Intimate visions of a shy painter
- Martin Holman
- 2 days ago
- 9 min read
Words by Martin Holman
“Either you fall in love with painting and believe in it or you don’t” - Chantal Joffe.
Chantal Joffe has never fallen out of love with painting. She said to an interviewer in 2014 that painting is “a bit like a religion in that way that you can doubt it or believe it. It’s a belief structure”. The catalyst releasing energy combines colour and paint coaxed into an image with broad brushstrokes. “I’m not always in control,” she admits: a mark made one way for an elbow, say, or a hip, might lead the painting in a new direction.
Joffe paints quickly, with breaks after four hours, in a state of immense concentration mixed with doubt, the mark of a genuinely creative spirit. A work is usually complete within the day. She calls this experience of making a “kind of literal transformation”, a phenomenon other forms of faithful will also recognise. After all, she says, “an oil painting is really dirt on a canvas.”
Exciting, gripping, riveting are just three phrases that recur when Joffe talks about creating images. The fascination started at school when she said she was going to be an artist. “It came from so deep within myself. But I didn’t know what that was, really.” Starting her foundation course at London’s Camberwell College of Arts, life drawing had a strong appeal. “I couldn’t wait to get there in the morning. I didn’t ever want to leave, even when it closed at nine o’clock at night.” She went on to study at Glasgow School of Art, graduating in 1991, before spending two years at the Royal College of Art. Her commitment to painting never wavered in the process, even though a new generation of conceptual artists, using objects in experimental installations, was emerging around her. Moreover, her subject matter then, as now, was portraiture, an historic genre still associated in the public imagination with commemorating people of rank and power.
Joffe’s intimate, expressive portrayals have none of that. Her sitters are famous mostly to her – her late mother and her daughter, friends and their children and her daughter’s friends. Some, like Fraser (2024), she paints at stages as they grow up. “As a painter,” she once commented, “you fall in love with everybody you paint.” Humanity, defensive and vulnerable, permeates the look of the sitter staring beyond the picture to meet the searching eye of the observer.
Nevertheless, these are not pictures of people sitting pretty. Joffe might also have them standing up or lying down. She carefully thinks out the pose beforehand. The composition is often a little restless, animated on the surface by a nervy, distorted paraphrase of details. “I’m not sure I think about beauty explicitly,” she says. Depictions can seem almost caricatural. But they are never cruel. “A portrait is not a Polaroid,” she says. Both the subject and the artist bring elements to the meeting that influence the outcome, contained within mood and memories. They interact with effects of light and colour, the time of day, the occasional chat and fabrics in her London studio.
Then there are the facts of making. The paint is as unflinching and unfussy as the portrayal itself. Drips occur, running this way and that on the canvas from her broad gestures to become part of the image. “I am making a painting,” she says, “I’m not just painting them.”
The apple green undercolour peeps through in places, breathing nervily into flesh tones or clothing. Green was used this way by Degas, whom Joffe reveres. It covers the canvas to soften the cold white of the gesso layer beneath. The effect is startling and meant; it supports the emotional bench-press-impact some of these renditions deliver on first seeing.
Above all, Joffe is resolute and courageous when she paints herself. She has been her own subject on numerous occasions since the 1990s. The self-portrait is a standard idiom in art with a history reaching back centuries; examples by Rembrandt, Van Gogh and Picasso are merely the most celebrated.
Traditionally, such paintings reveal how an artist wants to be viewed by the world. Joffe’s make a bold statement; there is no vanity or flattery. She has no hesitation in showing how her body accepts the onset of years, registers emotional frailties and traces of motherhood. “Through art I describe what is happening,” she told one interviewer, “so I do not feel I have a choice; it is my way of understanding the world… I’m not one for symbolism.”
In one of the most recent, Self-Portrait in a Straw Hat (2025), she looks intently at the viewer, as if it was the person in the gallery who is being painted. She does not conceal the blemish on her face or the saggy frame of someone in her 60s. Her seated figure commands the large canvas, ungainly hands resting on the knees of her wide-legged posture. She has chosen to wear a red dress. It looks both glorious and defiant, set against the dappled puffball shapes of the garden setting. Red is a hard colour to work successfully in big areas. Past artists come to mind on the back of this detail: John Singer Sargent in the “gilded era” of the 1890s or Anthony Van Dyck in early 17th-century Genoa, both of whom depicted aristocrats.
Moreover, at seven feet tall, the size of Joffe’s image challenges the grand manner of those artistic greats. Hers is not a demonstration of personal power or wealth but of immersion in the materiality of paint and colour, and in the physical challenge of labour on the scale that calls for ladders.
That is tougher still when the support is not canvas but wood, which is the case with The Squid and the Whale (2017). There two figures sit on the edge of a bed. The woman in the foreground, naked except for a pair of pants, leans forward so that her immense back almost obscures the child sitting upright and tense beside her. Anxiety is almost the third character and the monumental dimensions threaten to overwhelm the audience with emotion underlined by the spare tonality.
A special class of inner truth is exposed in these intimate depictions. In 2018, Joffe made a head and shoulders painting every day during a year of mental pain, coping with the split from her partner of 25 years, the father of their daughter. She was also travelling internationally and each pensive image in the sequence registers a pressure from within that determines what appears on the outside. Slowly, the desolation, perceived in a cold British January, shifts with time somewhat, to a mood leavened by the warmer summer light of New York.
