Her version of real | Chantal Joffe, Scarlett and Lola
“I don’t find men very interesting to look at,” Chantal Joffe told the Telegraph a few years ago. She doesn’t feel the same way about women: her subject matter is almost always portraiture of female figures. She paints her mother, she paints her daughter Esme, she paints herself, unflinchingly (in 2018 she produced a self-portrait every day of the year), and she paints friends, and friends’ children, such as Scarlett and Lola (pictured) who have featured in her work since they were toddlers.
Scarlett and Lola, 2016, oil on board, 45.5x61cms. Photo courtesy of Castlegate House Gallery. She often uses family photos as source material, but also advertisements, fashion magazines and pornography. Models – usually friends, such as the author Olivia Laing – sit for her in her canal-side studio in Islington. She paints quickly, when she’s in the zone, in a state of near ecstasy: she likens the act to an addiction. There is a good deal of emotional power to her work, heightened by her vigorous use of colour. On the surface her paintings can seem childlike, but the distortion she builds in darkens the mood. Tellingly, she cites the photographer Diane Arbus as one of her major influences.
Also Chaim Soutine (“he never tried to make his paintings real; it was HIS version of real”), Maria Lassing and Matisse. She is big into the poets Anne Sexton and Robert Lowell. A lot of critics compare her work to that of the late Alice Neel. That’s a compliment to Neel, as well as to Joffe.
Chantal Joffe was born in the tiny Vermont town of St Albans in the USA, and moved to England at the age of 13. She studied at the Glasgow School of Art, and the Royal College of Art. Her reputation has grown, year on year, since she graduated from the latter, in 1994. She has enjoyed solo exhibitions in London, New York, Milan, Venice and Helsinki. She was unanimously awarded the Charles Woolaston award for the ‘most distinguished work’ in the 2006 Royal Academy show, and was elected to the RA in 2013.
Scarlett and Lola has recently been acquired by the Castlegate House Gallery in Cockermouth, in the Lake District, where it is on sale, for £26,000. Gallery director Steve Swallow bought the painting directly from Lola, on the left of the frame, who acquired it from Joffe in 2016, the year it was painted. The gallery will have a stand at the 2023 British Art Fair.