Aleah Chapin

Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA

Artist 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...

Artwork