For my 100 Days of Encouragement Project, I’m celebrating Chloe Lamb, a British painter who focuses on finding an image within large brushstrokes and dynamic fields of color.
Born in 1960, Chloe grew up in Wiltshire, as part of an artistically inclined family. Her father graduated from London’s prestigious Slade School of Fine Art, and her mum exercised her creativity in their home and garden. Chloe studied at the Heatherly School of Fine Art and the Lydgate Art Research Center before working for a number of years in an unrelated field.
After she was married and had her first child, she began to take her interest in painting more seriously. Currently she is a full-time working artist, traveling between her studios in Hampshire and Northumberland. She is a deep observer of her world, drawing inspiration from natural and man-made environments around her.
Though primarily an abstract painter, Chloe sometimes veers toward the representational, with elements of landscape, still life or figures featuring among her characteristic areas of color and line. It’s not that she sets out to paint flowers or a landscape, but the visual imagery she collects on walks and through her day-to-day experiences inevitably are part of the alchemic mix of her painting process.
In reality, her subject is always the paint. Chloe loves working in oils for the sensuality of the experience. She loves the way oils can be saturated or muted, applied with thick impasto or thinned to a sheer glaze that can be layered to build up intensity. She harnesses what some artists see as a drawback – namely, the long drying time – by making the most out of painting wet-on-wet and taking advantage of the moveability of oils.
Alternatively, she might let a canvas sit, drying and being considered, until she feels inspired to rework into the dry image with color and line. She tends to flow from simplicity to complexity and back again as she moves toward the finished layers. She works on many pieces at once, as a precaution against getting too precious with any one part of a painting or getting stuck in one composition.
Chloe works instinctually with her materials. She isn’t interested in knowing in advance what will emerge as she works. The process of discovery — of being part of the equation of artist and materiality – seeing what the paint will conjure – that is where her joy is found.
Rather than creating an under-drawing, her paintings begin with a blank canvas and the exciting first stroke of paint. From that moment on, it’s a conversation, a rhythmic dance. Areas of thick and thin paint, areas of negative space and form – these come together to create compositions that are joyful to look at.
She avoids over-intellectualizing her process or outcomes, which makes her work imminently accessible, even to viewers who may not think they like abstract art. Her delight in the paint and the process carries through, and we share in the sumptuousness of her creative experience.
During lockdown, Chloe found that she was compelled to be relentlessly cheerful in her work. The colors she was drawn to using — not just for themselves, but for how they interacted with one another in her paintings — reflected her hope. She knew, that as an artist, she was lucky because as long as she had her paints, she would never be bored. And she relished the unintended benefits of an appointment calendar that was suddenly empty to give her more time to walk and reflect and paint.
How You Can Be an Encouragement
Please check out Chloe’s offerings on Instagram, follow her, and send her some encouragement today by commenting on one of her posts or sending her a direct message.
Instagram: @chloelamb.painter
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