After high school, Charles DuBack volunteered with the U.S.Navy from 1944 to 1946, during World War II, where he served in the Amphibious Force through 3 invasions in the Pacific Theatre.
He attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine for five summers beginning in 1950, where he met fellow artists and friends Bernard “Blackie” Langlais, Lois Dodd and Alex Katz, as well as Daphne Mumford (b.
DuBack ultimately left New York City in 1990 to work in his home/studio in Tenants Harbor, on the Saint George River, until his death on October 22, 2015, at the age of 89.
He asserted throughout his career that he was a Realist, as “All of my work comes directly from nature.”[5] Many of DuBack's early paintings were large-scale landscapes and figurative, group portraits of family or friends.
For example, Happy New Year, 1961, in the permanent collection of Colby College,* features Bernard and Helen Langlais, John Grillo, Sasson and Shirley Soffer, Daphne Mumford, and DuBack himself.
These appositional perspectives produce an uneasy but successful marriage: the voices — violent, soft, ironic, transcendent — and always vibrantly and uniquely human.”[6] His final works were notational abstractions of nature — many imbued with the colors of the flora of the gulf coast of Florida, where he spent some winter months — bright, short slashes of color on large canvases.