DANIEL CHATTO

Chatto, who studied English at Oxford in the late 1970’s, after a one-year Art Foundation Course at London’s City and Guilds, is inspired by a love of poetry ranging from early English lyrics to the intimae sensitivity towards nature of the peasant poet John Clare and Andrew Marvell’s sublime wit and ‘deep love and knowledge of the country’.

‘I was lucky when I was about eight to have been bought a book on Samuel Palmer, and that’s pretty much when my mother gave me my first oil box. You opened the box and it was like the whole artist’s studio was contained in that.’

Chatto’s recent pictures run partly in tradition encompassing Blake’s engravings, redemptive visions of Minton, Craxton and Vaughan. Seminal influences on him have been Indian miniatures, and, perhaps above all, early Italian painters, notably Giotto and Cimabue, of whom he says he ‘loves the freedom with which they play with perspective’.

Yet Chatto’s Downs’ depictions evoke a pure, curiously distinct ‘inscape’ all his own. He sometimes makes vibrantly spontaneous pastels on the spot. The paintings here in gum tempera are invariably multi-layered in the studio; he usually works on a few paintings at the same time. Though there are atmospherically dramatic paintings here, Chatto says that increasingly he no longer aims to evoke ‘a particular instant – how the clouds were or how the sun sank that day’. These pictures are less and less literally or topographically descriptive; ‘they are to do with a feeling.