Colin Chillag is an artist whose work I have been aware of for some time. I am drawn to his work because he makes something really special of the unfinished.
Colin Chillag is an American painter best known for complex paintings which blend two often juxtaposed styles - vivid hyperrealism and abstraction. His creations are often characterized by a sense of incompleteness.
Chillag almost never fully finishes a painting and instead allows viewers to glimpse the work’s evolution by leaving it to appear as though it is a work in progress. His paintings seem to expose the tracks left by his brain as areas of intensely detailed realism appear alongside preliminary sketches. He deliberately reveals all the creative steps taken to produce his pieces, such as under-painting and colour mixing to achieve a particular shade. Sometimes he even leaves visible his initial notes-to-self. Therefore, the final painting captures the process rather than a moment.
A lot of Chillag’s paintings are based on found photographs, mostly from the 1970s and are reminiscent of his own childhood. The incompleteness of his paintings could be said to serve as a comment on the fragility of memory – sometimes fading, sometimes a little sketchy and rough around the edges. One could say that Chillag embraces failure. His work highlights the pointlessness of fully finishing something already photographed – and therefore already represented with more detail than possible by the human hand. All in all, Chillag's style could encourage and stimulate the creativity of those who admire the paintings and complete them with their own experience and imagination.
I find this painting on the right rather interesting. Chillag sometimes leaves his notes-to-self visible, however, the piece of writing visible in this patining does not appear to be a note. It reads: "THE WORLD WE PERCEIVE AND THE THING THAT PERCEIVES THE WORLD ARE ONE AND THE SAME". It sounds almost poetic, similar to the way my little poem snippets might sound.
I often struggle to complete my art works, I have many that I have started which I will likely never finish. Either I do not make time for it or I can't seem to find the motivation to do so. I have always seen this as a problem so it is rather inspiring to see someone who makes the most of it and even does it deliberately, using it to his advantage.
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