About 

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. I’m interested in the ways we disconnect, reconnect, isolate and integrate within our own selves and 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. Working in oil on canvas from small to large scale, my practice begins with stillness. Going inward, I gather all the information my nervous system has picked up, waiting until a shape or pattern emerges. Then I follow that thread, layering, removing, controlling and allowing, until the image lands in a way that feels true. This process can take weeks to months, using everything from imagination to memory to intense external observation.

When I was 13, I was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease that left me tethered to a body full of pain. The only thing that helped was to create. Decades later, my body is healthy, but the world is suffering. Just as when I was a child, I’m finding that the more pain there is, the more I want to create. Not from a place of avoidance, but because creation is the opposite from destruction, and in a world that is breaking apart, this feels important.

Bio

Aleah Chapin (b. 1986 Seattle, WA) is a painter whose direct portrayals of the human form have expanded the conversation around western culture’s representations of the body in art. Her work has explored aging, gender and beauty, influenced in part by the community within which she was raised on an island in the Pacific Northwest. In 2020, Chapin’s work took a radical shift inward, expanding her visual language in order to better express the truth of her experience. Consistent throughout her career, Chapin’s work asks the question: What does it mean to exist within a body today?

Chapin holds an MFA from the New York Academy of Art and a BFA from Cornish College of the Arts. She has attended residencies at the Leipzig International Art Program (Germany) and MacDowell (United States) and has exhibited both Nationally and Internationally at Flowers Gallery (New York, London, Hong Kong), The Belvedere Museum (Vienna), and the National Portrait Gallery (London) among others. Chapin was a recipient of the Promising Young Painters Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (New York), the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant (Canada), a Postgraduate Fellowship from The New York Academy of Art, and won the BP Portrait Award at the National Portrait Gallery (London). Her work has been published extensively, including New American Paintings, ArtMaze Magazine, 50 Contemporary Women Artists, and Radio Juxtapoz. Chapin is also a subject in the BBC documentary titled “Portrait of an Artist”. In 2024, she was a featured artist and co-juror for an exhibition titled More Disruption: Representational Art in Flux at Oceanside Museum of Art in California. Aleah Chapin’s most recent solo show, titled Night Bloom, took place at Simard Bilodeau Contemporary in Los Angeles, where she currently lives and works.