Biography
Charles Oakley was born in Manchester in 1925. Charles’s formative years were spent in Urmston, Manchester near the Manchester Ship Canal. A bright boy, Charles won a scholarship to Manchester Grammar School, where he was taught art by Charles Tunnicliff, who instilled a love of art and possibly encouraged the young Charles Oakley, who even then must have been talented. However, Charles was 14 years old when WW2 was declared. He must have seen barrage balloons over Manchester because these appear in a number of his paintings.
Serving in the armed forces in India until 1947, on his is return, Charles was accepted into the Slade School of Fine Art, excelling and subsequently winning the Sir Richard Taylor and Melvill Nettleship prize and later earning the prestigious Wilson Steer Medal in his final year.
Marrying Ann, a Cumbrian who Charles had met on a walking holiday in The Lakes, Charles Oakley became Art master at Eden School in Carlisle. His next career move was to Ferguson Fabrics in Carlisle as Assistant Head Designer. While working full-time, he continued to paint in his spare time leading to his first one-man show at the Crane Kalman gallery in Manchester in 1957.
The Crane Kalman exhibition at last offered Charles an opportunity to show his works, which featured industrial northern landscapes and life studies. L.S. Lowry, who opened Charles’s exhibition, purchased one of the nudes which he subsequently donated to Salford Art Gallery. The exhibition caused quite a stir, a shocked and disapproving councillor requested that the police closed the exhibition, leading to a feature in the Daily Mail. The publicity provoked much interest resulting in a sell-out exhibition. The offending painting showed the nude, with two teacups by the bed, one with lipstick stains on the rim.
In 1962, Charles Oakley accepted a position at Belfast College of Art, where he and his family spent 12 years, experiencing the start of the ‘Troubles’. Holidays were spent in Donegal, where Oakley enjoyed spending time by the sea, pottering in his beloved ‘Bass Boat’. He spent time painting numerous seascapes and beaches where the rotting hulls of wooden boats were gradually revealed through the shifting sand. He painted landscapes, featuring derelict houses and peatbogs.
In 1974 Charles moved back to England to teach at Newcastle Polytechnic in the Fine Art Department, commuting from Cumbria daily during the final five years before he took early retirement to focus on his painting. Trips to Holland with fine art students had provided a chance to see old Dutch masters, which he greatly admired for their attention to detail, their perspective and the story they told. Moving on from the familiar landscapes and derelict buildings, he started a new phase in his work incorporating references to the works of various old masters including Vermeer and Bakhuizen. He often used deep glazed boxes in which he placed miniature easels and objects with paintings that showed interiors with tiled floors, doorways leading to rooms beyond with walls on which hung painstakingly copied mini-replicas of 17th - 20th century paintings. These paintings often held a hidden story within, which only an art historian might decipher.
Charles continued to paint until he felt that his eyesight was not good enough to enable him to do the very fine and accurate brush strokes that his art required.
Charles died aged 82 in 2008 in his adopted county of Cumbria. During his life Charles had numerous solo exhibitions at many prestigious galleries, with works held by many public institutions, including Salford Art Gallery, Tullie Carlisle, Ulster Museum, Brighton Art Gallery and The University of Northumbria, amongst many others. A posthumous exhibition was held at The Fine Art Society in London in 2015.