This exhibition shows new artwork by painter Challoner Spokes.
Challoner’s paintings are about growing, cultivation and horticulture on an individual and personal level. Her work is full of big colour, shape and bold contrasts.
The paintings depict themes of growing and maintaining distanced friendships, the cultivation of memory, and the joy of gardening. Things that have become vital to the artist over the last 2 years.
Hello! I’m Challoner Spokes and I’m a painter inspired by nature, horticulture and relationships.
I’m delighted to be opening my studio this summer and I’m thrilled that I’ll be sharing my 40th anniversary with Oxfordshire Artweeks 2022! I hope that you can come and visit my studio for art and a slice of birthday cake.
A lot of my paintings are done in oil paint or acrylic. I love the feel of paint. It’s buttery and smooth and the act of putting the paint on canvas is delicious. I make my own canvas boards so that I can feel completely involved in whole process.
To create my artwork, I go for a walk with my sketchbook, a 4b pencil and a flask of tea. I’ll sketch from life, being brave with my pencil marks and not rubbing out any mistakes and then I take the drawings back to my studio to work into bigger paintings. I’ll make notes about the colours and occasionally take a photo if the colours are particularly good, but I won’t work directly from a photo. I like that my sketches are slightly removed from the reality. I enjoy my own perspective and mis-rememberings of a subject.
I start a painting with a wash of grubby-pink paint. Then, with a dark purple, I draw my composition on the canvas. I paint the darkest areas first, then the lightest areas, then I deal with the middle-tone colours. I work around the whole canvas, one colour at a time.
This year I’ve been really inspired by my garden and the vegetables that I’ve been growing in it. It’s been so wonderful to get my hands into the soil and nurture seedlings into plants for my dinner plate. I’ve also really enjoyed visits to my local “Pick Your Own” farm. Plants and cut flowers are heavily featured in my artwork, along with other horticultural themes and nods towards the nostalgic and memory.
My work is representational but it is not bound by reality. I’m interested in shape, line and colour and I think my artwork reflects that. For me, light is important but primarily to show up contrasts in colour. I enjoy the line that interrupts colours to define shape and objects.