Artist Profile, Chris Grimm: On the last Saturday of the month, you will find local artist Chris Grimm at her easel welcoming visitors to discover her paintings and her process, as part of the Jervis Bay Arts Trail. Chris is an oil painter who works from her studio in Bayswood, Vincentia in a variety of styles. We asked Chris what you will find on her easel at the open day on Saturday 28 June, 11am till 2pm.
“I’m currently working on a Jervis Bay seascape with really intense clouds,” says Chris. She explains this painting is coming from a combination of a reference photo she took, “and my experience of the reflections you get on Collingwood Beach when the sand’s wet and you get some really dramatic clouds over the Bay.”
Chris’s love of drama come through strongly in her use of perspective and high contrasts of light and shade. We asked Chris what attracted her to work in oils.
“I’d had quite a long break from painting while I was working really long hours in jobs over a number of years and I wanted to go back to painting but I’d never been all that enamoured of acrylics and I’d sort of lost my passion for watercolour.
“So I decided to try oils. I did a night course at art school in Canberra. And I just loved all the different ways you can use oils to create depth and texture and perspective, all of those things.”
Chris says her choice of oils enables her to paint in many different styles. “I can paint in a quite classic manner, for example, if I’m doing a portrait. Or I can paint a really modern type of work as well. I paint mostly landscapes, but I can imagine a whole different colour palette and use oils really effectively to do that.”
She is inspired by the dramatic use of imagined colour palettes from the Fauvists of the 1920s, who used bold colours and expressive brushstrokes to create visually striking paintings that conveyed emotion rather than accurately representing reality.
She says: “It’s those sort of imagined colours, to be able to walk through the bush and then come back and imagine that completely different colour palette of the scene, of an area I’ve been walking in, on some of my favourite walks locally.” Growing up in Canberra was a big influence on this new style, for Chris, especially her imagined colour palettes.
Art School For the Soul
When Chris went back to art school, she found the experience very freeing. “It’s really good for my soul, it gives me such a feeling of peace plus those classes just really gave me this freedom to create that I don’t think I’d ever really felt in the past.” She recommends the experience to anyone, even if you don’t have an ambition to become an exhibiting artist.
“At the time I was still in a job that was extremely stressful and it just really gave me an escape and it was a really wonderful thing to do and I’d recommend it to anyone no matter where they intend to take their art or whether they have much experience of creating art, but it gives a real positive addition to your life.”
Chris was encouraged by family and friends to take her art practice to the next level, and exhibit and sell her work. “I’m quite prolific and I started to share work with people, with friends and family. And they really liked my work. And I really enjoy being able to share work with a wider group of people.”
She exhibits at the Millhouse Gallery in Milton, which is an art society that changes over work in the gallery with every change of season. And recently, Chris held her first solo exhibition, at the Greenhouse in Huskisson.
Chris selected 25 paintings for the show over the Easter long weekend, and transformed the share-work space on Owen Street into a vibrant gallery.
At the Greenhouse, director Jamie McAinsh says: “Chris’s exhibition was a special event because it was our first art show at the Greenhouse. Chris exhibited a large collection of her landscape oil paintings to capture the minds of both visitors and locals alike. The colours and technique in Chris’s works are stunning, and she selected a perfect collection for the Greenhouse location, overlooking Jervis Bay.”
Jervis Bay is one of Chris’s favourite subjects for her landscape paintings, which tend to use a more realistic colour palette than her bush landscapes, due to the natural drama of the environment. But much of the work exhibited at The Greenhouse was the more impressionistic, bold coloured work.
Light + Perspective
The work of masters like Caravaggio, is a great inspiration to Chris in her use of light in paintings. She says: “I love really stark light in paintings, particularly in portraits. You’re dealing with light and shadow, in your creation of a face and shadows on a face. But also in landscapes, just that understanding sun through clouds, focal points and extremes of light and dark.
“It really can make a painting, take a painting from average to incredible, good use of light and dark. I’d have to say my favourite artist is Caravaggio. I grew up loving those extremes.”
She admits that she loves drama. “I like a really bright sun, probably late afternoon on a hot day where you’ve got bright sun but long shadows. I really love that. But I also love dawn light, for example, and the shadows and mistiness of that as well. But I probably tend more towards those sort of extremes of light and shadows. So I love painting long, deep shadows in my landscapes.”
Drama in Chris’s paintings can also be expressed by her use of perspective, which is amplified by her bold brushstrokes. Looking into one of Chris’s paintings can feel like you are being taken on a journey, through a big, bold foreground and into a scene.
When asked what draws her compositionally, she says: “Depth. I like to create a feeling of distance so you’re being drawn to a point far away.”
Chris says she thinks this is partly a product of her curious mind that she noticed recently on a bushwalk. “I always want to know what’s up in the distance or around the next corner. It’s like this innate sense of adventure that I have, that I always like to explore further.”
It Starts With Tone
Chris works in many, many layers to build up her paintings, often starting with a tonal painting in just two or three colours. She says visitors to her open studio on the Jervis Bay Arts Trail are often intrigued about how her paintings are created.
“I’ll often do a background using one or two colors, I’m doing a tonal painting to show where the darks and the lights are and the general shapes and that would often be a really thin layer of paint. Then I will let that dry before starting to paint the larger background areas, so normally I would do sky or with a seascape, sky and water in the colours I want those to be in, before I start laying more paint on top to add in more detail and interest.”
Another technique that Chris has been working with recently is negative painting, which she says is done by painting the background, rather than the subject directly, and allowing the subject to emerge from the surrounding area.
The Jervis Bay Arts Trail is on the last Saturday of the month, 11am-2pm. Find out more about the participating artists and how to find them on the website, which also includes a map.
