Rod Charlesworth was born in Terrace, British Columbia in 1955. His family moved to the Okanagan Valley, Kelowna, when he was seven. His childhood fascination with drawing and painting has grown into a unique and primarily self-taught style. Influenced early on by the surrealist movement, he later discovered the impressionist school that led him to experiment with colour and the physical qualities of paint. The work of Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven has had a profound influence on Rod's style. Rod studied art at Okanagan College where his ability to express the beauty of the western Canadian landscape became evident. Rod's work is now collected world-wide and he is committed to painting images that have a strong Canadian cultural influence, whether through his bold landscapes or his more recent whimsical images of children at play.

I must say that if I waited for a bright shaft of light to awaken my artistic senses and stir me to create, I would probably have created nothing. What initially inspired me to paint was how we all see the world differently. I wanted to strike my own visual language that could be used to portray the Canadian landscape in all of its rugged subtleties.