I know that Chloe Steele loves the woods because she’s a country-loving woman with a long stride and a nifty dog. Yet there is a darkness about her landscape paintings which are as much about inside her own head as outside it; there are bottomless pools, unexplained drifts of cloud, storms brewing. Ghostly shapes drift across her canvasses as through the landscape is haunting itself. There is no jolly blue sunshine in Steele’s work but a dematerialised watery light that evokes a mood of solitary dreaming and of wandering into unvisited places. Her world is cooly tinted with dim greens, slate blues, occasionally palest pinks, once a flash of orange in a forest.
Steele’s solo exhibition at the Myrtle includes paintings, drawings and sculptures from the last 10 years.The work ranges from tiny to large – she also does vast, but not here. The tiny works have large objects in them and the large ones are densely detailed so that the scale is maintained overall. If de Kooning painted as though his subjects were at the tip of his brush, Steele paints as though here subjects are twenty feet away, near and far at the same time, so there is a dreamlike conflation of size and distance. You are always looking at a small picture of a large view – even though the exquisite drawing ‘Waiting’ is 25cm square you are looking at a monumental landscape. Likewise the central slab form of ‘Pocket’ features an oblong object recalling the stone in Poussin’s ‘Et in Arcadia Ego’, or the monolith in the opening of ‘2001, a Space Odessey’. This solidity is paradoxically undone by the limpid translucency of the painting which gives a lightness to the forms.
The artist tells me that the subject of her landscapes ‘pays tribute to place and narrative’ and many of her later paintings have their origin in her grandmother’s farm. They are evocations of place but not particular places, though there are shapes and objects that emerge as being important: soft triangular vegetal explosions intersected by strong verticals; horizontal zoning of composition, with bands of light above the horizon that destabilise the mass of forms in the centre (‘Games at Sea’ 34 x 84cm, pencil on board): lovingly detailed masses of leaves and twigs.
Steele also says she is a frustrated figure-painter, which can be detected in ‘Sinking’ (oil on linen, 50 x 70cm). Here cloud-like forms seem to stalk on stilts through the brushwood in a blueish nocturnal light, like ballerinas with skinny legs in Swan Lake. They also remind the viewer as much of the smoke that drifts past after a bomb has exploded as of the sea mist that masks the dangerous reef.
by Stephanie Douet
THE MYRTLE GALLERY
The Old Mill Basement Walsingham Norfolk
Open : Fri. Sat. Sun. 11am – 5pm
07426 295 784 / themyrtlegallery@gmail.com
Until 31st July 2014
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