Untitled by Jo Chate
oil on canvas
This little painting is taken from a photograph I recently came across in the studio which I took seven years ago in India. It is of the facade of an impressive building, a temple? The night before I painted it we had an artists group discussion about the film Philip Guston: A Life Lived. His work was still fresh in my mind and that particular Guston pink came through.
My practice is concerned with exploring the space between the real and the imagined. I make paintings which fuse reality and fiction. They are largely landscape based with the feel of memory – inhabited spaces, environs passed though, things seen, momentary glimpses.
Using photography to initially capture these fragments it is during the process of painting that a transformation occurs. The everyday slips and subtly shifts towards something less familiar, this allows the space for a new kind of reality to emerge.
Recent paintings have moved to a more vibrant, vivid palette - using colour they are thinking towards a brighter, different not too distant future.
www.jochate.com
@jochate
