Chloe Scott Moncrieff — Cel del Nord

Chloe S Moncrieff is a British painter. She was born in London and having lived and worked there for two decades, she now lives in Hants with her partner and two young children. Her residency at Cel del Nord took place in September 2023.

Corn Dancers, Acrylic and oil 106cmx50cm on linen

In your plan for the residency, you were thinking about the Carl Jung quote “In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order.” Has this been present in your thinking while you’ve been here?

Initially, I was very focussed on it. This led to quite literal depictions of incantatory scenes, depicting the mystery of life that’s so slippery to explain in words.

Interestingly, when I let Jung’s words swim further away and relaxed, I became liberated and felt better able to really sense, tap into the deeper psyche, perhaps we could call it the internal chaos. In there, something new can emerge. Chaos brings chance. I don’t always approach my practice like this but I find when I have the courage to follow this avenue, more interesting things emerge. More mistakes but more breakthroughs. In the painting of the corn dancers, they spin, twirl in the intense sun, they are part of the collective, nodding to their bright star. Through them, I wanted to show the secret order, the interconnectivity.

On a hot day, we hiked to seek out some stone carvings made by a local bandit that date back to the early seventeenth century, didn’t we.

We did, and they captured my imagination. There it was, art in its pure form, humanity’s primordial urge to express. The carvings seemed to embody more than Cervantes’ bandit Perot Rocaguinarda’s life in the wild, they revealed something atavistic. The lines and geometry resembled candles, pyramids, houses, suns; like cave art, they were an elemental representation of the sacred parts of life.

In my painting - I might call it Quixotic - there is a play on chasing windmills. The carvings’ symbols informed the composition, becoming surreal forms of architecture in it. The painting ended up a dreamscape, which seems apt as metaphorically, like Rocaguinarda we are all chasing dreams.

It was worth braving the landscape for it. It’s not that easy to get there! What was your lasting impression of the the landscape here?

A fleshy tangle of greens and orange. Although the river is empty now it’s the end of summer, everything seems to be defined by it here. Instead of the plants and trees seeming arid, they’re vivid. The rustles of the throng of birds before they burst from the green maize stalks makes me jump each time. Human infrastructure hasn’t had much impact here, apart from the long white winding tracks. My ambition was to capture that in the painting on MDF (below).