Create and Destroy

Charlie Owens is a Knoxville, Tennessee native now living and working as an Art Director in Atlanta, Georgia. The Southern-born mixed media artist earned a Graphic Arts degree from the Art Institute of Atlanta while at the same time experimenting with new printing techniques and further honing his design skills. While earning a living doing freelance design work, Owens never lost sight of his roots, conjuring images inspired by street art, rock-n-roll, and most notably skate art and culture. Eventually the worlds of traditional media and design combined and matured into the recognizable style of art that Owens is known for today. Showing in galleries on both the East and West coasts, much of Owens’ work is a symbiosis of iconic illustration, clean design, and bold typography screened, splattered and forged in the grit and flavor of urban decay and street art. He achieves his style by using a combination of vector and freehand illustration, screen printing, stenciling, and the use of a wide range of acrylics, stains, wheat paste and other materials. Collected and shown across the United States, Canada, Australia, Asia, and Europe, Owens has made a name for himself with his uniquely-stylized female forms and the monolithic muralsScreen printing is a printing technique that uses a woven mesh to support an ink-blocking stencil. The attached stencil forms open areas of mesh that transfer ink or other printable materials which can be pressed through the mesh as a sharp-edged image onto a substrate. A roller or squeegee is moved across the screen stencil, forcing or pumping ink past the threads of the woven mesh in the open areas. Screen printing is also a stencil method of print making in which a design is imposed on a screen of silk or other fine mesh, with blank areas coated with an impermeable substance, and ink is forced through the mesh onto the printing surface. It is also known as silkscreen, seriography, and serigraph.