.


TS