[1] Grown up in a poor neighborhood, Charaf pioneered an expressionistic style of painting, covering a range of themes including contemporary political issues, social struggles of his native Baalbek and folk art and poetry.
[2] Charaf appeared as a visionary and pessimistic artist when, in the early 1960s, he depicted lugubrious landscapes, often outfitted by wires and dead trees.
[3] He always showed social and political involvement in his art, so that when the Lebanese Civil War broke up, he produced posters devoted to the National Resistance.
[5] In the years following the beginning of the war, Charaf will drift into an opposite direction, working with gold leaf on icons inspired by Byzantine and Oriental religious mosaics and paintings.
Inspired by oral history and tradition and folklore, he created a series of paintings depicting the epics of the Arab poet and hero Antar and his cousin, Abla, with whom he fell in love and married her.