Interview by Katie Aiken Ritter
“I have to start with absolutely no frame of reference, because if I look at a landscape, I become obsessive about copying it until it’s perfect.”
Gosh, this is really a love story as much as an art interview.
That’s not usually my impression when talking to an artist. But today, it’s true—and there’s a twist.
Anyone from the Hereford Zone knows that Zone kids grow up and want to come back home. Chloe is no exception—but her journey took Chloe to Wyoming and then Vermont before the road led back to Maryland.
Let’s start with the love story: while getting her BFA at Towson University, one Tyler Saron showed up: an adventurer hopping between white-water kayaking in South America and Wyoming. Sparks flew, and parents approved; turned out he was a Zone boy home on vacation, so they knew he and Chloe would come home for the holidays. The day Chloe graduated from art school, she headed to Jackson Hole to be with Tyler.
There she found work at an art gallery. Chloe helped to represent very high-profile artists by doing shows, selling, and curating artwork—and in doing that, her own art experience crashed headlong into a new sensibility: trained in classical technique by her artist grandmother, Chloe found herself entranced by the vibrant, progressive, contemporary artwork in Jackson Hole. It would take some time for her ideas to come to fruition, but the seed had most definitely been planted.
How many artists have someone who truly, truly supports their creative passion? Chloe has that person in Tyler.
“You need to figure all this out,” Tyler told me, seeing me wrestle with myself. “You are talented. You deserve the time and the chance. You’ll get there.”
“I wanted to come home, but he needed the challenge and demands of adventure work, so we settled on a ski resort back East. He wasn’t ready to be tame in Maryland yet, but he was ready to do whatever he could to help crack me open so I could paint the way I yearned to.”
That is love, folks.
They left Jackson Hole and moved to Vermont. Tyler took on a job that paid all the bills, setting Chloe free to paint.
She still struggled.
“We lived like snowboard bums. While Tyler worked, I stayed at home, trying and trying to figure out a process that excited me, but I was too locked into traditional work. I just couldn’t get myself out of that.”
Tyler would come home from a late hour job with an assemblage of after-work guests in tow to find Chloe—a night owl painter—hard at work. Each night became an impromptu critique session. She found herself striving to make every painting more ambiguous, harder to define. Still, letting go of traditional techniques and realistic images remained a massive challenge.
“The first time I stumbled upon my process was by accident. I was working on top of another painting, and removing what I’d just done, moving the paint around, and a seascape suddenly emerged out of…nothing. I felt a rush, the sensations of so many beaches on which I’d walked, ocean horizons on which I’d gazed, all flowing together. One of Tyler’s friends immediately said it gave him a memory of a different place by the water, and another one. All at once the ability for each viewer to clearly grasp what the painting referenced, plus the ambiguousness that allowed them to have a personal interpretation, joined with my rush of memories and feelings. It was thrilling. I knew right away that I had found how I wanted to paint.”
This is how it works for her: Chloe uses very, very thin layers of oil paints on canvas. “I have to start with absolutely no frame of reference, because if I look at a landscape, I become obsessive about copying it until it’s perfect. Instead, I make myself start out thinking of nothing. Nothing! Then the mushing starts. I keep mushing the paint, again and again and again.”
‘Mushing’ means Chloe moving the thin layers of paint around, removing some, adding some, completely changing what’s on the canvas, and getting lost in the process for hours—and then something emerges: the sense of a place she’s been. A hiking trail; a river or seashore. Mountains. Bogs and wetlands. The work drifts into the place and slowly takes on an experience of a time spent there. Sometimes the memory invokes deeper tones, and sometimes there’s lightness. Several more hours, and those almost-transparent layers of color take on an evocative aura.
Chloe’s pieces exude a mystical presence that pulls you in, whispering of something just beyond human awareness. They are profoundly serene. If a painting could breathe, her work would be the breath of meditation, with colors so subtle they almost seem to have no color.
“It’s like when you’re passing trees in the car, in the rain… You can’t see the trees; you just get a sense of them. But they’re real, and you have a response to them, even though they’re just a blur when you pass them.”
Animals in one of her paintings seem almost part of the mist as well. “These look like cows,” said one observer. But Chloe wants us to see our own interpretation. She’s carefully deliberate that we can’t tell for certain if they’re cows or horses.
With a process of her own, Chloe applied to galleries across several nearby states. One, a brand-new gallery in Kennebunkport, featured Chloe in their opening show. Sales surpassed everyone’s expectations. She was on her way.
And then, a twist: Chloe gave Tyler some happy news. “Apparently, the second after he found out I was pregnant, Tyler called his mom,” she laughs. “And he said to her ‘Chloe’s expecting, We’re moving home. Now.’ I had no idea he’d give up living in the mountains so abruptly and so willingly, yet here we are.”
‘Here’ means wandering the roads of her childhood again. It means white-water Tyler happily exploring the adventure of being a dad, of grandparents getting to be with a beloved little boy. It means a depth of joy, of being thrilled to have her first show near the fields and forests where she was raised.
I ask Chloe what the future holds, and her eyes take on a distant gaze. She dreams of being a fulltime artist, of a quiet life sending the kids off to school and painting all day in her studio. Maybe trying different subjects, maybe exploring more color, maybe working on location…maybe.
The dream feels much like Chloe’s paintings: misty, undefined, changing, flowing, open to interpretation—but appealing, peaceful, and serene.
Bring on the mushing: she’s talented, and she’ll sort it out. In the meantime, come and find yourself lost in and entranced by Chloe’s soothing, intriguing works.
Chloe Saron’s paintings will be at the Manor Mill, a beautiful gallery in a historic grist mill, March 31 to April 30.
Chloe Saron refers to her pieces as Modern Romantic. Embracing her favorite part of the Romanticism movement, she aspires to experience and understand the world through emotion and feeling. Her pieces are born from her subconscious, fusing her memory with her perception of an idealized scene. She starts each painting with only a loose sense of a specific memory and a vision of where light will reflect. The rest transcends through fine layers and compositional arrangements.
Though subtle, some pieces have emerged with hints of the many landscapes Chloe has witnessed — ranging from her time living in Wyoming, Vermont, and Colorado to her travels in Southeast Asia, Australia, and Europe to her home base in Maryland and summers spent in the Adirondack Mountains.
Chloe purposely blurs or ‘fogs’ her paintings to force the viewer to perceive the scene as a whole. By eliminating tight detail, the eye is not distracted by ‘this or that’. The viewer is able to perceive the scene as a moment. She hopes that such ambiguity enables each viewer to connect with the scene in his or her own way and pull from a personal memory — a place, a feeling, or a time.
Born: Baltimore, MD 1992. Education: BFA Painting, Towson University, Baltimore MD, 2015. Painting Program, University of Tasmania, Tasmania AUS, 2014.