The young person who frequently appears in these paintings is Joffe’s daughter, Esme. She grew up in the household of painters and so understands artists’ fascination with everyday experience and passing time. Audiences have seen her since babyhood in oil paint, drawings and pastels, the media Joffe uses to report on the special bond she perceives between them. “We are so exposed by our relationships to our children,” Joffe says.
That is Esme beside her mother in The Squid and the Whale, seeming to assume the parental role for her mother’s distress. In Esme at the Kitchen Table (2019), she appears absorbed in reading, settled contentedly in her white shirt into surrounding tones of dark red, plum, pink and scuffed honey. Across the table from her a rather anthropoid chair keeps silent company.
Children were an early subject-matter of the artist. She has always tended to paint what is on her mind and around the early 2000s, among other concerns, she wanted to have children. At that time, too, she was making mostly small paintings, often on wood ply. Her source material for these precise little figures in lively details and rich in colour was mail-order catalogues. “I was interested in re-animating images,” she told an interviewer, “… and making these children real again.”
Around that time, too, she painted from her own photographs. They offered her emotional distance simply to watch. Such as the model observed backstage at Paris Fashion Week about 20 years ago, making hurried, undignified changes in a cramped space to clothes, hair, shoes before stepping imperiously onto the catwalk. Joffe has long admired American mid-century photographers Diane Arbus and Garry Winogrand. The awkward rhythms in their pictures of people staring sadly at the lens or looking slightly bewildered impressed her.
Are there subjects she will not touch? They are few for an artist who, at the Royal College in the mid 1990s, sought out subjects shunned by other artists. At one point, she used pornographic imagery which was hard to find in days before the Internet.
Pure landscape did not feature as a subject until 2023. The art charity Hospital Rooms commissioned her to transform a communal space for long-stay service users at Longreach House, the NHS mental health hospital for west Cornwall in Redruth. Joffe asked herself what she would want to see if she were a patient. Her response was to be able to look at somewhere magical and inspiring. So Joffe connected with her own experience of painting in Venice the previous summer.
The result was two rare, unpeopled paintings. She loves Italy, its cities and beaches; she finds she quickly enters the life enhancing spirit of the country. The views she painted of light sparkling on the water of the broad Giudecca canal on two wood panels copied the exact size and shape of her Venetian studio windows.
Equally rare are paintings of men. Some years ago, she explained that, tackling a male subject, “I’ve really struggled to make it look like he was ever alive… I think my brain is limited in that I can’t empathise with men.” That belief has now shifted. Once again, first sight of it has occurred in Cornwall with Joffe’s exhibition of her luminous paintings of men at The Exchange in Penzance. Although she was born in Vermont, USA, to expatriate British academics, she came as a teenager to England. In the 1990s, her mother Daryll lived in Penzance and Joffe has visited West Penwith often since then with her own family.
Joffe has broken her habit in an eye-opening manner, with five huge horizontal canvases featuring reclining male nude portraits of her partner Richard. Audiences are still uncomfortable with male nudity even though the female nude has been a common subject for centuries. “A woman looking at a male figure that way,” she says, “turns the tables on art history – and on men.”
Stretched canvases, almost ten feet long, were left from a project that never took place. The material had a smooth, silky weave and somehow suited this bold career move. Who better to lavish them on than the man closest to her? So she settled him into frontal and rear poses across a cream-coloured cover on a bed.
Perhaps the most striking is the crown to heel back view of Richard Naked 2 (2023). His head rests on a patterned cushion and then the painting travels along his broad back, diverts at one point into his arm and hand lying on one thigh, before tapering to Richard’s dirty soles placed one above the other.
They listened to recordings of Bach’s Goldberg Variations while she worked. She responded to pianist Glenn Gould’s fast tempo and bold play. The picture’s size meant that Joffe worked close to the surface. The brushwork takes on abstract qualities or resembles landscape as much as skin. She had to steady the canvas as it slipped and slid as she worked. Paint lies in thin, translucent layers. In places, it cascades in drips sometimes vertically and then horizontally when the stretcher was upended.
Needing to see the image close to as well as by standing back, the viewer is easily drawn into the orchestration of brush and medium, surface and gravity, speed and movement. The effect resembles exposure to a soothing breeze on a familiar, sunlit pathway in known and cherished country.
“Men are more self-conscious about being painted,” she suggests. She mentions the artist Lucian Freud, whom she admires and who was best with men as he shared their vanity. Her portrayals of friend Charlie Porter are particular, intimate and tender. Suffused with sadness and sensitivity, they were made when both artist and sitter had suffered close bereavements. Yet they also fizz with the speed of their making, to keep the light, and with a mutual love of pattern and fashion.
Chantal Joffe is one reason that figure painting has become modern again and highly sought after by museums and collectors. With contemporaries such as Marlene Dumas, Jenny Saville and Elizabeth Peyton, her work receives global attention. Yet somehow Joffe has kept both feet firmly grounded, eyes pointed forward and alert to the world outside her studio.
The exhibition Chantal Joffe: The Prince continues at The Exchange, Penzance, until 15th November 2025. Chantal Joffe: I Remember takes place at Victoria Miro, 16 Wharf Road, London N1 7RW, from 14 November 2025 to 17 January 2026.
