Bath Life magazine, March 2020
I’m posting some images of an article in this month’s Bath Life magazine, just published. Lovely to be featured on the cover, and delighted that the editorial team also chose to feature an image of the latest Print Club edition. Nice to see it in print, if that isn’t too meta
Modular Locus / In conversation with Freeny Yianni
FY Tell us a bit about your approach to your work. How would you describe it? What are you looking for in a subject? How has your style developed, and what matters to you?
CE Sometime back in 1984 I saw, and used, the first Apple Mac computer to be imported to the UK. It was an important moment and one that resonates to this day. In that moment I decided I wanted to use digital systems tools to draw my work, as opposed to the more traditional media I was being trained to use. In some senses, you could characterise this as the difference between rock music and electronica. Rock music remains super relevant of course, esp the post-rock movement, but there seems to be space in the discourse for a more contemporary means of production too.
The digital offers a host of revolutionary options, many of which revolve around the idea of the edit, and the remix. Effectively you can draw, colour and model, and then refine, edit and remix, to arrive at images that simply weren’t possible to create before the digital revolution.
In conversation with Freeny Yianni at the Brewhouse Gallery, March 2020.
Modular Locus
A solo show of digital drawings at the Brewhouse Arts Centre in Taunton, curated by Freeny Yianni and Close Ltd.
Critique and action / Plastic pastoral / Tao
These two latest prints are entitled Tao. One is earth, one is sand. Back in the eighties when my main concern would’ve simply been about how to create and sustain a creative studio practice, I was hugely influenced and impressed by the work of April Greiman. I’m not sure if her works have stood the test of time, but in many ways that is not the point, I love the idea that a work in some way defines or represents the moment that it is made in.
Modular Locus / Brewhouse Gallery
A solo show of digital drawings at the Brewhouse Arts Centre in Taunton, curated by Freeny Yianni and Close Ltd.
Print Club, edition 13 in progress
I’m working on some initial colour proofs for my first Experimental Print Club edition of 2020. If you’d like to know more about my Print Club. It’s an ongoing experiment in contemporary print, and an opportunity to collect exclusive limited edition works from the studio, posted out directly to club members, alongside invitations to events, and studio news. All powered by Patreon.
Pride 2020
Starting the week with a post to highlight my recent work in support of the the LGBT Foundation. The Pride print is available as an open edition for 12 months only, ending on 31st October 2020. You can read more about the work on Blackwater’s website
10 Artworks From Artnet’s Gallery Network
interStella / Quad by Chuck Elliott. Inspired by the work of Frank Stella, this geometric pattern print riffs on ideas of the changing seasons and plant life through bold and bright colours. The colour saturated work is sure to enliven a winter day. Sara Carson
12 / in production at Ripe Digital
12 in production at Ripe Digital. Rik was kind enough to film the book in production for my blog, fascinating to see a modern digital press working. It’s a long way from the letter press and optical type setting we studied at college…
Chuck Elliott / 12
Sometime towards the end of 2019, I started working on a new book, broadly designed to catalogue some of my favourite images from the past 12 years. Beautifully printed by Ripe Digital in Corsham, the book features 100 large format pages, with accompanying short texts that I hope illuminate the project succinctly, and with a little humour.
Chuck Elliott / 12
Sometime towards the end of last year I started working on a new book, broadly designed to catalogue some of my favourite images from the past 12 years. Beautifully printed by Ripe Digital in Corsham, the book features 100 large format pages, with accompanying short texts that I hope illuminate the project succinctly, and with a little humour.
Coombe Gallery, Winter Show
Thought I’d post this shot from Mark Riley’s always fabulous Coombe Gallery in Dartmouth. They’re featuring my Cal R piece in the window as part of their Winter group show…
Saatchi Art / New Year 2020
Delighted to be included in Saatchi Art’s latest curated selection, by chief curator and VP Rebecca Wilson. If you’d like to view the work, it’s online here…
Moniker Art Fair / Opening night
Thrilled to be included at this year's Moniker Art Fair once again, courtesy of Cardiff's leading edge Blackwater Gallery, owned and curated by Jamie Aherne. Amongst a large selection of works on show is this newly framed Motorik / TWO / chromatic shift piece, available from the gallery, or online.
interStella / QUAD
intersStella is a new series of sixteen drawings, arranged into four quads, with four works in each quad. These new works on paper comprise Venn like geometries based on circadian rhythms, bought to life with a series of sixteen colour variants, which I hope speak to the idea of the four seasons, plant life, and perhaps tulips in particular. They clearly also riff on the work of Frank Stella, a true hero of colour abstraction
Hive #1 / EPC / duality : singularity
I’ve been working on a new series of drawings called Hive. It’s currently unclear exactly how these studies are going to ultimately manifest themselves, but I suspect it’ll be as a series of large format panels, possibly in sequence. For the moment however, I thought I’d print a single, smaller component of the series as a new piece for my Experimental Print Club. I’ve been thinking about the nature and problem of working in a rapidly climate changing world, and how best to integrate that thinking with my daily studio practice, both as a series of reflections, which is a large part of what the studio is about I think, and as physical works that can create some kind of response to the concepts we’re being asked to consider, and act on.
Experimental Print Club #11
I’ve just dispatched edition #11 for the print club. It’s titled interStella / EPC / home. The piece combines a variant from my new interStella series with photography from the garden, specifically the soil under my sweet peas. I like the idea of experimenting with ideas around combining drawing and photography, and of course the subject matter alludes to ideas including the sense of place, the idea of growth, and the earth, or soil, as root, and begins to unpack some new ideas about permaculture, and how that may sit with my practice in the future.
Moniker 2019
Really looking forward to exhibiting work with the Blackwater Gallery at Moniker again this year. This October, Moniker brings its acclaimed event format to Chelsea, which has for 9 years attracted contemporary art collectors in their thousands to East London. Moving from Shoreditch to Chelsea marks a year of radical change, as Moniker continues to push the narrative of urban art.
interStella 2019
I’ve been working on a new series of 16 drawings, entitled interStella. It’s kind of a mash up of a number of geometries I’ve been studying, but most obviously an exploration, and complication, of the maths underlying the early works of American legend Frank Stella. I first saw his beautiful, epic, artworks at MOCA in LA in 1991, and was completely blown away. So it’s been on my mind for a long time to try and unpack some of his thinking, and riff on that beautiful style that came out of NYC in the late sixties. I hope I’ve bought a little fresh thinking and technique to bear too.
Summer 2019, interStella WIP
The inclusion of garden photography is coming in from that idea of combining the maths with and from nature, a kind of hybrid organic / digital fusion that hopefully speaks to the idea of the digital overlaying the natural world in ways that are both positive and beneficial. I’ve been out on some demos with Extinction Rebellion recently, enjoying the positivity of the movement, and am keen to try and think about how a contemporary art studio can sit lightly with the issues surrounding climate change.