Charles Munch is well known in the American Midwest for his bold, luminously colored paintings of people and animals in expansive landscapes. For twenty-five years, his richly imagined images have explored the tangled relationship between tame and wild, between humans and the rest of the natural world. The elegant simplicity of his pictures has caused them to be described as 'nature icons'. Charles Munch, Dreaming in Color reveals Munch's transition from the poetic realism of his early work to the brilliant semi-abstraction of today, as well as the personal and artistic crisis at the heart of that dramatic transformation. Jody Clowes contributes a probing essay of critical analysis. Richard Ely's long biographical essay narrates one man's journey from suburban childhood to visionary landscape painter. The book also includes a chronology of Munch's artistic life and an exhibition history. Charles Munch grew up near St. Louis, Missouri, and now lives on a hilltop in southwestern Wisconsin. He has exhibited his paintings in twenty-five solo shows, eight of them museum shows. His work is in private collections nationwide, as well as in the collections of the Milwaukee Art Museum, the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Chazen Museum of Art.