Charles Lobdell was born in San Rafael, California and raised in Marin County. He resides in Lake County, California. The influence of the areas' natural scenic wonders is visible in his visionary art.
As a child he copied Walt Disney comic book covers. While a teenager he created posters and sets for student musicals at Tamalpais High School in California. Lobdell knew he would be an artist. He inherited his artistic ability from his father, who shared his talent with fellow students with his ability to draw Mickey Mouse at school functions.
Lobdell entered the College of Marin in 1962. He became a Fine-Art major and focused on becoming a painter. His favorite mediums were oils and watercolors. His major art influences are Picasso, Kandinsky and Klee as visible in his abstract work.
In 1965 he transferred to the California College of Art and Crafts receiving his Bachelors degree and the Master of Fine Arts degree in 1969. While completing his degrees he studied painting, sculpture, design, drawing and filmmaking. Lobdells influences expanded from Picasso to abstract expressionism, surrealism and contemporary abstract pop art. The highlight of his college education was his stay at Erongaricuaro, Mexico in 1968. At the El Molino foreign exchange campus of CCAC he was one of the first students of independent study in a foreign country. In Mexico he created elongated abstract landscapes with repeating symbolic forms. These abstract works inspirited him to create a new form of visionary abstraction depicting the movement of theme forms across space and time like musical color symphonies of shape, color harmonies, form, texture, composite and positive-negative spaces. These early abstract mural paintings are similar to his work today. Some of the Mexico mural paintings were designs woven into tapestries for his Masters thesis. The tapestries were displayed in his MFA Graduate Program Exhibition.
After college graduation the 60s ended and the 70s continued. He was influenced strongly by the Mexican muralists: Siquieros, Rivera, and Ovozco while working in Mexico. He focused on mural opportunity. This opportunity came as a member of the One World Family Community in Berkeley. During the Berkeley stay he painted murals and posters for the Communitys Natural Foods Restaurant and New Age Center. This era of Lobdells art was influenced by psychedelic art and pop surrealism-the new wave of American art. He was active in the Berkeley and Haight-Ashbury mural art movement in California. After bonding with other artists of the communal movement, he realized the personal need for freedom and individuality in his art. He traveled to Hawaii. There he did sign work and further immersed himself in spiritual studies at the Metaphysical Center with a Japanese eastern spiritual group. His visionary art became diverse including spiritual teachings of the East and West. The spiritual images reflect back on the European Masters of different eras combining the realism of the Renaissance, Surrealism, and the 1970s New Age Art.
In 1976 Lobdell was chosen in a competition by the California Arts Commission to create a mural for the Paltenghi Youth Center in San Francisco that was completed in 1977. The theme was The Spirit of Youth in America . The portraits of Martin Luther King, Jr. and John F. Kennedy were incorporated into scenes of Americas youth coming together in unity, celebration and nature. This was part of the Back to the Land movement of the 70s. The ideology encompassed spiritual renewal of the human potential the quest of individual enlightenment. This was the heartbeat of Americas creative youth seeking expression, liberation from other generations and finding their own individuality or identity.
Lobdell left San Francisco in 1977 moved back to Marin County and then to Sonoma County to a rural area. He joined an Artists Co-op with a studio in a converted dairy farm. Then in 1978 he relocated to Occidental, California and established his own studio, returning to abstract painting in watercolor, prismacolor and acrylics. He collaborated with other artist visionaries at the New Age Exposition in the San Francisco Bay Area. In 1979-1980, he started on his first motion picture project. He transferred his knowledge to pre-production art and story consulting for Immediate Future Productions. During this same period Lobdell participated in group exhibitions: Monte Rio Visionary Art Show-CA 1979, Christmas Crafts Fair (visionary art) in Sebastopol-CA 1981, Health and Harmony Festival Visionary Art Show-1982 and Spiritual Arts Festival San Francisco, CA-1983.
