Chuck Connelly Interview

For many years Connelly pursued a body of work exploring narrative, and was devoted to a kind of storytelling from myth, history, memory, and make-believe. Yet over time Connelly had also begun to paint from life. Rather than measured observations and careful depictions of his subjects, Connelly's life paintings result from a swift and dynamic interaction of eye and hand, and he has made many such paintings in the last three years. There are other types of paintings also, as Connelly continues to make narrative paintings, to weave words into pictures and even to flirt with abstraction. And not surprisingly, there are a few pictures painted after September 11 in which he expresses a strongly empathetic identification with the event and its aftermath. Plane crashes, train wrecks and other disaster paintings have always been a part of Connelly's repertoire, even as fires, floods, beasts and spirits are part of the vocabulary of fables, fairy tales, and history stories which have played such an important role in his work.