Charles Foster’s work lives in the space between instinct and structure—where raw mark-making collides with language, symbols, and fractured figures. His paintings feel excavated rather than composed, built through layers of scraped pigment, stenciled text, and gestural drawing that reference both street culture and personal mythology. Faces, horses, halos, numbers, and signage drift in and out of abstraction, forming a visual vocabulary that feels both primitive and contemporary.

Deeply rooted in family history and personal experience, Foster’s imagery reflects the emotional highs and lows of his life, using repetition and symbol as a way of processing memory, resilience, and change. His years spent in New York City surface in the work through its urgency and urban grit — echoing early influences from artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol — while his current life in Detroit brings a quieter sense of reflection and reinvention. Experimentation is central to his practice; he pushes materials, erases and rebuilds, allowing chance and raw gesture to guide the final composition.

The result is a body of work that embraces imperfection and tension: bold color fields meet rough erasure, handwritten words collide with industrial forms, and meaning remains fluid rather than fixed. There is a gritty, poetic honesty to his surfaces—part graffiti, part diagram, part confession—where personal history and place converge into paintings that feel immediate, vulnerable, and alive.