Chuck Staley Gallery

Chuck Staley has always been an artist of one type or another. When he wasn’t writing screenplays or working behind the camera directing the movie “Cracking Up” with actors Fred Willard and Harry Shearer, or directing music videos with Emmylou Harris, Willie Nelson and Jerry Lee Lewis, he was working in films and TV shows with such stars as James Spader, Gary Busey, Diane Lane, James Woods, and Alan Rickman. Then there were the six years he spent with CBS, directing segments for Sixty Minutes and the CBS Evening News while writing a novel.

And when Chuck isn’t involved with show business, he’s taking photographs and converting them into artwork in Marina del Rey, California, sitting before several state-of-the-art computers in his penthouse studio/gallery, using processes that demand great technical sophistication as well as aesthetic vision. Choosing from millions of possible colors, Staley literally “paints with pixels” to create the unusual hand-crafted artwork for which he is becoming known.

"There have been many fine artists over the years with the ability to pick up a paintbrush and create a work of art that looks like a photograph. Chuck Staley, on the other hand, takes a photograph and, with many involved steps, turns it into art that resembles a painting. Other artists call his work painterly."

Staley says, “Somewhere along the way I quit caring about whether the pictures I take accurately depict a person or object; I want to show my impressions of the people, places or things and evoke the emotions of the viewers. "

Reviewing one of Chuck’s recent shows, The Sherman Oaks Sun states: “The artist’s color-soaked, impressionistic photographs seethe with process-induced grains that resemble a stipple effect.

“Ghost Train, a rich-hued negative image, finds an old German locomotive glowing eerily against a post-war night. French Shepherd takes on a starlit quality as a man and dog stare out at an inky sky. Three days after snapping the shot, Staley recalls, a group of shepherds told him his subject had passed away – but years later, the man and dog live on in a pastel haze of immortal light.”

Art Slide Show

Panorama