The Art of Pierangelo Boog

Charles Nicholas Sarka

Charles Nicholas Sarka,	Born Chicago, IL 1879, Died New York City (?), NY 1960

Sarka's travels as a young man produced a rich body of work. He camped along the Indian River in turn-of-the-century Florida and roamed Southern California on horseback. He journeyed to the South Seas, Hawaii, Egypt, Morocco, the Caribbean, and Europe. With a delicate touch and an unselfconscious eye, he painted a record of the natural beauty he encountered and of the people he came to know. It is through his work, from the first peripatetic years of his career, that Sarka has been best known.

Yet, for all his youthful wonderlust, Sarka spent most of his life rooted. He lived 60 years in New York City and for 50 years kept a summer camp on Canada Lake in the Adirondacks, among a small colony of artist friends. He made his living as an illustrator and muralist, but Sarka's passion was the uncommissioned paintings and drawings that he did every day, works that shimmer with vitality and sheer creative joy. In New York, he often focused on the quotidian - a neighborhood streetscape or the view from his apartment window of rooftop chimney pots. At Canada Lake, too, where nature was his focus, he was less interested in the grand majesty than in minor miracles: a patch of sunlit asters, or a rock outcropping in an autumnal wood. Over the long haul, some of Sarka's most successful works were small-scale sketches and paintings, uncluttered and intitmate.

Born in Chicago, Sarka apprenticed at age 11 in an engraving plant, sketching figures on blocks for engravers. By age 16 he was a staff artist on the Chicago Record. Sarka excelled as an artist reporter and was soon hired away by the New York Herald. In New York he met artist George "Pop" Hart, who was to be his traveling companion to Florida, Egypt and the South Seas. Between trips Sarka built his name as an illustrator for Collier's, Cosmpolitian, Harper's and other popular magazines. Sarka wed Grace Jones, sister of Haydon Jones, a well known artist reporter. They were married nearly 50 years, until his death in 1960.

Works by Sarka are in the collections of the Metropolitian Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Chicago Art Institute, the National Portrait Gallery and other public and private collections.