Finally, he dunks a large paintbrush in the white brew and begins a long vertical stroke from the top corner of his first of two wooden panels. Together the panels form an eight- by seven-foot foundation for his new painting. Charlie works on it in the sparse downstairs guestroom of his quaint home nestled between the woods and the sea. Cars occasionally travel down the nearby road to a small Maine fishing village called Port Clyde.
“I’ve never attempted anything this big. Big in every sense of the word. I’m a lunatic,” says Charlie as he pauses to remove his rimmed hat and tuck his shirt into snug Wranglers. His thinning white hair matches his trimmed goatee. His eyes are alert, but one eye wanders.
At 51, Charlie has finally established himself as a professional artist. He’s been painting since childhood, but his work didn’t appear regularly in local and New York galleries until the past few years. Though he’s completed thousands of paintings and sold more than 450 of them, he’s now priming the panels for what he considers his epic work.
He’s beginning the painting of his earliest, most poignant memory. He was three and sitting on a tricycle when a brilliantly lit, blond angel appeared before him. Though he says her appearance that day has “informed him all his life,” he lost sight of her and what he considers his true, pure self when he started drinking heavily as a young teen. So he put off painting his angel until he could see clearly.
After sharing his first Pabst Blue Ribbon with his Uncle Walt at about 14, Charlie developed a crippling addiction. He lists many reasons for drinking — he lived in a town notorious for fishing and drinking, he had awful self-esteem and he spent most of his time alone. By his mid-40s, he was spending around $– a week on cheap beer. “I was drinking umpteen 16-ounce Pabsts along with all kinds of wine and vodka and anything in my fridge or a friend’s fridge each day,” he says. Meanwhile his art career was taking off.
Charlie’s breakthrough moment came in 2003. Sally McVane booked him a show in her local gallery during Port Clyde’s busy summer season, when the normally quiet village bustles with tourists and artists passing through to Maine’s art colony, Monhegan Island. Charlie’s hometown finally saw his art hanging in a gallery instead of stacked in his red Chevy. After the show, Dona Bergen offered to exhibit his art full-time in her nearby gallery, and in January 2006 Charlie entered his first New York exhibition, selling six pieces at the Outsider Art Fair.
His art was thriving while his personal life was plummeting. “I was overweight, probably gonna blow a heart valve, never mind my career,” says Charlie. “I just remember being absolutely petrified, and then a little while later reaching for the remnants of last night’s beer and wine. I was deeply ashamed of myself. Deeply ashamed.”
Charlie was terrified because he had tried to quit drinking countless times but never succeeded. These earlier efforts were “miserable attempts followed by complete failures and feeling even more worthless,” he says. “I didn’t think after a lifetime of drinking I had the faculty, resources, let alone the courage to overcome the inertia, to get unhooked. Fortunately for me, I underestimated my higher power contacting my angel to turn it around.”
Nineteen months ago, Charlie says he woke up on the floor, having gone to bed drunk the night before, and felt his angel tapping his forehead. “Three times,” he remembers, “tap, tap, tap. And I knew it was over, knew I had to quit.” He took his last drink the following evening; then began his detox with a journal as his only counsel. Daily he recorded streams of swears and pleas.
Day 9: I want to go into a f---ing coma.
Day 15: Deep, deep anger. Mind won’t quit running old tapes.
Day 17: Wanted drink all day. Can’t stop sweating.
Day 34: F---ing depressed.
Day 38: Still pang for alcohol. Won’t go back. Won’t go back. I’ve come too far.
Day 51: First full night of sleep.
On day 111, he almost slipped after visiting his most recent ex-girlfriend. He asked her about getting back together, she asked him to leave and he bought a six-pack. On his way to Marshall Point Lighthouse, the bottles spoke to him seductively, he says. “I was freaking out.” He still cringes as he remembers the smell of the alcohol pouring into the sea.
Now he is sober — or “clear” as Charlie calls it — and painting with the hope of moving on. Finally he can paint his angel.
With careful, graceful strokes he makes his way across the panels, top to bottom, left to right. “I’ve been preparing myself for a very long time and most recently getting sober to undertake this painting. I used to think it’d be my last and I’d croak, lug me off to the crematorium. But, no, it finishes up a chapter.” Charlie reaches his large hand up to rub a patch of dried gesso. He feels for texture as his mind spins. “That chapter of my life will be placed in paint and put out there, outside of me,” he says. “The end of the person that I used to be.”
All of his art brings him healing, explains Charlie. With bright reds, yellows, blues, greens, he paints and repaints his many lost loves, the fish shack that he grew up in and the town that shunned him for being a bastard child. Scenes of “old” Port Clyde spill across canvases and pieces of driftwood in a unique combination of folk art and graffiti that he’s spent a lifetime developing. Charlie’s career continues to escalate — he returned to New York in January for his one-man show In the Spirit Room and sold a painting for $28,000 last August — but to paint the past he must surround himself with old memories.
A drop of gesso falls from his brush and plops on the scuffed wood floor. Charlie ignores the spill. He’s renovating the spare room anyway, since guests don’t sleep over anymore. Though his third marriage ended 10 years ago, Charlie rarely had an empty house before he quit drinking. But his longtime friends don’t visit now that his parties have stopped.
So he cranks his small stereo and paints.
“Outside of me,” repeats Charlie. “It’s a rebirth. It’s bringing things back around full circle. And I can move on.”