#stephenchambers

https://www.nga.gov/audio-video/video/chiaroscuro-ra.html

The Court of Redonda.  Stephen Chambers.  

The Heong Gallery, Downing College, Cambridge.

Colour is a very important part of his artwork.

His practice wanders from area to area, but is very much led by curiosity  He doesn't make work as an expression of feeling. But rather an idea. And in ways those ideas are articulated is what feels most appropriate to the idea at the time.

He doesn't use too many colours within the paintings, but the colours themselves are very rich so it makes up for a lack of diversity. 

There is a voice at the back of his mind what tells him that things can be simple. And to be as simple as possible. As there can be quite a lot of ingredients to make it simple. 

He says there is a lot of flatness in his work. There is penitential narrative in all areas of his work. He is purposely trying to provoke thought. 

These paintings were painted over a two year period. They are, in a response to work he had previously been making. Which were much simpler with single figures. He was trying to make a much bigger thing of the setting rather than primarily the figure. The faces are frequently surrounded by speech bubbles and with dots on their faces. What he is attempting to do is animate flatness. To animate nothingness.

Various things are a depiction of things are invisible. Speech bubbles are a visual of sound. Because there is no shadow there is a blurred line between floor and the infinity of background. He likes the notion of marking where things land. These are paintings about gravity.

The paintings begin from making drawings. "Falling back to gravity" A suspended leap. He attempts to keep the viewer engaged with the use of vibrant warm colours. Everything in the paintings that is the dark element, the furniture  is the original colour of the canvas. "An inverted negative". 

William Blake is a great influence of Chambers. Some of his work is a response to his work. A cross-time "Love affair".

There has been increasingly a an ongoing quest of wanting to a series of paintings what were easy to reconise by him. Paintings that were acknowledgements of his fondness for crosswords.

Work being led by curiosity  How you deal with a reflective surface, is to not deal with it at all.