charles presti

Award Winning Author

About

From Pensacola, FL.

From Pensacola, Florida, Charles Presti is a contemporary painter and writer whose work explores memory, human connection, and the moments that stay with us long after they pass.

Working primarily in acrylic on canvas, Charles builds his paintings through structured planes of color that hold emotion in suspension. His work often explores the space between movement and stillness, presence and absence. He frequently focuses on people, animals, and domestic scenes where time feels briefly held. His work received Best of Show honors at Artel Gallery’s 2026 Fabulous Forgeries exhibition and was later featured in his solo Award Alcove exhibition, SUSPENDED.

Before returning to painting after more than twenty-five years away from the canvas, Charles spent fifteen years practicing clinical medicine before transitioning into healthcare informatics, where he worked for more than two decades in medical records and drug database systems. During those years, writing became another creative outlet, shaped by family stories, memory, and characters that kept resurfacing.

His debut novel, Covered in Flour, a fictional memoir about coming of age in a 1960s Italian-American suburb, received the Next Generation Indie Book Award for First Novel under 50,000 Words.

He is also the creator of the Zoe’s Garden Tales children’s series, including The Silent Song of Harpo, a finalist in the 2025 Children’s Book International Competition, A Star, A Storm, and Her Chariot, and Zoe Gets a Visitor.

Charles also writes personal essays on creativity, memory, family, and reinvention on Substack.

He lives and paints in Pensacola with his husband of more than thirty years, Mike Bruce, and their Wheaten Terrier, Zoey.

Together, Charles and Mike co-founded Sunday’s Child, a Pensacola nonprofit supporting local organizations that promote diversity and inclusion.

Painting the World in Polygons

I hadn’t painted in more than twenty-five years

Back when I thought old age was a concept rather than a destination, I promised myself that when I became an old man, I’d start again. No excuses. No delays. I assumed there would be trumpets, maybe a sense of occasion.

Instead, I woke up one morning, looked in the mirror, and realized there had been no announcement at all. No trumpet. No sash. Just the quiet understanding that the man looking back at me was, inconveniently, the one I’d been waiting to become.

So in the fall of 2025, I picked up a brush.

I wish I could say it arrived with some otherworldly calling. It didn’t. I had simply reached the age I once assigned to a mythical future-me. These paintings are what became of that promise—made to a younger man who assumed time would be polite enough to wait.

The work is an attempt to make sense of ordinary moments: wine and Crocs at the counter, Zoey at the cupboard, grandkids hauling Pop-Pop to the candy store, babies suspended in that impossible second before gravity remembers its job.

Nothing here is staged or perfected. It’s simply the world as it looked when it held still long enough to land on canvas.

All of it happened.

Well, most of it.

The Geometry of Memory

From what I can tell, I appear to be in my geometric phase of work. I paint in fragments—shapes, angles, and colors—because memory doesn’t arrive whole. It comes back in pieces, its shape and meaning altered by time and reinterpretation.

Some sharp.
Some softened.
All held together by whatever emotion was present when it was formed.

In more recent work, that same attention has widened. Alongside memory and relationship, I’ve begun looking more directly at the present—at structure, symmetry, and the quieter forces that shape us long before we’re aware of it. These pieces are less about recollection and more about observation, but they’re rooted in the same impulse: to slow down and notice what is forming us, and how.

What follows is a collection of those fragments—the work itself—each piece an attempt to hold onto something once ordinary and later revealed as anything but.

If any of these scenes feel familiar, that’s the point. Most of us don’t recognize that what we’re living in is extraordinary until it’s gone.