About the Artist:
Chatham Meade Kemp has taught painting and drawing at William Carey University for over 14+ years. She received her Master's of Fine Arts degree in painting from Indiana University in Bloomington in 2007 and her Bachelor's of Arts degree from the University of Southern Mississippi in 2004. From early on in life, Chatham's life was centered around making art, traveling to museums, and interacting with arts. She is the daughter of James W. Meade who has been an art faculty member at the University of Southern Mississippi for over 40 years and Myra Meade who taught art and ceramics to high school students and elementary school students in addition to being a landscape painter. It is her pleasure and privilege both in teaching and artistic production to give back to her native south Mississippi. Recently, Chatham was awarded an artist fellowship grant by the Mississippi Arts Commission and her paintings were also selected to be a part of the prestigious Mississippi Invitational at the Mississippi Museum of Art by guest juror Carla Hanzal. Her work was also recently featured in a National Juried Exhibition at the University of Southern Mississippi and invitational exhibitions at Southeastern Louisiana University and the Lauren Rogers Museum of Art.
Artist statement
My paintings celebrate my love of making discoveries with the expressive power of color and the physical process of layering paint on canvas. Each work walks a line between representation and abstraction. Certainly, they suggest natural forms such as plants, trees and flowers, not to mention weather patterns and other natural world references. Yet, first, they are also concrete forms where I attempt to organize and harness the energies of color, shape, light, marks and patterns.
Fundamental to my paintings is the south Mississippi landscape that I call home. Here there is no long view of the natural world. Instead, one is perpetually staggered by the bright sun and sky and the intense, highly-charged colors of trees and flowers always so close at hand, blanketed by humidity. It is my hope that the paintings are like a long walk in this environment where one is, at times, overwhelmed by the sensations of light and color, but it is the overall impact of the experience that one remembers. What interests me in painting is composing an entire world made of fragments – a patch of light here, the suggestion of a color or a shape there –that flow together in a way that is not always logical, temporally or spatially. I feel, as human beings, we have an amazing ability to revise, compress and fuse together elements that constitute the memory of our experiences. The tension of making these revisions and fusions happen on a canvas, whether it is through juxtaposing one color with another or suggesting forms that seem to jump from one moment in time to another, is, what I believe, gives my paintings their bite.
Most recently my paintings have been influenced by working on location in Kona, Hawaii, where I studied and painted the plants after receiving a professional development grant. The Hawaii paintings were made one year after I worked painting on location in Cortona, Italy. I feel my current body of paintings is about me working out how both of those influences fit together when I’m working in the studio. I love the earthy colors of the Italian architecture and landscape with its grays and ochres next to terre verde silvery greens. The order and organization of Italy is so diametrically opposed to the organic chaos and activity of my paintings that I like how provides great balance and challenges me to push myself especially when it comes to the light and shape organization in my paintings. It’s been a hugely helpful influence on my work. From Hawaii I feel a great kindship to the heat and abundant growth of plants in Mississippi. I think going to Hawaii made me appreciate the particulars of the weather and plants we have at home. Hawaii also made me care about ecology and wonder how I can better help the environment around me. My paintings fit into a celebration of the landscape that I hope prompts the viewer to care more about their environment. In my paintings I think I am always overcoming disorder and creating a particular world with its own logic of colors, shapes, and marks. I continue to try to work out these two impulses for order and focus as well as for the organic and luscious. These propel me forward in my current body of work which continues to be about being immersed in the landscape.
Chatham Meade Kemp has taught painting and drawing at William Carey University for over 14+ years. She received her Master's of Fine Arts degree in painting from Indiana University in Bloomington in 2007 and her Bachelor's of Arts degree from the University of Southern Mississippi in 2004. From early on in life, Chatham's life was centered around making art, traveling to museums, and interacting with arts. She is the daughter of James W. Meade who has been an art faculty member at the University of Southern Mississippi for over 40 years and Myra Meade who taught art and ceramics to high school students and elementary school students in addition to being a landscape painter. It is her pleasure and privilege both in teaching and artistic production to give back to her native south Mississippi. Recently, Chatham was awarded an artist fellowship grant by the Mississippi Arts Commission and her paintings were also selected to be a part of the prestigious Mississippi Invitational at the Mississippi Museum of Art by guest juror Carla Hanzal. Her work was also recently featured in a National Juried Exhibition at the University of Southern Mississippi and invitational exhibitions at Southeastern Louisiana University and the Lauren Rogers Museum of Art.
Artist statement
My paintings celebrate my love of making discoveries with the expressive power of color and the physical process of layering paint on canvas. Each work walks a line between representation and abstraction. Certainly, they suggest natural forms such as plants, trees and flowers, not to mention weather patterns and other natural world references. Yet, first, they are also concrete forms where I attempt to organize and harness the energies of color, shape, light, marks and patterns.
Fundamental to my paintings is the south Mississippi landscape that I call home. Here there is no long view of the natural world. Instead, one is perpetually staggered by the bright sun and sky and the intense, highly-charged colors of trees and flowers always so close at hand, blanketed by humidity. It is my hope that the paintings are like a long walk in this environment where one is, at times, overwhelmed by the sensations of light and color, but it is the overall impact of the experience that one remembers. What interests me in painting is composing an entire world made of fragments – a patch of light here, the suggestion of a color or a shape there –that flow together in a way that is not always logical, temporally or spatially. I feel, as human beings, we have an amazing ability to revise, compress and fuse together elements that constitute the memory of our experiences. The tension of making these revisions and fusions happen on a canvas, whether it is through juxtaposing one color with another or suggesting forms that seem to jump from one moment in time to another, is, what I believe, gives my paintings their bite.
Most recently my paintings have been influenced by working on location in Kona, Hawaii, where I studied and painted the plants after receiving a professional development grant. The Hawaii paintings were made one year after I worked painting on location in Cortona, Italy. I feel my current body of paintings is about me working out how both of those influences fit together when I’m working in the studio. I love the earthy colors of the Italian architecture and landscape with its grays and ochres next to terre verde silvery greens. The order and organization of Italy is so diametrically opposed to the organic chaos and activity of my paintings that I like how provides great balance and challenges me to push myself especially when it comes to the light and shape organization in my paintings. It’s been a hugely helpful influence on my work. From Hawaii I feel a great kindship to the heat and abundant growth of plants in Mississippi. I think going to Hawaii made me appreciate the particulars of the weather and plants we have at home. Hawaii also made me care about ecology and wonder how I can better help the environment around me. My paintings fit into a celebration of the landscape that I hope prompts the viewer to care more about their environment. In my paintings I think I am always overcoming disorder and creating a particular world with its own logic of colors, shapes, and marks. I continue to try to work out these two impulses for order and focus as well as for the organic and luscious. These propel me forward in my current body of work which continues to be about being immersed in the landscape.
