This is the start of a series of lectures (and thus, my essays) based on personal narrative and identity. As part of a cross year event, Diane Chappelley had been asked to speak at the first lecture of the year on Thursday 5th October 2023.

Swiss artist Chappelley is an abstract-ish painter whose work is described by herself as autobiographical. She mentions that many of her paintings are not just a process but a culmination of her life experiences and knowledge. The lecturer in charge of the series, Katrina Monroe, gives the artist’s recommended reading list before the lecture, and this week the recommended books were:

• The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry - a poignant French tale of an aviator and an alien prince sharing stories whilst trying to make their way home from the Sahara Desert

• The Birds by Daphne du Maurier - a horror story following a farming family in post-WWII Cornwall as they are attacked by a never-ending flock of birds

• Strangeland by Tracy Emin - a memoir that explores her rekindling relationship with her father, the raw truth of her childhood, her abuse and the many stories she has already shared with her confessional installations

• To look at the Seas is to become what one is Adnan Atel - a compilation of the works of the Lebanese writer/professor .

• Life? or Theatre? by Charlotte Solomon - which explores the people behind the autobiographical gouache paintings of the Jewish artist who fled Nazi Germany

• The Love of Painting by Isabel Graw - following the tradition of classical theories of painting based on exchanges with artists, Graw considers the art form as a visual and discursive material. 

• Against Interpretation And Other Essays by Susan Sontag - among the first critics to write about the intersection between ‘high’ and ‘low’ art forms and to give them equal value as valid topics 

To get a proper understanding of what Chappelley’s paintings are about, one must look at the combined brilliance of the visuals and the titles; for example, in Mother and Daughter, you would not know the relationship between the figures even though there is this deep intimacy between the two figures in the paintings. Still, you would not see the relationship between the two until you look at the title. There are other paintings as well that had quotes from the Little Prince, especially one about the last line of the book Little Prince (it still eludes me, the title); looking at the painting, you can see her interpretation of the book and her interpretation of how we understand whether the end of the book is meant to be an ambiguous symbol of death to suggest the continuation of life and such. A deep-set melancholia follows her work, even the more lighthearted ones depicting her pregnancy - perhaps to to record the general macabre of everyday life and how there is a clear predetermined state of balance that our decisions add emotional meaning to.

In her visual material, you can see how even though she has found her niche in her work, it is still intrinsically a different story in every painting, and that is how you can tell that she has developed her work in a super concise manner where she can explore her subject. However, it is not repetitive, which can happen with many abstract artists like Mondrian. Later on in his career, he had very concise visuals in his work. Unless you followed his entire line of work, many people do say that it is repetitive at the end because he is beginning to find his visual language, and unless you were educated on what his process was like, you would not be able to tell how similar a painting earlier on in his career is to that of his later abstract works where it was just lines and blocks of colour. This is not present in Chappelley’s works, whose flowers and figures are instruments, masterfully manipulated alongside her equally intriguing titles. Each has their own role to play in her narrative field and she knows her limits in terms of when to start and finish.

Last of all, it would be a shame to not mention any last thoughts answered in the Q&A at the end of the lecture. She spoke of melancholy being not an indicator of the actual mood of her works, which is expected as she seemed to genuinely enjoy the creation of her works and has stated that she thinks fondly of the inspiration for most of her paintings. Chappelley’s creation process also being that constant creation has also challenged me to make time for life outside creativity rather than to schedule creativity between life. It was wonderful to see and talk to an artist, alive, whom art has also consumed - it is inspiring and seeing someone whose art has transcended them does lift the soul slightly.

Citations:

[1]  Atel, A. (2022) To look at the sea is to become what one is:, Nightboat Books. Available at: https://nightboat.org/book/to-look-at-the-sea-is-to-become-what-one-is/ (Accessed: 08 October 2023).

[2]  Graw, I. (2018) The love of painting, Sternberg Press. Available at: https://www.sternberg-press.com/product/the-love-of-painting-genealogy-of-a-success-medium/ (Accessed: 08 October 2023).

[3]  Sontag, S. (2009) Against interpretation and other essays, Penguin Books UK. Available at: https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/57629/against-interpretation-and-other-essays-by-susan-sontag/9780141190068 (Accessed: 08 October 2023).