Charles Pompilius is a painter based in Rochester, Michigan. His work combines observation, invention, and historical imagery to construct psychological and symbolic spaces where contemporary experience collides with older cultural forms.
Although figurative, the paintings are less concerned with narrative than with the tensions between rational order, instinct, cultural memory, and decline. Classical fragments, interiors, portraits, and staged figures recur throughout the work, not as illustrations of historical ideals, but as material through which larger cultural and psychological pressures can emerge. Strong underlying structures provide a framework for imagery that is often associative, fragmented, or unstable.
Pompilius received a BFA from Central Michigan University and an MFA from the University of Iowa, where he attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture on scholarship. He has taught painting at Wayne State University, the College for Creative Studies, and Edinboro University, and is the recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award and a Michigan Council for the Arts Creative Artist Grant.
His work has been exhibited throughout the United States. Current paintings explore the origins of Western culture through the intersection of historical memory, symbolic imagery, and contemporary experience.