About CHANTAL

A San Francisco native, who’s creative passions have been nurtured and supported from a young age; learning to knit and needlepoint in elementary school along with many art classes leads to an early exposure to creative production. As a young adult attention was focussed on developing a professional path by pursing a degree and later a career in Interior Design. While doing my graduate work at UC Berkeley, I took the opportunity to take an elective course called “fundamentals of oil painting”. Over the 15 years since design school, and raising two young daughters, there wasn’t a lot of time for deep diving into creative passions, but during the craze of the pandemic, there was a renewed and discovery and passion for the painting process and having complete creative freedom as a means of release, I found myself drawn into the immersive escape of getting truly lost in the process, testing different techniques while on the hunt to define my elusive “personal style”.

About the art

My paintings are primarily based on photography; either my own, or fashion editorials from vintage magazines. I find there is often beauty in an imperfect photograph. Whether it represents a memory of a treasured moment, (but someone's eyes are closed, or the camera is just out of focus, or there are two great photos - if only they could be combined into one) or vintage fashion that at once exudes such a mood and deserves to be celebrated. These are my goals at the beginning of a painting; to honor that moment, feeling, mood, gesture, relationship and/or sense of being. I find that the brush stroke has a way of figuring this all out and making sense of it. I love black and white photography. I find something peaceful, relatable and neutral about carrying that over into painting. In the art of many incredibly talented artists color and the selection of color plays a primary role however I find a sense of calm in the absence of color. I’ve worked hard to remove the need for color from the equation in my pieces. I feel that the posture, gestures, composition, mood and style play the key roles and it's possible for the composition to feel whole and complete without color. My hope is that this nostalgically familiar yet neutral palette is at home in any setting, around a multitude of different styles and personal tastes. There are of course exceptions and a few instances in which I’ve worked in a monochromatic palette (or very limiteds other than black and white) in which I feel the color plays a role in telling the story. Although my paintings “read as black and white, there are often complex, intensely colorful layers of underpainting that are intended to provide depth and interest, and subtly show through the layers, here and there; revealing that it isn’t truly all black and white.