Charlie Hunter

2021, Brattleboro Museum, Brattleboro, VT

The collaborative exchange between artist and curator is likely to reveal unusual connections. The discoveries made in organizing Charlie Hunter: Semaphore extend beyond the paintings to ties both rooted and personal.

Charlie and I grew up with New England’s railroads in our blood. Charlie, raised in Milford, New Hampshire (three towns over from mine), recalls the local rail traffic on the Hillsboro branch of the Boston & Maine Railroad’s Fitchburg Division line, which ran past his father’s printing shop. More than a few times I tagged along with my father, a B&M railroad man, up front in the diesel engine on weekend runs along those very tracks. Though Charlie and I hadn’t yet met, the railroad brought the paths of our childhoods unwittingly close. Today, Charlie’s studio sits close to the rails in Bellows Falls, Vermont. We’re neighbors and colleagues, and the railroad continues to connect as it rattles through us.

A local artist and entrepreneur, Charlie is increasingly known for his time-stained pictures of America’s neglected industrial infrastructure, including its railroads—trains, tracks and bridges. The Brattleboro Museum & Art Center, which makes its home in the former Union Station built in 1915 (Amtrak continues to use the lower level for passenger service), is especially well-suited for this long-awaited focused presentation of Charlie Hunter’s paintings.

When asked to organize this exhibition, my focus went not to Charlie’s popular loosely handled sepia-toned subjects, but rather to elements he renders—indeed, engineers and conducts—with greater precision. His bridges and railway overpasses remind us of necessary infrastructure—as crucial to the dynamic composition of a painting as it is to a vibrant society. Charlie’s unmistakable crossing signals and semaphores stand at the intersection of life and art. They direct us, and him, toward some unknown destination further down the line.