Wise women: Meet Char Baxter, a 74-year-old master’s of fine arts student
By Jean Cole | Living 50 Plus
When Char Baxter was only 5 and living in Iowa, her parents bought her a paint set for Christmas. As a creative little girl, she immediately took to it.
“I was in heaven,” she remembers.
Then she spilled the paints on her parents’ white carpet.
Becoming an artist was going to be messy. But so began her lifelong connection to art.
“I’ve always considered myself extremely creative, but as far as being a practicing artist, at times,” said Char, who is 74.
As a young woman, she earned her bachelor of fine arts degree in studio art with a focus on watercolors from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
Early on, she was a senior artist for the U.S. Army Services in Aschaffenburg, Germany. She was creative director for a software company in Atlanta.
For 20 years she worked in advertising as CEO of Char Baxter Communications in Atlanta, where she managed a staff of 30 who developed branding concepts, marketing strategies and advertising and public relations programs for clients.
Then she was a retiree, but never from art. She wanted to delve into it more deeply. Then one day her husband, Dennis, read in The Decatur Daily about the Alabama Center for the Arts in Decatur offering a master’s degree in integrative design. It was just what Char was looking for.
On a recent Thursday, Char was at the ACA plugging away on her master’s degree. She has to produce 20 works to get her fine arts degree. She works 40 hours a week at it. One painting, “The Fortune Teller,” took her more than 100 hours.
She considers herself a slow painter. Sometimes she uses oil paint for faces because its slow drying time is forgiving.
“You can go back into it and blend it, mix it, or remove it or do whatever you want to do with it,” she said. But it takes a week to dry thoroughly enough to continue.
The Old Masters used oil, she said. They didn’t have rapid-drying acrylics, but they did have watercolors.
A painting technique called chiaroscuro informs her work and it simply means the dramatic contrast between light and dark. Like one side of a face illuminated by candlelight. Rembrandt was a master of the technique. The light in some of his paintings was stunning, like a beacon drawing the viewer in.
“It’s a magical quality to be able to paint and draw their eye to where we want them to look,” she said.
Another painting technique she uses is grisaille. It is a painting method in which an artist creates a monochromatic artwork using shades of gray (or other neutral colors like brown or green) to build form and depth. It’s like a grayscale rendering that provides a foundation for later color additions.
Finding inspiration
She gets ideas for her work from many places.
“I’m a visual learner and I write and take pictures with my brain,” she said. “I keep a log just to write down descriptive phrases.”
She uses the internet because she can type in a phrase like “girl with a kitten” and get hundreds of images. She views an image and then makes it her own by changing various aspects.
“I love the internet because it gives you the ability to travel to see what you can’t see,” she said.
She is foremost a painter but she is also a multimedia artist who uses things like fabric, threads, beads, strands of decorative edging and other items that give her work the texture that is sometimes missing in a straight painting.
For example, in “The Fortune Teller” she painted the gypsy’s head, face and shoulders on the canvas but then sewed decorative fabric to the canvas to make the fortune teller’s head scarf.
For her thesis, she is concentrating on painting a collection of powerful women, she said. The thesis is called “Wise Women.” She said she sees an innate wisdom in women that comes from experience and understanding people.
Love for life
Char has a love for life that is evident in her artwork, her smile and whenever she talks about her artistic process, which also brings a light to her eyes.
“It’s something I’m really trying to portray in my art,” she said. “It’s also love. I’ve never known an artist who didn’t try to love through their art.”
She is enjoying the production of her wise women.
“I want to portray what is behind the faces of these women,” she said. “What’s the love that cracks through the art? That is why the fortune teller is there. Who doesn’t want to know what lies ahead? There is a wisdom there even if it is a gypsy-type wisdom.”
The series also includes a pottress, quilter and marketplace woman.
She finds it interesting the power women have in life.
“That is what I am trying to capture in my art — that power, that wisdom,” she said. “It’s a natural power to understand and communicate. You can look at a person’s eyes and tell if they are really there. And that is what I try to capture. I try to capture that knowledge, that wisdom.”
She has what seems like a philosophy about life — you don’t have to change the world, you just have to make a difference.
One of Char’s supporters is Pamela Sue Keller, chair for the Fine and Performing Arts at Athens State University.
Keller said Char’s work explores the nature of love as both a personal force and a collective cultural memory.
“Through a mix of oil painting, stitched canvas, batik and found materials, she creates richly layered images that feel both intimate and symbolic,” Keller said. “Often focusing on mature women, her figures serve as living icons of complexity, love and deep, embodied wisdom.”
She said Char creates jewel-colored large paintings in mixed media on canvas with a female face as a central focal point.
“Her use of analog materials like fabric, thread, feathers and fibers provides unity, pattern, texture and meaning,” Keller said. “The stitching, for example, becomes a mark of time, memory and care. These elements are interwoven with the fluidity of paint, allowing her surfaces to breathe with texture, engagement and life. The resulting work feels both mystical, grounded and has an emotional clarity that doesn’t rely on direct narrative.”
Char is intentionally stretching the boundaries of painting by integrating media and techniques that historically fall outside its definition, Keller said.
“Her work simmers, hums and lingers,” Keller said. “It’s painterly in its sensibility but built from layers of meaning that reach well beyond the canvas. Viewers are drawn not only to the beauty of the work, but to the quiet power it holds and the feeling that it knows something about love that best be said through arts.”
Keller has known Char for close to two years and, in that time, she has developed an impression of her.
“She brings a rare combination of joy, kindness, wisdom, business savvy and design experience together with a huge imagination, strong art-making skills and a heart for meaningful creativity,” Keller said. “Her art-making discipline is inspiring. She’s academic in her approach and also very intuitive. That mix makes her not only a fascinating graduate student, but a friend and a leading presence in the school studio.”
Grieving through art
Although Char’s focus is currently on wise women, one painting she had already completed, “The Boy and the Blackbird,” is close to her heart. It rests on an easel in her gallery downtown. It represents her grandson, Kolebi Baxter, who was stricken with cancer at age 12 and died when he was only 14.
“It was a couple of years of really awful struggle and prayer, and it makes me so angry that he died,” Char said. “Grief didn’t have an outlet at the time. It took me a long, long time. It tore our family apart. We actually moved to Decatur to be with our son and his wife who moved here to start fresh after he died.
“Kolebi was happy, creative, loved science and was constantly on his Minecraft game.”
The artwork representing him is a mixed media creation. She did a watercolor painting of her grandson with a bird and a sunset, then she tore each piece out of the drawing. The canvas is covered in hand-dyed batik with the watercolor boy, sunset and blackbird, made with real feathers, sewn onto the canvas. It is a striking work and not one that one forgets after walking away. It was featured recently at the Carnegie Visual Arts Center in Decatur along with some of her other artwork.
It all started with that little paint set she received as a child. It opened the door to a lifetime of art.