CHARLES SAFFORD
Painter, 1900-1963

While viewing an exhibition of color photography in the 1920s, Safford became aware of the implications of the modern photographic process and soon afterward turned to a highly personal abstract idiom which gradually eliminated realist references from his work.
- Frederic Hobbs, Charles Safford - The Potrero Paintings, FHFA Galleries, San Francisco, 1961

After running away from home at the age of fourteen, he spent his teenage years as a hobo, meanwhile learning to draw and paint in part through a brief attendance at the Pratt Institute in New York City. After WWII (sustained an injury that later caused his death), he went to the Hoffman School in New York on the G.I. Bill. The abstract paintings that he did after returning to San Francisco were big, gestural oils filled with a slashing, linear energy that reflected Hofmann's influence, but which also had a raw intensity and bluntness as well as persistent roots in the forms and spaces of the natural landscape.
- Thomas Albright, Art in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1945-1980

Charlie Safford became one of San Francisco's outstanding abstract expressionist painters, a symbol during his life of the uncompromising artist, and now, five years after his death, a legend of the free man.
- Mary Fuller McChesney, Charles Safford - The Only Way to Live

Charles Safford probably was one the oldest artist to show at the "6" Gallery, and, to the younger artists, he must have evoked an older West Coast bohemia. A number of them remember Safford as one of the most original and inventive of the Abstract Expressionists in the city during the '40s, but Safford died during a period when Pop and Funk raged and Abstract Expressionism was at a low ebb in popularity and critical regard. His career has never been fully documented.
- Lyrical Vision: The 6 Gallery

The Black Cat was the North Beach setting that Jack Kerouac wrote about in 'On the Road,' but by the time the book was published, the action had shifted elsewhere, most significantly to The Place. Thomas Parkinson once referred to it as the most important place in the United States during the mid-50's, primarily for what was happening there in poetry, but even before that, it was one of the most important centers of underground activity in the visual arts. There were frequent Dada Nights, displays of paintings by artists like Charles Safford, Jay De Feo, Robert LaVigne, and Wally Hedrick.
- Thomas Albright, Underground Art Celebration, 1945-1968, Rolling Renaissance: San Francisco

Education
Studied at Pratt Institute, New York, 1930s; Hans Hofmann School, New York, late 1940s.

Selected Exhibitions 1945-1975
Second Annual Group Show (Jay DeFeo, Roy De Forest, Sonia Getchoff, Dimitri Grachis, James Kelly, Fred Martin, David Simpson, James Weeks, etc.), Six Gallery, San Francisco, 1955; The Art Bank of the San Francisco Art Association (from 1961, San Francisco Art Institute), 1958-1960; Paintings by Charles Safford, Spatsa Gallery, San Francisco, 1960; Third Winter Invitational, California Palace of the Legion of Honor, San Francisco, 1962.

Collections
Safford's work is represented in public and private collections throughout the West including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.