Charles Strong

Charles Ralph Strong was born in Greeley, Colorado in 1938. Strong initially trained at the Coronado School of Fine Arts in San Diego, California in the late 1950s, and received a master of fine art degree from the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI) in 1963, where he studied with Elmer Bischoff, Frank Lobdell, and Richard Diebenkorn. While at SFAI he attended the Skowhegan School of Art in Maine, and received a Fulbright Scholarship to study in the United Kingdom. He also met Clyfford Still during this time, who had been a visiting instructor at the institute in the 1940s, and had a profound impact on Bay Area abstraction. Strong gravitated towards Still’s palette during his early years as an artist, and went on to produce an impressive body of abstract expressionist works.

Strong’s influence as a post-war painter spanned two decades as he participated in exhibitions at the Richmond Art Center, the University of California Berkeley Art Museum, and University of California, Santa Cruz, the San Jose Art Museum, Triton Museum of Art, and Laguna Beach Museum of Art from 1969 until 1989. He received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1982. In 1989 he moved to Taos, New Mexico, where he was active until his death in 2013. In Taos, he worked in painting, sculpture, and ceramics.

Strong’s works are in the collections of the New Mexico Museum of Art, Oakland Museum of California, and the San Francisco Art Institute.