Biography

 


Charles Baker Strahan is an award-winning, self-taught artist based in Los Angeles, California. After 27 years of working in fashion and entertainment as a Celebrity Hairstylist, both in front of and behind the camera, and a 10-year stint as the Global Ambassador for Procter & Gamble’s Herbal Essences, he was about to start development of his own haircare line when he randomly created a triptych of paintings for his home — and he was suddenly hooked. At the one-year mark, he was given his first opportunity to show with “The Art Of Elysium” in LA, which created prints of his painting “High Dive” to support the charity organization.

Charles was awarded by Circle Foundation the Honorable Mention Award for their Artist of the Year competition 2019, was invited to be, and is currently, a foundation member. He's one of 100 international artists invited to participate in the European Cultural Center’s annual exhibition “Personal Structures 2022” in Venice, Italy, a seven-month-long exhibition that has over 600,000 visitors annually and coincides with the Venice Biennale.

On June 15, 2020, Charles switched style gears and started a brand-new series of paintings called “The F-Word Series,” aka “The Fuck Paintings,” in response to our volatile, shifting world and culture. This work not only struck a nerve through his Instagram; he has sold majority of the almost 80 (currently existing) paintings within the same day, the fastest one selling within 2 minutes of him posting it.

During the beginning of the pandemic, Charles was invited by The Goss Michael Foundation to donate work to Art Trinity’s “Postcards of Positivity,” which benefited Artists Relief. His F-word painting “2020 Vision” was so well received that he was privately asked by Kenny Goss to recreate three more in addition to his initial three paintings to help the charity. In September, Charles opened a new merchandising branch of his F-Word Series with Revolution Art Shop. Starting with his F-word painting “Notorious RBG,” they released T-shirts, hoodies, and tote bags in advance to honor the passing of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and donated a portion of the sales to the Biden campaign in her honor.

Shop by Series
Out Of Time

Out Of Time

This series is a work in progress where I am exploring taking historic portraits and altering them in various ways to pull them forward from the past as a means to perhaps show where we have come from, a greater truth than what was depicted by them, the projection/filter of identity through the artifice of dressing, and why caste systems and these portraits are not unlike a social media filter that obscures the truth.
Beyond The Flesh

Beyond The Flesh

Borrowing inspiration from Jenny Saville, one of my favorite artists.

I explore building a figure out of or over an abstract painting as a means to understand the medium of oil paint in general but also how the visceral experience of building the illusion of a 3-dimensional form over the abstracted plain creates a visual tension that can amplify the experience the viewer has with art in general. Going beyond the flesh, down to the abstract and coming back again.

Totally Bugging

Money Buys Happiness

Money buys happiness is a small series where I took fashion ads, using the irony of the current culture that we are immersed in that glorifies luxury/wealth as a projection of “happiness” yet the models depicted are anything but “happy”.The smiley face balloon in each represents the fleeting nature of happiness and articulates a sense of humor by which all these works were created.

Reawakened

Circular Diffusion

Circular Diffusion is the exploration of creating a synergistic visual abstraction through the use of circles. Taking influences from Yayoi Kusama, to the impressionists and playing with the idea of light being as a circular component of energy that the figure is in response to and with.

“The feeling of the energy that is all around us and the emotional responses that we experience in reaction to this energetic experience.”

She Doesn’t Give A Fuck

Complex Compositions

The following works were designed from a desire to explore the capacity of compositions by layering different subject matters together as a means of storytelling, through visual form.

Made to Measure

Morphic Resonance/Abstractions

In art, morphic resonance refers to the theory that ideas and forms can be transmitted through a collective, unseen "memory" or field, influencing new creative works. I have cheekily used this term to illustrate how I have used art history to explore and abstract the following works in conversation with some of my hero artists.

Psychological Cubism

Psychological Cubism

The following works depict a person's complex inner life, much like how traditional cubism showed an object from multiple viewpoints at once. Instead of showing physical perspectives, it layers different emotional states—like hysteria, sadness, or joy—onto a single figure to capture a person's fragmented internal experience.