Chicago-born artist Charles Steffen likely saw his first paintings in the knave of his family’s Catholic church. As a young man, he would continue his art education at the Illinois Institute of Technology, where comparably irreverent abstract expressionism had taken a firm hold. It was at this time that he met Hugo Weber, an avant-garde artist and professor whose work and lessons would influence Steffen’s drawings throughout his life. He was influenced too by the writing of Lewis Carroll in Through the Looking Glass (1871), a story of exploration, alienation, and the world being turned upside down.
Following a decline in his mental health, Steffen departed early from art school in 1949, later continuing his research on the oeuvres of Van Gogh, Auguste Rodin, and Pablo Picasso during visits to the Art Institute of Chicago. For over four decades, Steffen made drawings constantly. He was dedicated to the quality of his work, occasionally critiquing or praising his efforts in the form of notes on the page. Intertwined with these reflections are accounts of the day’s events: what he ate, how he was feeling, his worries, anticipations, and desires. At times, he longed for the structure of formal education, writing about his desire for better materials and better results. He worked in the lineage of his inspirations; as Van Gogh did with Potato Eaters, Steffen drew figures not only from memory, but from his daily life. His mother, siblings, and romantic interests appear consistently in his work, rendered in varying detail and often elaborated upon. The drawings themselves are sensitively stylized, while the artist’s annotations are comparatively raw.
Charles Steffen’s work has been exhibited at the Collection de l’Art Brut (Lausanne, Switzerland), the American Folk Art Museum (New York, NY), Reyes Finn (Detroit, MI), Andrew Edlin Gallery (New York, NY) and Galerie Christian Berst (Paris, France). His work is in the permanent collections of the Collection de l’Art Brut (Lausanne, Switzerland), the High Museum of Art (Atlanta, GA), Intuit (Chicago, IL), and the American Folk Art Museum (New York, NY).