July 1, 2005 through August 13, 2005
Gallery reception for the artist: Saturday, July 16, 2005, 6 to 8pm

Click on the images on the right and below to enlarge them >>
Most of these photos are available for sale, matted and framed.
Contact Charles Reilly for more details about purchasing his artwork.

Biography

Charles Reilly was born in 1951 in Brooklyn, New York, and grew up in a suburb of New York City. At 23, after an extended trip through Europe where he intensively photographed his surroundings, Charles returned home with the aim of learning photography. He enrolled in night classes at the School of Visual Arts in the City and studied with Helen Buttfield and Julio Mitchel, among others.

Before long, he was assisting in commercial photography studios in New York, and for ten years he supported himself as a studio photographer specializing in music performance and portraiture.

In 1988, disappointed with the business, Charles closed shop and returned to live in Brooklyn, and on New Year's Day, 1989 took a picture out his apartment window of a tree, a bare tree, cradling a tiny birdhouse. He called it "Homecoming", and it signaled to him the beginning of his life as an artist.

It was a beginning punctuated by a robbery at gunpoint in his home, and in 1990, after completing classes he'd begun at the International Center of Photography, he left New York and settled in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

In Santa Fe, so different culturally and visually from anything he knew back East, he began making photographs in the old adobe city after dark. Several first edition prints of these Santa Fe images, in Liquid Light medium, are part of the current exhibition.

In 1993, Charles moved to San Francisco to live with his girlfriend, who is  now his wife. He took a job at a fine art auction house, Bonhams + Butterfields, and became lead photographer and manager of photography studios. He stayed on ten years and in 2004, left to begin the work of an artist full time. Charles Reilly now lives in Oakland with his wife Jane and their daughter Shoshana.

Contact Charles Reilly