ABOUT CHIP

Both the Outdoors and Urbanism have inspired my art.

Chip’s Background

I have designed, photographed, drawn and painted all my life.   My main professional careers have been as an architect and a sustainable urban designer.   A Princeton University graduate, I am founding director of Ecologically Sustainable Design Pty Ltd based in Melbourne.   In recent years I (aged 69) have concentrated more and more of my time on watercolours, particularly en plein air while travelling to destinations of great natural or urban beauty.    While earning a Master of Fine Arts degree in drawing and photography at the University of Texas at Austin in 1974, I taught life drawing, perspective drawing and architecture,  and later at the University of California at Davis.  
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While loving and doing art, Nature and the Outdoors have equally fuelled my passions.  Since my twenties, I have been an ardent whitewater kayaker.   My favourite place on earth is the Grand Canyon, where I have kayaked the Colorado River many times.

Why My Art?

Art for me is more about what I am observing, than about myself.  Finding Beauty or 'some presence' in something that I observe, and making an image of it, may engender a work of art.   My art then may say something about myself.
 
I’ve been strongly motivated in my earlier career as a sustainable urban designer to help improve the world.  As the end of my life looms closer, my priorities have shifted toward savouring my life, in part by making images that pay homage to Life itself… to peace, timelessness, the miracles of sight, and just to appreciating all this, while it lasts for me.    This devotion I now recognise is the common theme, to which all my disparate art alludes.  Also, having chosen not to have children, I realise that another motivation for doing art is to leave that legacy behind.
 
I note that Claude Monet produced his sublimely peaceful Water Lilies series as an offering of healing to humanity, after the Great War.   Perhaps I’ve been trying in my own very modest way to emulate his mission, in response to current world circumstances.
 
I also deeply enjoy the intensely focused ‘buzz’ of actually doing my art, constantly at risk of failure, especially with watercolour.   Sometimes the act of painting or drawing takes me over.
 
I generally paint ‘on site’ doing my best to deal with the heat, the wind, and often the pesky Australian flies.   This immerses me in the immediacy of the place and in the act of painting.   When doing portraits, I far prefer directly to engage with the person, instead of working from a photograph.