Charles Wildbank, an artist from Long Island’s East End, will be the Third Friday speaker on Friday, June 21 from 6 – 8 PM at the Reboli Center for Art and History in Stony Brook.  Mr. Wildbank creates large striking canvases that result in a profoundly sensual experience. Born deaf, Mr. Wildbank was inclined towards art from an early age and has long trained his eye to examine objects in such a way that bring his paintings to a certain hyper life-like reality.  His presentation, Sight Over Sound, will explain his life influences on his art.

For many years, Mr. Wildbank delved into photorealism, a technique he studied in the early 1970’s while a student at Pratt Institute.   He became famous for his painting of the famed Cartier diamond and life-like portraits of David Hockney and the late Luciano Pavarotti. After reaching a threshold with straight realism, he began to dive into more of an inner world, expressing himself on the canvas with an infusion of emotion and energy.  He has stated that he paints with motion and emotion. “I love nature and the cosmos. You have to have some flamboyancy in order to have more liveliness in the work, to bring together all the elements,” he said in an interview with Erin Schultz of the North Fork Patch. In his artist statement, Wildbank states that he achieves this within his studio by “tango-ing with the opticals of photographic images that match that vision for their eventual union of pixels and paint.  Such is why I paint large, I mean LARGE, as it becomes an open stage for me to do my dance in colors and forms in their enhanced realism.”

Mr. Wildbank is listed with some of his works in Deaf Artists in America: Colonial to Contemporary, a book by Deborah Sonnenstrahl.