The youth center mural of 1977 gained him commissions for many murals in which he combined social realism and visionary painting. Then in 1979 Lobdell collaborated with other artists creating a series of murals for Oakland, CA BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) station depicting exploration of space with visions of NASA space programs, missions, walks in space and futuristic space stations amidst the wonder of planets and stars. For the 1982 Peace Quake Festival in San Francisco, CA, Lobdell created a mural dedicated to John Lennon, illustrating three of his songs and including his portrait in the clouds smiling down on humanity. This portable mural is titled Imagine and was displayed at many California festivals. Today it is on permanent display at the College of Marin. In 1985 he collaborated with other artists for two large-scale murals; one for Alta Bates Hospital in Berkeley, CA using images of holistic and hi-tech practices of the medical industry and the other for Eden Youth Center in Hayward, CA. From 1980-1990 he was commissioned for murals by many California commercial businesses including a San Francisco bowling alley, which was featured and reprinted in Time magazine and San Francisco Chronicle newspaper. The California magazine featured his mural on a hardware store in Occidental, CA, which lamented the passing of small-town life in America. Other exhibitions were at University of California at Berkley in 1986, California Visions Gallery in 1987, Art Reach 88 in 1988 at Salt Lake City, Utah, which was juried by Henry Hopkins, past director or San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Peace World portable mural of 1987 coincided with Gorbachevs rise in the Soviet Union and his meeting with President Ronald Regan, the destruction of the Berlin Wall, and other historical events of that year. The mural depicts Peoples of all races, creeds, and ideologies holding hands in Unity in native costumes, marching in Peace Parades and celebrating in song and dance at the futuristic Peace Rock Festival all under the vision of Earth as seen from outer space. The murals sky is filled with portrait images of global people of Peace: Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., Mother Teresa, Caesar Chavez, Robert Kennedy, and Emma Goldman. The mural created a sensation at the New Age Festivals: Whole Earth Festival-Davis, CA; Health and Harmony Festival-Santa Rosa, CA; and New Age Exposition-San Francisco, CA. The Star Alliance cable network displayed the mural as the backdrop for their interviews with major celebrities in social, economic, political and entertainment arenas.
Lobdell displayed in 1996-1997 a pair of wraparound dioramas of Virtual Worlds at the California State Fair and in Warner Brothers lot in Hollywood. The murals depicted Futuristic Fantasy landscapes peopled with new age beings in virtual environments and fantastic cities of the future that looked like a 3-D computer generated hologram. They were not computer generated! The portable murals were part of a traveling 3-D and Holographic Arts Show.
Prior to this epic mural display Lobdell created pre-production artwork and story consulting for Etanali Films and Spiritual Fantasy Motion Pictures (1990). He was an Animation Assistant for Lucas' Film Death Becomes Her, which won the Academy Award for Best Special Visual Effects in 1992. In 2005 he is working pre-production artwork and script consulting for the full-length animated film, Peace World in collaboration with V.I.P. productions in Southern California.
Lobdells artwork continues to be multi-dimensional, visionary, 21st Century Futuristic and progressively abstract. He enjoys being a part of the Rainbow Bridge between the art and culture of the 20th century and the New Age Visionary art culture of the 21st Century that the global community is in the process of creating. A time of great change and excitement is affecting my artwork. The future lifestyle for all of us is a new kind of human society-one of unlimited positive progress, prosperity, peace, freedom and the universal power of Love. Now is the time to move forward into a new era of ecological and social responsibility building a New World Cooperative Democracy that unites all of humanity into a World Society of sharing and service of, by and for the people. This will incorporate the Three Cs cooperation&commitment...and community!
The artist has many paintings in private collections of prominent persons, businesses and public galleries. His murals are recognized internationally and nationally. Two books written about California murals and International Murals have photographs of his projects and production documented.
Copyright June 2005 Janet Gwendolyn Smith Based on personal interview with the artist June 7, 2005. Submitted by Janet G. Smith, art consultant, art historian, art authenticator and independent curator, www.jgsart.com
