Back To Abstract at CBG

July 2023

A selection of paintings from Light Seeking Light 2022 curated by Jenny Blyth for the Royal Watercolour Society, London WC2. Beautiful summer paintings that reference colourfield, surrealism and abstraction. Chloe Fremantle is a member of the Royal Watercolour Society and has been painting and exhibiting internationally for forty years with work in international Collections. She has lived in New York and Italy and now splits her studio time between London and the Alpes Maritime on the Cote d’Azur. Chloe has a terrific palette, capturing the light and joy of the Mediterranean and her paintings impart surprisingly a wonderful calm that comes from a natural union that she achieves in her compositions.

Chloe Fremantle & Peter Blegvad

‘Light Seeking Light’ November 2022 curated by Jenny Blyth

Royal Watercolour Society Galleries

London WC2

​

‘Colour and I are one. I am a painter’ Paul Klee

Colour influences our perceptions, affecting our behaviour and our moods whilst our brains seek out patterns to help us assess and predict. Colour and patterning have been core to our survival since humanity began, and Art ‘manna for the soul’. From the Ancient Egyptians who used prisms to split the colours from crystals for medicinal purpose and to enhance wellbeing, to Carl Jung who said that ‘colours are the mother tongue of the subconscious’, clearly palette colours the mind. For artists, it is a path to liberation.

Chloe Fremantle’s ‘Evocations’ reflect the fleetingness of our memories, and the wealth of individual experience which inform our responses to any given moment.

Artists share with us their unique journeys through observation and expression across a limitless spectrum of creativity in varying degrees of figuration and abstraction, from the keenest depictions of realism to the dream realms of Colour Field painting. It is the artists of the 1930s and 40s who have been the most influential for Chloe Fremantle with artists such as Paul Nash, Graham Sutherland, Patrick Heron, Eileen Agar, Helen Frankenthaler as well as Henri Matisse, Braque and Picasso, clearly her muses.

There is an innate sense of joy in Chloe Fremantle’s painting irrespective of her subject. Such is the effect of colour and patterning in her work for us as viewers. On close inspection one can unravel her language of mark-making that she has developed from observations of the natural world and her immediate environment.

High up in the Alpes Maritimes, close to a much-loved pied-a-terre on the Cote d’Azur, is a beautiful cemetery that pans out over the Mediterranean below. Chloe’s Memento Mori in Black and Gold explores the curve and line of stonework and trellis, interspersed with the adornments particular to catholic French graveyards, and the flowers and succulents that flourish there.

Urbanity and politics do not go unnoticed. Her Contemplation series celebrates diversity whilst reflecting on the seemingly unreconcilable stand-off arising from Brexit. Lockdown during Covid, highlighted the nuances of Home Sweet Home, contrasting with Chloe’s explorations of space - the ‘out’ from ‘within’.

Seeds, pods and petals of myriad flora observed, inform her mark-making and are complemented by the micro of biology and cellular structure, to the macro of curves and contouring in the landscape. All of this is academic because she has over years created her own alphabet and language that has a life of its own. It is instantly recognisable and distinctly Fremantle in both palette and form. Memories and emotions through association pervade her compositions so that the initial delight that one enjoys on first inspection is challenged as we explore the complexities of her compositions. The overall effect is a ‘jazz fusion’ of balance on the canvas, the product of a life time of painting.

Text by Jenny Blyth, Curator © 2022

‘REFLECTIONS’

ART JERICHO 4 June - 5 July 2015

Chloe Fremantle has clearly found her signature - her compositions appear to come easily. Yet work that falls easy on the page is so often hard won, and Chloe has been observing and composing her art with endeavour and increasing delight for some decades.

Reflections includes artist response to gardens, to urban London scenes, to remote rural Northumberland landscapes and to a hill village in the South Of France & Oxford University Botanic Garden in acrylic on canvas and gouache on watercolour paper, small, medium and large.

MUSE IN THE GARDEN : March - May 2013

The Gallery, Oxford Botanic Garden curated by Jenny Blyth Fine Art

For the past year Chloe Fremantle, contemporary artist, has been observing the Oxford Botanic Gardens. Her paintings inhabit ambivalence, ‘visual haikus’, suspended between abstraction and figuration. Capturing the essence of the seasons as freshly dug earth transforms to summer flower-filled borders, seed pods, petals, leaves, stems and bark are captured in all their glorious colour and myriad patterns. The artist combines her depiction of flora with an element of topography to reflect the layout of the gardens, and a backcloth of distinctive sandstone walls. Essentially, Chloe Fremantle has been exploring flora for thirty years, celebrating nature and the miracle of its unending beauty.

CHLOE FREMANTLE & TAEKO MAKINO

SUMMER HAIKU at ART JERICHO

23 July – 27 August 2011

Jenny Blyth Fine Art at Art Jericho presents SUMMER HAIKU, an exhibition of paintings by CHLOE FREMANTLE and wood engravings by TAEKO MAKINO to celebrate the glory of summer at Art Jericho.

Chloe Fremantle explores the rhythm and pattern of nature inherent in feathers, petals, waves, splashes, leaves, flowers, seeds, trees, tracks, contours, spirals, curves, clouds and circles….. In the spirit of ‘visual’ Haiku, the artist uses her observation of simple elements in the natural world to impart a symbolic interpretation of universality, constraint, stillness, energy, movement, peace, freedom, chaos, imagination, beauty, endurance, strength and empathy. Delighted by the repetitions, the infinite variety, the colour and play of pattern irrespective of form, her recent paintings in oil on canvas abstract to unexpected landscape. Chloe Fremantle trained in Fine Art at Byam Shaw School of Art in London in 1968. She has been painting for forty years living in Italy, New York and London where she has been based since 1987.

Taeko Makino’s exquisite wood engravings of peonies, camellias, chrysanthemums inlaid with gilt draw directly on Japanese tradition of fine art. The artist lives and works in Tokyo.