Ain't No Use in Cryin
2022 Acrylic, glitter, and cut painted paper on canvas, 66 x 84 inches
Black Veil
2019 Acrylic embossed metallic paper and cut painted paper on canvas over panel 18.5 x 25.5 inches
Between The Hour And The Age
2022 Acrylic, glitter, and cut painted paper on canvas, 64 x 48 inches
Conjured Springs
2020 Acrylic Dispersion with powdered pigments cut paper and cut painted paper 64 x 64 inches
I Have Always Thought/ It Seems I've Misunderstood
2018 Acrylic, spray paint, mirrored Mylar, and cut painted paper on canvas over shaped panel 17.5 x 19.5 inches
Melpomene
2021 Acrylic, glitter, and cut paper on canvas over a shaped panel 19.5 x 25.5 inches
Verbis Deest
2021 Acrylic, glitter, and cut painted paper on canvas 66 x 54 inches
A Very Special Episode
2018 Acrylic, wax resist, glitter, and cut painted paper on canvas 36 x 48 inches
You Are Here
2013 Acrylic, acrylic dispersion, and powdered pigments, glitter, cut painted paper, and metallic paper on canvas, 72 x 72 inches
Artist Biography
Chris Fennell (b. 1966, Vermont) was raised in the shifting silvery light of New England, in the town of Shelburne, Vermont. As a child he spent many hours exploring the fields and forests of his surroundings, sparking a lifelong interest in nature. He also immersed himself in the wonders of the Shelburne Museum, an encyclopedic world-class collection of folk art, vernacular crafts, colonial metalwork, glass blowing, basketry, quilts and needlepoint, and dozens of other categories of things, up to and including ships, buildings, and trains. The so-called line between craft and art, high and low, sacred and vernacular was forever blurred. He majored in painting and English at UVM, and then attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago for his MFA in Painting and Drawing. He moved to Brooklyn, NY in 1992, where he lives with his wife and three children.
Fennell started as an oil painter but developed dangerous allergies to the materials of that medium in the late 90s. Since then, he has been working with mixed-media paper collages on paper and on canvas. His paintings forsake grand gestures in favor of pixilated, small-scale joinery. The method is acrylic paint mixed with collage, the means units of cut or hole-punched paper, glued down in closely-ranked rows, waves, or outward-bursting radiations of lines or dots. Movement is revealed via multitudes of small changes, the nearly identical tidy, tiny units disappear as individual events into a context of handcrafted irregularity. The diminutive scale of the internal structures necessitates intimate viewing, bringing awareness of proximity as composition dissolves into a narcotic, rhythmic buzz that blurs one’s sense of scale. The viewer becomes one with the collapse of measurement, the sense of fractal continuity that links the space between atoms to the distance between stars.
Fennell draws his inspiration from language, music, the natural world, science, politics, and metaphysics. His paintings are fueled by the shadowy intimation of bodies and skin, bursting stars and bombs, by questions about the borders between body and mind, between self and other. They reflect the energy, chaos and conflict of the world, and the processes by which nature reclaims the world from culture— the inevitable rounding of all edges by time. Fennell has shown his work in New York City, Miami, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Chicago, Seattle, Atlanta, Tokyo, Dubai, and elsewhere. His work is represented in private and public collections In the United States and abroad.
