Chalice (pronounced like the cup) Mitchell is a figurative painter based in Western Massachusetts. She was raised mostly in Maine and Vermont and has lived in British Columbia, New York, Oregon, Colorado, Florida, the West Midlands, UK, as well as Kyushu and Shikoku, Japan.Her work explores the spaces in between gender, power, sensuality, religion, identity, and impermanence. Having studied classical oil painting in the western lineage and ink painting in Japan, these two influences overlap in her work. Brush strokes break apart and dissolve into the background, inspired by flying white, a technique from ink painting in which the stroke itself opens up to reveal the paper underneath, integrating the empty space with the ink, symbolically eradicating dualism. In Chalice's work, this cohesion of opposite entities (paper and ink, empty and full, body and space, inner and outer) is echoed in oil on raw linen. She is fascinated by the sensuality of religious art in the late-Renaissance and Baroque periods. The visceral medium of oil paint brings a sensual touch to this combination of the spiritual and the sexual. the grey areas, the intersections, the multifaceted quality of identity, social relations, history, and the messy nature of human experience.
