With assurance and great appropriation of reality’s various incidents, from every day themes to passages of political and social flavour, Ann Chamberlin’s painting (United States) takes place in a narrative field, revealing without ambivalence a special taste for telling stories and for making some characters stand out, which in some ample and uncommon scale, have to do with objects and conditions, at times intimate, at times explosive.
This isn’t an artist that pays attention to the objections that some critics dish out to her, about firstly, to painting as such and, secondly, to narrative painting. She, evidently, enjoys the picture and enjoys the story being told. Everything here indicates that the world never stops, that the ideas live freely, that abstractions and concepts are simply different. Furthermore the ideas live outside: in the street, near the sea, in the open air, prowling around a room or a highway or a tribunal. Not always joyful of course, sometimes as preamble to death or as signs of solitude, of cutting silences, sometimes vivacious and in-love. There are small stories in keeping with small formats showing oil on metal (copper and bronze), on canvas, on wood; or watercolour on printed paper. Entertainment that paints and worries, like small narrations from masters, of tales and suspense, giving life and voice to inanimate objects by ignorance or routine, bringing into the light sharply and with humour, the importance of a corner, a shadow or a light.
Ann Chamberlin, becomes the hand of the elemental spirit that, in itself, contains the art but insufflates a point of view devoid of complexes and precautions. She enters naked (as art should be always) to the soul of worlds that she has been discovering for many years now.
The artist looks on with nobility and justice though she is not fooled by the unspeakable human condition prone to baseness and violence, when not to ridicule and certainty. But her eye, here, is the eye of grace.