arts
Chantal – Everything I Like
Scarborough Calling: Part 8
Chantal examines an exquisite piece made of sea glass
Andrew Liddle chats to multi-media artist Chantal Anderton about her Open Studio Saturdays
Meet Chantal Anderton, one of Scarborough’s most exciting and original talents. Actually, you can - and simply should - meet her in the flesh today (15th June) and every Saturday until August 4th.
Chantal's Treasures
She’s generously opening to the public her house of delights and surprises, of visual metaphors and allusions, which she shares with her husband, the sculptor Mark Anderton, as part of Scarborough’s Festival of Arts.
She’s not long back from a major exposition at Pornic in France where her pieces were admired alongside those of such international luminaries as sculptors Giovanni Crippa and Ulrich Schnackenberg, naturalistic portraitist Bivan and, not least, the multi-award-winning social documentary photographer Nieves Loperana de Saa.
Mixing recently in such company, understandably Chantal has no wish to call her Open Studio Saturdays an ‘exhibition’. “Let’s just say I’m inviting the public to come and see the sort of work I do.”
A Crowded Corner
Now the sort of work she does as a hugely inventive ‘mixed media artist’ is as hard to classify as it is easy to admire. “I’m not into genres, categories and labels,” she says with feeling. “I create what I like, and only what I like.” Not for nothing is this most personal of shows being called “Everything I Like”.
If it reflects a totally eclectic taste for the brightly visual and tactile, and a wide range of technical skills, it also gives a clue to her rich and varied background. At times her biography reads like that of somebody from the Bloomsbury set of the 1920s, artily unconventional and self-consciously modernist.
She is one of the five children of the acclaimed sculptor Tim Scott, still active in his late eighties and currently seeing through to publication his latest book, a work of autobiography. Her mother, now in her nineties, was the Sri Lankan beauty he met on a Thames barge when they were both students in London. He’d qualified as an architect having studied in Paris Le Corbusier’s structuralist principles, but followed his heart and pursued art. His father, A.C. Scott, was a professor at Wisconsin University specialising in Oriental performing arts. Two of his many books, The Kabuki Theatre of Japan and The Classical Theatre of China, are still in print, acknowledged as authoritative.
Chantal was born in London and received her early education in East Sussex, boarding at one of the Ralph Steiner kindergartens run on progressive lines intended to develop pupils' intellectual, artistic, and practical skills, with a focus on imagination and creativity.
Her house is a gallery showcasing her own creations
The family home was in Peckham Rye but much of her summers were spent in Filey which her father remembered fondly from his own childhood. She spent two years in her late teens living with her grandmother in Kandy, experiencing life at the heart of Sri Lanka. “I wore a saree and learnt something of what colonial life had been like.” She remembers the heat and the vibrancy of the colours, thinks that both influenced her art.
From an early age she had loved nothing more than to draw and paint and she studied at the famous Camberwell Art College and the Central School of Art, now St Martin’s. Later she would qualify as a jeweller, mastering the essential skills of enamelling, soldering, setting, chasing and repoussé.
Madonna and Child
“I think I am a product of so many early experiences,” she ponders. Her formative years, it seems, equipped her to become the archetypal mixed-media artist. Whatever her medium, whether she chooses to dip her brush in acrylics, gouache, enamels or watercolour or thread her needle through canvas or silk, embroidering or bejewelling - all her images are melodic, dreamlike, bursting with vitality. The lines weave rhythmically in and out of perspective, displaying Picasso-like distortions, Matisse abstractions and her female countenances put me in mind of those of the Brazilian, Anita Malfatti.
She is anything but conventional, will paint with domestic Dulux on small squares of sheet metal, drip paint on and let it run and congeal - and yet is fiercely critical of meaningless abstractions, the phoney and pretentious. The discussion turns to the pure, unalloyed aesthetics of Expressionism - art as a means of expressing the obscure, not to be confused with the impostor, obscurity of expression. She is very clear about this distinction.
Shades of Sri Lanka in this elephant
A great beachcomber, many of her pieces of ‘Yemaya’, that is hand-made sea glass jewellery, recycle beautiful fragments washed up and rendered opaque by prolonged immersion, threaded on copper wire. She feels a particular affinity for the sea - which she swims in each day - and her work of this kind celebrates Yemoja, the African mother of humanity, goddess of creation.
Finally, she explains how many of her themes have, albeit unconsciously, derived from the raw emotional data of her childhood. There are clowns from the circuses that came to Peckham, elephants from Sri Lanka, crabs that crawled across Filey beach and Punch and Judy.
Lucky
Lucky at home
Lucky, her loveable Romanian rescue dog, features often in pen and ink drawings which are perfectly naturalistic, capturing not only her appearance but character.
Chantal in her time has played many parts, jeweller, real estate promoter, dairy maid, social services carer, health worker. She’s kept her own shop, run her own gallery. Above all she’s brought up three girls and been married for 30 years.
Her work is as varied and colourful as her life has been and in the name of art she’s inviting us all into her world. Chantal says she creates ‘everything I like’! It’s safe to say the public are going to like what she creates.
Her house is a treasure trove, a living gallery, three storeys crowded with Expressionist art and artefacts, every work different. 3 Aberdeen Place, between 12 and 4 is the place to see it all, for the next several Saturdays.