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Charles Louis Blank
Charles Louis Blank (born 1948, Hammond, Louisiana), who has also exhibited as Charles Blank and C. Louis Blank, is an American painter whose work moves between figures, landscapes and abstraction.
Blank came to attention in New Orleans at the start of the 1980s, showing at the Contemporary Arts Center and with Galerie Jules LaForgue, and critics grouped him with the Visionary Imagists, a circle of southern Louisiana artists brought together by the artist and dealer George Febres. Writers responded to the strangeness and drama of his figures; in 1989 the critic Roger Green called him “a visionary with a vengeance.”
From the mid-1990s he largely stepped back from public view while continuing to paint. Many of his later paintings take as their subject the Ox Field behind the artist’s house; others move into pure abstraction, in an expressionist palette and thickly layered paint. In April 2024 he presented Ascension, his first solo exhibition in decades, at EVEY Fine Art in New York.
Blank pierces, twists and withers the human form. High-key colors and ominous shadows heighten the drama of figures caught up in a psychic maelstrom.
Mary Warner Marien, Los Angeles Times, August 4, 1990
The paintings
This site presents his paintings in four galleries. Each work carries its own catalogue number.
- Landscapes — many painted at the Ox Field behind the artist’s house
- Abstractions — paintings that move into pure abstraction
- Figures & Portraits
- Wild / Dystopian Landscapes
About the artist
Featured Works
Studio photographs of works no. 1–273 © Forever Studios, Boca Raton.