Aleah Chapin

ALEAH CHAPIN (b. 1986 Seattle, WA)

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 facility with the figure has since pushed into new territory, retaining the grounding of an intimately depicted hand or 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 a desire towards something just as magnetic but harder to name: to be enveloped by 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 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 knee meeting the edge of the canvas with enough pressure to suggest the body could continue past the frame. Line accrues, 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 realistic passages develop from direct observation, close and exacting with detail, while the abstract gestures follow an intuitive pull rather than anything seen. Light, once secondary to the figure, is now a subject just as important, constructed from within the painting itself. The effect reads less like a captured place and more like a built one, charged with potential rather than settled.

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, 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 and the Promising Young Artist Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. 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. She lives and works in Los Angeles.