Featured Artist Chantelle Sales

Artsy Shark is pleased to present featured artist Chantelle Sales, who celebrates color in her wonderful abstract work.

Coming from a graphic design background, I appreciate the fundamental ‘orderliness’ of well-executed design—the demonstration of skill that can take raw elements and combine them to create an effective whole, the message uncluttered by extraneous information. Despite this appreciation, I’ve often felt at odds with graphic design’s indelible connection to the coldly impersonal world of commerce, dictated by rules and expectations.

I’ve found liberation through painting. My earlier work was focused on figurative and photo-realism, but I soon found myself gravitating toward pure abstraction. However, my early attempts at abstraction seemed so unstructured and wild that they never felt truly ‘finished’ in my eyes. It was during this exploration that I realized that the thick acrylic paint I had been using was not the ideal medium for the new works I wanted to create.

It dawned on me one day to try using the acrylic inks that had been languishing in my paint box. And as I began to work with this new medium, I knew I had finally found the way. It was truly a ‘eureka’ moment: I now had a means with which to create something that united my disparate creative impulses—wildly unstructured versus tightly controlled, organic versus mechanical—all the while allowing me to hone a ‘craftsman’s’ work ethic.

I developed a customized palette of hand-blended gradients, using this palette to create vibrant compositions built on a ‘skeleton’ of pure line and shape.

My work is a celebratory result of this process. I see my work as a carefully executed ‘visual chemical reaction’—a ‘rainbow viewed under a microscope’ as it were—with each swatch in my palette acting as a molecule—vibrant, energetic and intricately linked with its neighbor. My ongoing challenge is how to find new ways of making these ‘molecules’ interact with each other—to create works that stand on their own and evolve over time, yet remain harmoniously connected to their predecessors.