About
Aleah Chapin's paintings pair an exquisite command of rendering the body with an equally fluent language of environment and atmosphere. Her early portraits fixed on the women of her upbringing in the Pacific Northwest, their faces and skin revealing a singular topography set against the rugged forests and terrain of her youth. That same facility with paint and the figure has since pushed into new territory, retaining the grounding of an intimately depicted hand or a pair of legs amid an emanating light with no single source. The result is warm and illuminating rather than simply descriptive, a scene built from the inside.
A sense of urgency propels Chapin's paintings. Where a viewer was once pulled in by the contours of a particular body or by the exquisite paint application, recent works offer something just as magnetic but harder to name. That curious draw has shifted from an interest in skill toward a desire to read the surface and composition before language catches up. Chapin rewards that instinct without resolving it. Close looking transforms the experience rather than breaks it, as the seemingly sharp image softens into visible brushwork, loose and unguarded, its charge intact rather than dispersed.
Chapin works as an intuitive draftsperson, and her compositions carry that instinct even in their most resolved passages. A recurring palette of blues and pinks sets a register that is at once bodily and otherworldly, threaded through with hard lines of light that cut across the canvas like an emanating source, akin to a geological fault or circuitry. These lines organize the composition as much as any figure does, and the figure itself often pushes against its own containment, a hand or a knee meeting the edge of the canvas with enough pressure to suggest the body continues past the frame. Pristine passages of rendered flesh sit directly against areas left raw and quick. Line accrues and winds a path between worlds known and evoked, kinetic even at rest.
Each canvas is created in layers, and the two modes of mark-making come from different places in her process. The more realistic passages develop from direct observation and photographic reference, close and exacting with detail. The abstract gestures begin further from the eye, following an intuitive pull rather than anything seen. Chapin keeps her paint translucent and her brushwork visible, leaving legible traces of her hand moving across the canvas. Light, once a secondary element in support of the figure, has become a subject just as important, something she now constructs from within the painting rather than finding externally. The effect is a dimensionality that reads less like a captured place and more like a built one, charged with potential rather than settled.
Faces are largely absent from this newer work. Hands carry much of the expression instead, reaching, pressing, sometimes open in a gesture that reads as address, standing in for the fixed cue of a face. What ties the realism and the abstraction together is not a boundary but a shared aim. Chapin applies the same exacting attention to both registers, regardless of which one looks looser on the surface. The two languages are not opposites in her work so much as two ways of reaching toward the same elusive thing, one starting from what can be seen, the other from what can only be felt.
Aleah Chapin was born in 1986 on Whidbey Island, WA. Her work has been exhibited at Flowers Gallery in Hong Kong, London, and New York, Simard Bilodeau Contemporary in Los Angeles, the Belvedere Museum in Vienna, the Muskegon Museum of Art, Oceanside Museum of Art, the Museu Europeu d'Art Modern in Barcelona, and the National Portrait Gallery in London, among others. She attended the MacDowell Residency Program and received the National Portrait Gallery's BP Portrait Award, the Promising Young Artist Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant nomination. Chapin holds an MFA from the New York Academy of Art and a BFA from Cornish College of the Arts, and has been the subject of a BBC documentary on her practice. She currently lives and works in Los Angeles.
Statement
As a painter of people, I think of the human body as a calligraphy to which we are innately literate. While we live in an era of widening physical and emotional disconnection, we are also bound by deep currents of collective thought and feeling. The spaces between us are the scaffolding of my current work, and I'm interested in the ways we disconnect, reconnect, isolate and integrate, both within our own selves and in relationship with each other.
Drawing inspiration from artists like Jenny Saville, Agnes Pelton and James Turrell, my work explores how the physicality of the human body can be a catalyst for intangible experience. With oil on canvas, I employ traditional techniques to paint recognizable forms of the human figure, often my own body, in conversation with automatic, intuitive abstraction. My practice begins with getting quiet and going inward, observing the sensations inside of me until a shape or pattern shows up. I follow that thread, layering, removing, controlling and allowing, until the image hits my nervous system in a way that feels right.
I crave finding cohesion in opposites: the physicality of the body in tandem with the ethos of being, and, technically, the relationship between intention and accident, observation and imagination, flatness and fullness of form. The more pain and fracture I see in the world, the more I want to create, not from avoidance, but because creation is the opposite of destruction, and that feels like the most important thing I can offer.