I'm an internationally respected picture maker who has built a reputation producing socially challenging figurative, narrative realism for more than 25 years. I have just returned From 10 years living and working in Europe to tend to family matters. I'm looking for beautiful, dynamic people to populate my new work. Visit my website http://www.charlesmalinsky.com/ to get an overall view of my work. If you think you'd be appropriate and interested in working with me be in contact at: [email protected] I'll give you an outline of the current project and we can discuss meeting for an interview. Thanks

Here is and article from New York Arts Magazine to give you a bit of an idea of who I am and what I do:

Charles Malinsky first exhibited his drawings and paintings of warrior angels in 1994. Since then, he has shown a subsequent, related series of works in galleries across Europe and North America. The angelic cast from the original series expanded rapidly, providing characters and impetus for Malinsky’s subsequent visual sagas. They and their relational dynamics provided the repertoire for Faustian spectacle -- heroic deeds of courage or defiance and Machiavellian betrayals of trust. These operatic dramas are uniquely Malinsky’s own; they stage the familiar meta-narrative of an all-embracing, cultural hermeneutic familiar to both East and West. The ongoing tableaux of mortal expectations common to the three main orthodoxies are witnessed as if through a multidimensional x-ray lens.

Malinsky paints in oils on canvas in layered, black and white oil glazes. The images emerge as if manifested by multiple levels of reality or bleeding through different planes of meaning. Malinsky’s visual sagas foreground issues of judgment, condemnation, redemption and survival, which are currently being played out on the world stage. For those Mohammed termed "People of the Book" — cultured within a Judeo-Christian epistemological frame -- the unfolding spectacle is also necessarily intimate and personal. Imaginatively, spiritually, and socially, most of Malinsky’s audience will have been tuned to some version of the hermeneutics deconstructed in his parables. In this, the newest world of ideal values --rational enlightenment, neoplatonic humanism and postmodern anti-humanist tropes -- there is little chance of escape.

This claustrophobic, saturated hermeneutic provides an emotional subtext for the sensation of being trapped upon a grim, existential treadmill when faced with questions of personal salvation or current world events. The only escape is a radical deconstruction and reinterpretation of cognitive culture and its terms. Such issues of interpretation have colored dominant ideologies and their conduction of temporal and psychological power ever since the earliest theocratic ideologies emerged. In Mosaic laws of purity and pollution, Zoroastrian hierarchies and Platonic dualities, clear borders of good and evil were upheld. Dividing the universe into warring "Light" and "Dark" powers, spiritual dualism posited an extreme black and white universe in which a lofty "Good" vied against a degenerate Evil. With methods that the renowned humanist, Machiavelli, would later formalize, such notions legitimized the divine right of leaders to rule their subjects entirely -- mind, body and soul. The escape routes of polysemous meanings, plurality, and intellectual autonomy flew out the window (or, thoroughly demonized, down to Hell), and power itself became polarized between the ranking mandates of dominance and submission, obedience and spiritual/ideological treason.

Beginning with Lucifer’s initial defection that sets the dualistic universe in motion, winding through Eve’s traitorous pact, and ending with the unholy alliance of the Antichrist with the Scarlet Woman, this version of the oldest story in the world is a tale of political treason against sanctified power. It is an enduring, millennial construct that was always intrinsically political, which is why it repeatedly plays out in that context. As Bush the Younger advances his evangelical Christian "Crusade" (alias: "Democracy") against the "Axis of Evil" and its demonic legions, the self-styled "Hidden Imam" (or returned Prophet) pushes back from his picturesque mountain exile. A full-blown romance of the End Days is at hand, in which both sides of this neoplatonic duality believe it is they alone who are elect.

Malinsky has been documenting the thematic undercurrents of this ideological drama, with astonishing prescience and incisive knowledge of its embedded, semiotic imagery, for over a decade. The canonical narrative he challenges is ancient, simple, warrior-like and effective -- one in which spiritual terrorism reigns. Soon after the Creation mankind sought god-like knowledge. Tempted by Eve’s subversive compact with the Devil, man encroached upon the magical "Alpha" territory of the Supreme Being and was henceforth ostracized from God’s grace and "cast out." Humanity, like Lucifer and the rebel angels, "fell" -- only to perpetuate the ongoing, black and white morality play through deeds, works, the commission of evil and/or redemptive submission. This checkered moral pattern continues until the Judgement. In the dramatic climax of Armageddon, the Lord will harrow Hell (and the souls of men) one last time. Women, as the "Daughters of Eve" and therefore culpable for the Fall, are largely doomed by their inherently carnal and corporeal nature. Except by extreme means of spiritual purification and sacrifice, made all the more difficult by their historic role in conferring the "sins of the flesh," women are "mostly of hell on the day of Resurrection" (The Sunnah, "Of Women and Slaves"). In the Rapture, the spiritual "wheat" will be separated from the carnal and corporeal "chaff" once and for all. In the meantime, individual souls will make their private, final journeys, inescapably destined by their choices in life (or predestined from the Creation, according to Calvin) for either heaven or hell.

