Two Painters - SOLD
By Chloe Cumming
Graphite and coloured pencil on watercolour paper
Original artwork
Framed
Image size: H: 19cm x W: 14cm
Framed size: H:40cm x W:34cm
This extraordinary and intimate dual portrait of Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin is one of a 2022 series of painted and drawn works by Norfolk-based Chloe Cumming. Both van Gogh and Gauguin experimented with the expressive possibilities of colour and line to create distinctive, personal styles of painting. Chloe, in her own style, does the same thing.
Working in France at the end of the nineteenth century, the artists' infamous and turbulent friendship inspired each other during a nine-week period in the autumn of 1888. Chloe's drawing conveys the turbulence, anxiety and endurance of that period of proximity, just ahead of van Gogh cutting off his ear lobe.
Chloe created the first of this series of haunting portraits to mark the 2022 Van Gogh show at The Courtauld, London. The show took, as its springboard, van Gogh’s iconic 'Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear', one of the most celebrated works in The Courtauld’s collection, and brought together, for the first time, half of the self-portraits he created during his short years as a painter.
The hugely energetic pencil marks intense and hugely expressive - utterly fascinating and intriguing, in fact. Like The Courtauld, she offers us another chance to connect with this much misunderstood artist.
"I do feel a kinship with Vincent. There’s something about the urgency of the way he worked and the relentless, visceral connection to feeling, which is what allows his art to resonate now, in part. There’s also something about the warmth of his colours and the depiction of warmth and heat - the need for warmth, the need for connection through art, when connecting with people is challenging and often painful, as it was for him."
ABOUT CHLOE CUMMING
After many years of creativity, in which she has built up a following of collecters, Chloe makes her art gallery debut at Spencer House Gallery this winter.
She is an unusual draughtswoman and observer of life. Her art output is prolific, as much a release and expression of her own thoughts and emotions as an outpouring of recurring figurative and symbolic motifs and figures.
She tries to find something alive and beautiful in mundane or downtrodden objects or figures - hence her toilet and traffic cone collections. She is attracted by taboo subjects or by the notion that places or things are not celebrated or acceptable in 'polite society'.
Her interest in Vincent van Gogh - and, hence, her many depictions of him - is prompted by her drive to express the man behind the myth and the social and emotional barriers he faced. Like him, her own painting style is defiantly idiosyncratic and independent of any movement or genre.
In some of her more aggressive and vivid images, one can detect energetic and frenetic aspects of Francis Bacon, combined with a range of surreal and haunting elements and narratives of her own making.
She has a Fine Art degree from Kent Insititute of Art & Design and works from the studio at her Norwich home.