Charles Stokes-Northwest Mystic Painter with a twist.

Stepping into the mystic circle...

    When I first enrolled at Cornish College of the Arts in the early '80s I had no idea who Charles Stokes was, but as soon as I stepped into his anatomy class I was utterly enthralled by his vitality and brilliance.  He was at once irreverent and pulsing with challenges.  I was one of the lucky ones that edged my way into the inner-sanctum of his magical world and his influence found a chord within my creative soul that resonates to this day.

 

 

    

Here's Charles sitting in front of a charcoal drawing which would be the basis of the paintings evolution using gouache to develop even more complex and illuminated lines.  The first time I saw one of his paintings (which was five or six feet long and painted on a piece of mulberry paper that Morris Graves had given him) it sparkled with so much luminosity that I turned around to see if someone had turned on a special light!

   

Charles lived outside of time...or so it seemed.  And as a result his artwork has yet to really be documented.  As far as I know it is sequestered in private collections and in a few museums, and I look forward to the day when someone takes on the process of really cataloging his work.  Much of what he was doing when I knew him he described as "archetechtonic"...like universal lay lines that take the viewer into never before seen realms.  And that is what Charles sought to do...to make the unseen visible...or more specifically to create something that hadn't been seen before.

 

Charles was an exacting task-master, always pushing his students to go beyond trite into the transcendent.  I've always remembered a quote he gave me:  "In ancient times elders wrought with greatest care each minute and unseen part, for the Gods see everywhere".  He spoke of the power of duality in the creative process and in one painting exercise he had us laminate an Oriental paper onto a European paper and to then choose two opposite colors (mine were green and red) and to then visually delve into the concept of opposites at once dueling and melding and ultimately creating dynamic introspection by way of starting with a zen-like gesture and then coming up with a painterly response.  Below is one of Charles versions of this exercise.

 

 

 

('Sudden Hysteria' by Charles Stokes)

 

When I threw myself into the Fine Art department at Cornish, I had no idea who the Northwest Mystics were...and I certainly wasn't aware of the kind of initiation I was receiving through Charles' mentoring.  I was enthralled and deeply challenged and more alive than I'd ever been.  I lived and breathed art.  It became my religion.  And Charles was without a doubt the reigning High Priest.  He challenged my assumptions relentlessly and if I spoke too much about myself he would break into an operatic "I me me I"!!!!  He was at once breaking me and opening me to a place of purity...a mindset that had no place for duality.  Sometimes I was downright afraid.  But Charles was kind, too, and a father to my creativity.

 

 

('Bay of Dreams Cascade')

 

Charles left Cornish in 1985 with my best friend at the time Millicent Cummings, a voraciously talented artist herself.  We had spent a great deal of time together as friends and creative cohorts often ending our evenings over champagne at the Pink Door.  They moved to San Francisco and I moved into Charles' old apartment above the Paramount Theater and tried to adjust to life without the equivalent of Henry & June electrifying my existence.  The heart and soul of my Cornish experience was gone and I soon followed suit going off to have my own adventures and eventually losing track of Charles.

 

Years later while stopping on Capitol Hill for a coffee I ran into an old art school friend Ferdous Ahmed  who told me he'd just been in New York.  I asked him if he'd looked up Charles.  And that's when I found out that Charles had died (http://www.seattlepi.com/ae/article/Charles-Stokes-1944-2008-Seattle-painter-never-1271124.php).  I had just gotten an address for him and was meaning to write, but it was too late.  I was compelled to contact his sons, Ian and Saul and found Saul on MySpace.  We wrote back and forth and it was comforting to see Charles' genius passed down to his children.

 

Then one night I had him in a dream.  We were standing in a pool of water (an element we both shared astrologically, he being a Pisces and me a Cancer)...we communed spiritually and lovingly and then his faced turned into that of a Tibetan dragon like a reminder of his teachings around duality and illusion and I woke up in a lucid state.  It was 3 a.m.  and the sound of his jazz piano playing filled the air and then dissipated.

 

I will continue to explore my own distillation of Charles' teachings.  The way of the mystic is well suited for painters...our necessary hours of solitude and striving for the ephemeral  made visible.  Although they say that Charles was the last of the Northwest Mystics, I would like to suggest that the tradition lives on and perhaps by virtue of their creative nature the new NW Mystics have yet to be discovered.

 

Note:  Charles Stokes Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Stokes