Though completely original in its visual vocabulary and approach, the spirit of Malinsky’s assault upon this claustrophobic, essentially Judeo-Christian moral dilemma is not without precedent; his lexicon of interrogative imagery shares traits in common with the apocryphal tradition. The familiar tale has consistently appeared to attempt its own deconstruction through its own dialectical agencies, semiotics, ambivalence, and contradictions. Malinsky’s repertoire of characters, roles, and visual interpretations shifts the values significantly, however. Whores, transvestites, androgynes, and raw nature have served as heroes; medical science, certain thug-like choirs of angels and the orthodox Church have filled-in as villains. It is often quite challenging to determine exactly which angels are in fact demons, while vulnerable, human-like transgressors emerge as redeemers. In his early Rescue series, as in canonical representations, angelic saviors salvage souls and courier them over Hell’s flames to safety. But Malinsky’s guardian angels were dark, female figures, adorned like dominatrix in the trappings of transgressive sexuality. They seemed to hail from an erotic underground of traditionally marginalized realities and values. Wearing fetish gear like black leather harness and heels, Malinsky’s conveyors of merciful intervention and salvation are precisely those erotic figures orthodoxy touts as base, corporeal "sinful vessels."

There is immense emotionality to these early figures. They seem to encompass a deep longing for the redemption of sex and sexual nurture from the unseemly fetters of shame-filled projections and conceptions of vice. There is infinite consolation in their erotic cradling of the souls entrusted to their care. In despair of immortality, lost souls are found, reclaimed, borne aloft. The "rapture" is reconfigured as the gift of human grace and compassion. This same spirit, democratizing divine love, infuses Malinsky’s recent Fragments series, where male and female angelic figures float in a light-drenched etherium of ecstatic sexual love. Their lyrical, figural conjugations are like the highwire dances of trapeze artists in a lofty, "pure" or elevated space. Malinsky gives rhapsodic dignity and spiritualized grace to sexual congress in these fragmented tableaux, though these are the fleshy connections and focalized body parts that would normally be denigrated as pornographic or obscene.

Other warrior angels, not so benign, have also returned from earlier series. In Pride and Solitude (150 by 120 cm.), "The Pilot" sports aviator’s goggles, erotic/military leather harness, and combat boots. He stands within a scene of devastation, weary of the horror surrounding him and the rubble at his feet. The fallen angel’s wings are seared and his eyes are hollow. The background is a ravaged mess of ripped masonry, exposed girders and mangled steel cable. Is he the source of the calamity, or simply present? Is he the attendant spirit of all such catastrophes, from Beirut to Jerusalem, Riyadh to Beslan? Did he also pilot the Enola Gay to her deliverance over Japan in 1945? Looking like the post- strike façade of the federal building in Oklahoma City, Malinsky’s representation of low-tech terror testifies to the certain failure of civility. The Abyss gapes from the shattered edifice behind the angel; it constitutes a second, somber and terrifying character -- a visible, negative presence in this tableaux.

In the Eternal Tourist (150 by 120 cm.) a rumpled, middle-aged figure crouches down to get the right perspective through his camera lens. His ill-fitting holiday wear bunches up around his inelegant body, and his white trousers stop short of his socks. The "tourist" is achingly human, poignantly real. He is focussing his lens upon a tall angel who displays casual unconcern. Strangely, the apparition’s stance seems both blithe and careworn at the same time, but that is not the only ambivalence he expresses. He carries a bow and sports a feather-crested carnival mask. He is a hermaphroditic or transvestite angel; he wears heels and hose beneath his warrior’s apron. His genitals are exposed and his wings flare slightly. Despite the appearance of some slight irritation or wariness, he looks as if he’s used to having his picture taken. More to the point, he hardly notices the little, mundane figure aiming his camera at him; they don’t really occupy the same dimension. Their two beings hail from different planes of manifestation, they are made of different stuff. The angel is sourced in the hyper-real, the metaphysical -- the realm of the ideal or the imagined. He is in attendance, on the austere loading platform, overlooking the underworld journey because it is his assignment or post. His duty consists merely in being there, a visible message or sign for the listless souls in transit.

The depressing-looking train carriage behind the pair suggests other grim transports -- cattle-cars on their way to Auschwitz, perhaps, or bleak, easterly destinations without warmth, or much light — Siberia, or the featureless plains of the frozen steppe. This is the twilit Final Journey; the Eternal Tourist’s battered suitcase bears witness to the lengthy duration of his travels, his time upon the tracks. There might be terminals, rest stops, and grimy, deserted waiting rooms. One may get off the train for a while, and look around, but there is no escape from the rail system. The track is only laid one-way and all tracks lead to heaven/hell, which are really the same place -- two sides of the same, warring dichotomy. There’s no getting off. Or is there?

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