About the Artist:
Chatham Meade Kemp has taught painting and drawing at William Carey University for over 15+ 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. Chatham is proud to be a member of the Hattiesburg Women's Art Collective.
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.
Chatham Meade Kemp has taught painting and drawing at William Carey University for over 15+ 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. Chatham is proud to be a member of the Hattiesburg Women's Art Collective.
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.
