“I delight in the unforeseen, the happenstance, the incongruities of things!”
—The Impoverished Landscape Painter Reflects on Art, by Carla Sweet Chlouber

The fragility of life and its ever-changing nature, both beautiful and tragic, sometimes ugly, compel me as to explore what gives us meaning and hope.  Over the last ten years, my work has considered our relationship to other animals and the earth, exploring ideas such as communication, compassion and sustainability.

My most recent body of work is a “collaboration” backward through time, inspired by the writings and poetry of my mother, Carla Chlouber, and her father (my grandfather), Arthur Sweet. Within my mother’s papers we found a trove of her and my grandfather's unpublished poems and writings, which were hidden in old trunks and file cases—scraps of family history.  Using fabric and embroidery, along with printmaking, encaustic, acrylic and oil paint, these mixed media pieces hold for me a haunting beauty and a transformation of family, love and loss.  

Exploring their writings has made me see the past differently, not as something that ends, but as ever continuing. 

Belinda Lee Chlouber 

We use our senses to help us understand our position in space-time. Vision is our main sensory input for the world we exist in. The human brain has some built-in limits beyond which it cannot properly interpret visual information. I use this limit to express the workings of the subconscious. Also embodied in my work is a sense of scientific realism; the elements and information of a natural system can be reduced and modulated and still exhibit characteristics of that natural system and to me this is proof that information is a true and robust representation of our universe. Clean lines, simple shapes, self-similarity on varying scales, and pure, changing color are my palette; information systems and data-sets are my subject matter.

I use mathematics and engineering to formulate physical space-time distortions: displaying static images through time while squeezing and folding the images’ space into 3-dimensional layers. Using industrially prefabricated LED technology, and custom electronics and firmware, I collapse space and re-map it onto the time axis. By re-displaying information in this manner I give the viewer a glimpse into space-time as seen through my eyes. It’s an automatism whereby I fold my own perception of space-time in an effort to understand what it means to exist.

My current work is an exploration of geometry, color and space. I am interested in the power of stars, both as iconographic symbols and as mysterious elements that are part of our natural universe. Each piece is an attempt to distill the magic of something millions of miles away into a frozen artifact trapped within the four walls of my canvas.

I have had a longstanding interest in working with gestural brushstrokes creating a compressed space. The marks and forms in these paintings are layered in space, that is they move back and forth in space, and to a considerable degree they have been oriented flat to the plane.

I have recently been expanding that involvement by developing a field of volumetric space in which planes are juxtaposed, forming a gestural interaction. The orientation of these more or less geographic planes emphasize a diagonal z-axis relationship to the picture plane through their contrasting positions.

The dynamic is established through size relationships of the geometric planes as well as their varied axis, which activate the field (or volumetric space) formed on the canvas as a whole.

This establishes a pictorial space that is both defined through gestural atmospheric forms and more clearly delineated geometrically-derived forms that are activated by actual and implied diagonal forces.

My over-riding concerns are to create a pictorial space inculcating the life associated with depth and movement, color and light.

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My vehicle for self expression has always been through creating art and practicing interior design. I balance two creative careers equally as a visual artist and as a partner of INSTUDIO interior design. My contemporary aesthetic in art and design is shaped by my passion for art, architecture, craft and designs from global periods, styles and cultures.

 Let me tell you why I'm not an axe murderer.

 I have traveled to every corner of this dark earth and it really is a terrible place:  death, disease, irritable bowel syndrome.

 Then there's the rent, the bills, the unhappy spirits floating everywhere around us.
  I chose to just run away from my problems and paint naked ladies all day. 

My art isn't about trying to heal the violence in my soul, instead it's about the cultivation and nourishment of it--because that is how I genuinely feel, or maybe this is how the universe genuinely feels, through me.  

 Either way, I am putting all of that violence out for your viewing pleasure:
 destruction and chaos, colors and shapes, form and imagination.

Plus philosophy, science, mysticism, our ordinary experience of daily life.

 It's all on the table, and because I have no allegiances to any of those things, I can fuck around all I want.

 Healing is for hippies.  Self-cultivation is for deluded artists.  
 Stop by my studio and share in my delusions.

 Namaste,

 Locust
 SF 2013