Artist Gallery

Charles Huckeba is a contemporary painter with a fine arts degree study from the University of California at Santa Barbara, where he studied under an outstanding faculty of contemporary artists such as Larry Rivers and Irma Cavat. His influences are varied, including Paul Klee, Jean Dubuffet, Adolph Gotlieb, Cy Twombly, Wassily Kandinski and Joan Miro. Charles and his wife, Jill, have spent years exploring and recording the rich lode of prehistoric pictographs and petroglyphs found in the Western United States Great Basin.

In 1993, Huckeba began combining and integrating various painting techniques developed from his academic foundation to render rock art designs he had seen into a contemporary presentation. The results are works held in corporate collections, private collections and shown at select fine art galleries around the United States and Europe.

Huckeba states, Rock art is the first American abstract art. What brings a petroglyph to life is the stone beneath the patina. As the surface patina of the rock is removed, the interior is exposed. This is how we see the prehistoric artist's mark. My paint application is multi-layered and textural. The image elements are scratched, etched and scoured under and over the strata's of pigment much as the numerous superimpositions found in Petroglyphs. My goal is to build a link between contemporary and prehistoric art.

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