Collection: Charles Gause Artist Biography and Art Gallery Collection

Charles Gause, born in Yakima, Washington, in 1955, and was raised in the Yakima Valley surrounded by orchards and pastureland. He exhibited a love for drawing and painting from an early age and as a child looked forward eagerly to the "Learn to Draw with John Knagy" television show each Saturday morning. As Charles Gause grew, his parents encouraged his artistic endeavors and in the footsteps of his boyhood hero "Peanuts Creator", Charles Schultz they enrolled him in the Art Instruction Schools of Minneapolis, MN, correspondence course while he was in high school. Continuing his interest in art by studying art history, design, and drawing at a local college, Charles Gause's work attracted the attention of his art teachers who encouraged him to pursue his talent.

After leaving college and working on some local construction jobs, Charles Gause sold his belongings and moved north to Fairbanks, Alaska in the spring of 1975. He found construction work locally for a month or so and then secured a job on the north slope of Alaska during construction of the Trans-Alaska pipeline. Although the seven day a week 12 hours a day work schedule left little free time, Charles still managed to squeeze in a little watercolor painting, metal engraving and cartooning. He fell in love with the sweeping vistas and dynamic mountain ranges he saw, along with the abundant wildlife. After a year with little rest Charles was ready for a change, he left the north slope and moved back to Fairbanks in the spring of 1976. Along with his future wife Joyce and a pipeline buddy, he launched into a more creative endeavor, cutting, polishing and engraving pieces of pipeline steel, and mounting them in frames to sell to pipeline workers. This provided a more restful pace than the previous year and along with the long days of 24 hour sunshine , warm summer weather and midnight volleyball games, caused Charles' artistic creativity to be renewed. During the summer of 1976 Charles Gause engraved Alaska's animals and other Alaska themes on nearly 100 mirror polished maps of Alaska cut from Pipeline steel scraps. Still, Charles felt that he was missing something and his dreams of becoming an established artist in traditional mediums seemed out of reach. 

Charles Gause's travels to the four corners of this immense state have supplied him with endless artistic ideas to explore with watercolors, oils and acrylics. Returning to his watercolors Charles began to paint Alaskan scenes and wildlife. In 1986 Charles was asked by the Iditarod Trail committee to paint the official Iditarod fundraising print. This ten year partnership proved quite successful and raised close to one million dollars for the Iditarod Race Purse. Charles currently has over 100 limited edition prints out now, most of which have reached "Sold Out" status. One of the most striking characteristics of the art of Charles Gause is the strong narrative element, the sense it creates of a story which expands beyond the frame. Viewers think about what brought the figures in a scene, whether animal or human, to that spot and they reflect on what will happen next. This narrative impulse is evident in several themes which recur in Gause's work, including, among others, myths of Alaska's past. His work is collected by a growing group of admirers worldwide and original paintings are in the permanent collections of such corporations as Cominico, Maersk-Sealand, Alaska Airlines and ARCO.