Charles Stokes (artist)

Charles Stokes (1944–2008) was a painter and sculptor and a prominent member of the last generation of artists identified with the Northwest School.

Revered as an energetic, charismatic, original, and meticulous artist and teacher, he spent his final two decades in self-imposed isolation from the art world producing works seen only by intimates.

He had an iconography that included the unseen things of the world.”[3] Stokes’ early work, Sheila Farr wrote, “put him at the forefront of the younger Northwest ‘mystics.’ You could make a case connecting his work to Leo Kenney, Mark Tobey and Morris Graves, but his style and imagery could be so fresh and imaginative that there was no mistaking it for anyone else's.”[3] Painter and ceramic sculptor Charles Krafft told critic Regina Hackett that (in Hackett’s words) “Stokes took Mark Tobey's system of abstraction, known as white writing, and made it three-dimensional.” Stokes, Krafft said, “was it, the last heir to the Northwest tradition.

Pease told Hackett, "He'd use long-fiber mulberry paper with English etching embossed into it, made stiff as canvas with arrowroot and a drop of formaldehyde.

Some of his later acrylic paintings took years to finish, labored over but full of light.”[2] After leaving Cornish, Stokes moved to New York City in the early 1990s, where he married Juilliard professor of dance and anatomy, Irene Dowd.

As explained by critic Regina Hackett, “In 1996, in a catalog accompanying a retrospective at the Port Angeles Fine Arts Center, he told director Jake Seniuk that he felt he needed to increase his ‘physical and ideological isolation from the art community’ in order to make his own contribution to the culture.

According to Farr, his son Ian, a Web designer in Los Angeles, “remembers his father as a meticulous technician, whose sly sense of humor flavored everything he did.”[3] "He never ran out of ideas," his wife, Irene Dowd, told Regina Hackett.

[4] A large group of Stokes’ early works were recently donated via his estate to the Museum of Northwest Art in La Conner, Washington.

According to the museum’s director, Greg Robinson, a full, cataloged retrospective exhibition of Charles Stokes’s work is planned.