Chloe Fremantle

ELECTED ARWS 2018 & RWS 2021

 

Chloe Fremantle has Painted  and exhibited since leaving Byam Shaw Art School in London in 1972. She has Lived in Italy, France, Scotland, New York and London.
 
As well as in London, her work has been shown in San Francisco, Hong Kong, Italy, Germany  and New York.  Galleries include: Curwen Gallery London, Jenny Blyth Fine Art Oxford, Jernigan Wicker Gallery San Francisco and the Eagle Gallery London. She has worked on several year-long projects and commissions since 2005 including Kew Gardens, Oxford Botanic Gardens, and Highgreen Manor in Northumberland.
 
Recently she has also worked on urban cityscapes, specifically of the area local to her studio (destined to be demolished shortly) as well as on her ongoing Memento Mori series celebrating the transience of life (currently drawn from responses to French cemeteries).
 
Chloe takes photographs as springboards for her work, responding to light, colour and form in what she sees around her. The photos predict paintings, usually gouaches on paper. These ideas then often develop further into acrylics on canvas.
 
This method became necessary when Chloe worked on outdoor projects and commissions (at Kew Gardens, Oxford Botanic Gardens and Highgreen, Northumberland). Being unable to spend a full year at each place, she visited them regularly through the seasons, walked, photographed and responded, and then worked from the photos in the studio – although she does still occasionally sketch in-situ.
 
The photographic process of capturing the initial immediacy of what excites her eye, then allowing the ideas to evolve and develop, until invariably the paintings assume their very own identity and presence, almost beyond her own dictates and expectations, is ever fascinating and absorbing - that from a simple starting point a whole other reality emerges.