peachseed 102: Chalavie
Chalavie (Charlotte Vanhaecke) is artist who can play in any medium. She also loves Shake Shack burgers.
Art happens one layer at a time and Charlotte is a master at showing up and adding another layer. You can give her any material and she will add a layer of paint, start grinding away another layer of wood, or take a piece of fabric start adding texture to it by stitching a new layer into it with a sewing machine. And if she doesn't like it … she just “erases” it with a wash that mutes the layer.
She has a vast toolbox of past experiences of refined techniques that she can revisit at any time. A technique that she learned and refined in one project ends up as the starting detail on the next project. Many times, I have watched an entire series of work get “compiled” into the starting detail of the next work.
Charlotte is a renaissance craftsmen with a generous spirit, a sensitivity to be able to tune into whatever is going on right in front of her, and synthesize it into something uniquely personal through a process of “clack clack clacking” a layer of paint onto wood with some type of plaster knife ranging in scale from a repurposed old business card to a massive 5 ft wide industrial behemoth.
Charlotte is the artistic equivalent to a remote village woman in National Geographic carrying a water bucket on her a head, a baby papoosed to her front, and three boxes of vegetables balanced on her back. With only a petite frame, she is strong as an ox and she can pack her minivan like a clown car. In case you were wondering, a mid 2000 Honda Odysseys can flat pack a stack of stretched 4x8 foot canvases. This technique apparently started when she had to invent a system of transporting her work using a road bike and rigging up some kind of homemade push cart.
Her latest studio space appropriately shares the parking lot with Space X Tooling. I’m sure that many an employee have found inspiration seeing some type of unconventional technique of making a tool “work for you”.
PS: Hey Elon … when are you going to commission a large scale Intergalactic Venus “Welcome to Hawthorne” mural/sign?
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