Reviews & Photos
Paul Chester’s latest collection of paintings express the fragile beauty of the rural countryside, made ethereal by flashes of recollection and visions seen only for an instant. Chester paints with oil and acrylic, building layers of painted glazes until a complex surface is achieved. Some of the paintings have a wide handmade frame which is part of the painting, serving as a window to enhance the depth of the scene.
His poetic scenes invite the viewer to step into a spiritual realm where nature is experienced as an emotional reminiscence rather than a precise physical location. His paintings brim with expressive sensuous colour as the artist interprets the universal scenes of an idyllic landscape.
Wallack Galleries
“Paul Chester combines both painting and sculptural elements into his unique works of art. With oil his primary medium, Chester builds the surfaces of his canvases with many layers of paint, sometimes scratching and carving lines into the paint and exposing the ground beneath. This approach forms wide fields, distant forests and luminous horizons. The physicality in the treatment of the paintings is closely connected to Chester’s sculptural experience and sustained relationship with his natural surroundings.”
Newbury Fine Arts
“By selecting a stand of trees, or grasses in a field, or the swampy edges of a lake, Chester manages to show us the poetry and the beauty in this seemingly ordinary rural neighbourhood. His images continue to cast a spell that takes us well beyond the natural landscape.”
Illi-Maria Tamplin
Past Director/Curator of the Art Gallery of Peterborough
“We have coined the word “Windowscapes” to describe the popular impressionistic landscapes which have become somewhat of a trademark for Paul Chesters paintings. His wonderfully constructed, worked and painted wide wood frames, integral to his landscapes, are best described as ‘windows’ through which the viewer is treated to Chesters interpretation of his surrounding environs.”
Bruce and Sally Rapp
The Russell Gallery of Fine Art
“… unrelated to the bustle of large urban centers, with ecology as its ultimate theme – an ecology that belongs as much to the mind as to nature, concerned with both living matter and the fundamental element of spirituality.”
“… his own capacity for absorbing nature, by becoming one with it, guiding us peacefully towards a new vision of both landscape painting and Nature whose simplicity relies on the complexity of expression, on the collected knowledge emanating from an in-depth observation, rooted in the essence of life and experience.”
Robert Bernier
Parcours L’Informateur des Arts
“With simplicity and texture, Paul Chester offers a unique view of the natural world, where image and frame corroborate to create a contemporary variation of the traditional landscape.”
Dan and Lana Hudon
West End Gallery
