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www.chloeearly.com

Chloe’s work will stop you in your tracks and make you look closer. This is what it’s all about. Her work is simply amazing and unites street influences with fine art sensibilities to create something unique. She grew up in Cork, Ireland, just outside the city.

‘It was beautiful in a mossy, green moist kind of way. We had a lot of space, we climbed trees, nature was close. The city was big enough to have great gigs, bars, clubs, and discovering all that as a teenager seemed like an Aladdin’s Cave of new delights. I think with painting there is always two strands to the work. Painting is an all-encompassing absorbing task, the process becomes the reward.

‘I think a lot about colour, mark making, movement, composition, form; these are the bricks out of which a painting is built. For the viewer the first thing they often relate to is the imagery. Previously, landscape was my primary subject but my emphasis has now switched to the figure. Oil painting and the figure seem to belong to each other and I take a lot of pleasure in painting flesh. But mostly my paintings are about the combinations of imagery I use, unexpected pairings and trying to create a narrative and then drown it out again in paint. It’s a tug of war.

‘When I go to Italy I love seeing extended families walking together in the evenings, talking to the neighbours. I’m sure it’s got a lot to do with the weather but also sadly I think here in the UK the streets are becoming homogenized as the same chains dominate high streets up and down the country, and even from borough to borough in London, it’s all starting to look the same. Perhaps, though, the same things I despair of are one of the reasons why street art and skateboarding have taken off so much in the west, as some kind of territorial way of reclaiming ownership and leaving a mark or belonging to our surroundings.

‘When I think of street culture I think of other countries. Where I live in London there is large African and Turkish communities, the Turks stand outside their barbers, bakeries and flower shops talking late into the night.’