Bio
Chase Cantwell grew up in Trenton, NJ, majored in Painting at CW Post College, LIU and received his BFA from there he migrated to New York City in 1978. There Cantwell came to paint storefronts and eventually portraits. Having a day job for 25 years in the music business Cantwell took care of major recording projects and worked for just about every recording label there was. At night he went home to paint in isolation. Eventually Cantwell would show in 1997 at Gallery Asyl in New York’s burgeoning Chelsea area. After 9/11 he moved out of the city back New Jersey to raise his two children and then they moved back closer to New York City and he began to find his art community. Cantwell took up encaustic painting to transform what was going on in oil only to realize that medium was excellent for him to portray an earlier love of geometrical abstraction. Stripes, Walking Lines, Curved, By Inference, and Cubes are all series involving a simple motif like the stripe and evolving it. After a decade of working in encaustic Cantwell turned back to oil to create his Artist Portrait Project where he is painting various artists in his community to be shown February 2023 at The Painting Center in New York City.
Cantwell maintains a studio practice in Montclair, NJ and also teaches encaustic privately and at the Visual Art Center of NJ. Cantwell is collected here and abroad. He has been in countless exhibitions throughout the United States.
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.