Growing up in Trenton, NJ, Chase Cantwell formerly known as Kathy Cantwell was a quintessential tomboy who at times was thwarted by the imperatives of his Catholic parents. In a world of gender-signaled clothing, stripes were the privilege of boys, and his mother always found a reason for why her “daughter” couldn’t wear their shirts, socks, or sneakers. They could never have imagined my dysphoria being raised a she when he was really all boy until puberty betrayed him and the dysphoria got worse societal norms looming but Cantwell could not identify with anything female. He thought he was experiencing life as a she but had difficulty relating he dated women and assumed he was just a butch lesbian until the world changed and there suddenly were new words and ways to experience their rightful gender as male. Cantwell was FTM, female to male.
On the other hand his father helped him fashion a makeshift art studio in his bedroom, when he was thirteen, which turned out to be his encouraging him to be someone’s cultured wife. Yet this led to his dysphoria and escaped to nearby Philadelphia on weekends to take classes at the Moore School of Art, learning studio skills advanced for someone his age. The school was all girls just like his prep school he lived in an all girl world. He was to be identified as female and given the birth name Kathleen Mary. Not until recently did Cantwell figure out his pronouns it came late in life to him but nevertheless it has come. This posed a problem in regards to Cantwell’s brand with his previous name. Slowly he is transitioning his brand along with himself as Chase Cantwell.
While at C.W. Post College on Long Island earning his BFA, Cantwell got to study painting with taboo-breaking artist Carolee Schneemann in an NYU graduate program, an experience that placed no restraints before this sheltered teen. After graduation, Cantwell moved to New York City found long-term work in the music industry, a place where he functioned as fixer for others flaunting convention. During the day it was an Alice-in-Wonderland world of rock stars and rappers in which he might be paying the bills for wrecked hotel rooms and keeping gun-bearing artists and producers within budget. At night Cantwell came home to compulsively paint dark, uninhabited cityscapes and quirky portraits.
After twenty-two years of this balancing act, post-9/11 he left the music biz and Manhattan, relocating to a northern New Jersey commuter town with his children and then partner. As a “recovering eccentric,” he lived a life of domestication. In this setting, he became attuned to a newly experienced sense of openness and light, and her engagement with the vibrant art community in the metropolitan region encouraged his leap to abstraction. At last in his art, he could claim stripes as a means of expression. Straight vertical lines became a way to deal with the external and internal roadblocks in becoming a wholly realized person. Cantwell has always regarded his work as having male energy. Recognizing that his formal choices have personal resonance, Cantwell is making way for more intimate narratives with hints of interactivity and relational issues.
Currently Cantwell is working on his artist portrait project which will consist of portraits of at least 10 artists. This will be shown in New York City at The Painting Center, 547 West 27 Street late November thru December 2022.
Regarded as “the king of Opacity,” Cantwell’s work in encaustic and oil has become well-known through a number of solo and group exhibitions, primarily in the New York-New Jersey area as well as Provincetown, Massachusetts. He is a member of The Painting Center in Chelsea for which he has curated a number of shows, and he offers private art instruction. Breaking out of the Northeast Corridor, most recently he has traveled to locations like Taos, New Mexico, and San Miguel de Allende, Mexico where she paints in the company of fellow artists.
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Artist’s Statement
Methodical, repetitive painting soothes me. Having an excessive commitment to routine, what propels me are the shifts I see occurring as I lay down a color next to another and the forms that emerge. I have always been drawn to sports or activities that require a certain powerful stroke from my arm, and this repetitive physical process heightens the sensation of pushback from my media. I am not concerned with staying within the lines. Where flaw meets perfection is interesting to me, because we deal with that dynamic within ourselves daily. So I allow soft boundaries and welcome irregularities.
For many years, this approach resulted in series in which stripes were simultaneously the primary mark and expressive element. As I began to seek more formal complexity, the relationships within the painting began to take on personal meaning. My abstract work always prompted external references and interpretation, but the paintings gave me permission to see the operations of color, shapes, line, and space as connected to what was going on in my life. To my surprise, I went deep inside to feelings of aloneness, togetherness, loss, passion, relationship, connectivity. Curves in their sensuousness, gestural quality, and shape-shifting figuration became revelations.
Taking the stripe on a journey, I found new spatial possibilities in which the two-dimensional could suggest movement in an open field — ambiguous spaces occupied by quirky, minimalist shapes. Currently I am teasing out multi-planar dimensionality with more intricate configurations. I’ve walked through a door in my paintings and with my art. The act of painting continues to be the core of my work, but now I am taking my awareness to that place where ideas manifest and morph in the material world through paint.