I engage with monochrome oil paintings, each completed in a single session and often reflecting my body of drawings. The process is slow and deliberate, beginning long before paint touches the surface. Weeks are spent preparing the ground through stretching, sanding, and priming to create a site of encounter where paint and surface can begin to speak.
I approach each painting as a new conversation. The surface holds potential, but no guarantees. Each painting is completed in one continuous session, preserving a moment of direct engagement shaped by hesitation, human error, and the material’s resistance. The paintings are not about control, but about attention and response.
Colour functions as a tool, not a subject. Working with a single hue allows subtle shifts in light, texture, and surface to take on greater significance. It is a way of resisting narrative, holding ambiguity, and deepening the viewer’s engagement.
The paintings are not images but experiences, surfaces that invite sustained looking and continue to reveal themselves. They are both present and elusive, open to doubt and to the intimacy of close engagement.
My work is held in private collections in the UK, Switzerland, New Zealand and Australia.
CV:
2025 AUTO AMOR PROJECT, Auto Amor, Dunton Green, Group Show
2025 MA Interim Show, City & Guilds of London Art School, Group Show
2025 Your Work Here, The Amelia Scott, Tunbridge Wells, Kent, Group Show
2024 Secret Postcard Show 2024, The Old Lock Up Gallery, Derbyshire Peak District, Group Show
2024 Works on Paper, Rush Coffee Group, Tunbridge Wells, Kent, Solo Show
2023 Small Works Winter Show 2023, Spring Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, Group Show
2023 Freelands Painting Prize 2023, Freelands Foundation Project Space, London, Group Show
2023 Anxiety of Interdisciplinary 2.0, Cambridge University, Group Show
2023 Graduate Showcase, Cambridge School of Art, Degree Show
2023 Midpoint, Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, Group Show
2022 Intensify, Ruskin Gallery, Cambridge, Group Show
2022 No Imagination, Unit 15, The Grafton, Cambridge, Group Show
2021 re-emerge, Ruskin Gallery, Cambridge, Group Show
2021 Exposure, Ruskin Gallery, Cambridge, Group Show
Awards:
2024 Leverhulme Scholarship
2023 Dr Supanee Gazeley Fine Art Award 2023
2023 Freelands Painting Prize 2023
Education:
2024-2025 MA Fine Art, City and Guilds of London Art School
2020-2023 BA (Hons) Fine Art, Cambridge School of Art, Anglia Ruskin University, First Class Honours
Publications:
101 contemporary artists and more… Volume 10, Collect Art, 2025
Collect Art Summer Issue, Volume 70, June 2025
Freelands Painting Prize 2023, Freelands Foundation 2023
Socials and Contact:
Instagram: @chloeculley_
Email: studio@chloeculley.uk