Chuck Creasy | Watercolor Artist
 
 
 
 
 
A wash of places around the world lend their color to the life and works of watercolorist Chuck Creasy...beginning with the place of his birth in rural Tennessee during the ‘50s.

Chuck was born in the small Sumner County town of Westmoreland, Tennessee and although he’s ventured far from his rural roots — traveling from the parched wilds of Ethiopia to the jungles of Honduras, he’s never strayed from his simple country upbringing that looked on life with a sense of honesty and a childlike curiosity. Chuck approaches his work in advertising and watercolor with the same straightforward insight and economy of style, saying a lot with very little.

“I believe great art and great ads draw from the same basic principles of human interaction I learned growing up in a small town,” says Creasy. “I was taught to never talk down to people. Always tell the truth and try your best to focus your attention on one person, instead of trying to shout to the whole room.”

Chuck’s training in art preceded his career in advertising. Following a tour of duty as an Army officer in Vietnam, Chuck spent the summer of 1970 studying with renowned American watercolorist John Pike in Woodstock, New York, and Norman Rockwell in Stockbridge, Massachusetts.

“I’ve never completely recovered from the thrill of applying that first big wet wash and creating a three-dimensional illusion with nothing more than pigment and paper,” Creasy remembers.

“And while my career in advertising physically removed me from my painting, it put me in touch with a much broader world and gave me the chance to capture a rich catalog of experiences which are now finding their way to paper.”

For more than 20 years, traveling the world as an award-winning advertising creative director, Chuck stole fleeting moments between photo shoots and creative meetings to sketch the places he encountered. Now he’s interpreting those experiences into watercolors that are earning attention in circles throughout the Southeast. From the pristine Bay Islands of Honduras to the hidden backroads of rural Tennessee, Chuck’s subject matter reflects the road map of his career travels as well as an adman’s insatiable curiosity about how things work in real life — the mystery of a forgotten dugout canoe that once served as a means of making a living for a family on the island of Guanaja, the way late afternoon light wraps around a weather-worn lighthouse on the Aruba coast, the humble dignity of conch divers waiting for low tide off the coast of Belize, or the simple wonder of a giant oak framing an abandoned farm house in Sumner County.

Chuck and his wife, Marnie, are avid scuba divers and aficionados of ancient Mayan culture. He is a member of the Board of Directors of the Boy Scouts of America’s National Scouting Museum, the Nashville Advertising Federation and Watkins School of Art in Nashville, Tennessee. He is also a member of the Southern Watercolor Society and has received hundreds of local, regional, national and international awards for creative excellence.

Chuck and Marnie have moved to St. Joe Beach, FL where he is pursuing his dream of painting and continues to work on creative projects for several national advertising accounts. About his recent move he says,”Well, for all these years we have done what we were supposed to do. Now we’re trying to do what we want to do.”