Slem Chambers

I love paper napkins in Parisian old restaurants. Not only they clean and fresh, but a wonderful place for being inspired and get going with my art. Here is one of my recent drawings while my dinner in La poule au pot.  

http://www.royalmonaco.net/article-comite-national-monegasque-vernissage-zoia-skoropadenko-e-clem-chambers-97128972.html

"Notre Dame de Paris" by Clem Chambers was exhibited at Annual Monaco-Japan Art Salon that took place in Monte-Carlo late February 2015.

FRACTALS
by
Clem CHAMBERS
Mathematics is a very beautiful thing but cold and inaccessible to all but a handful of souls.
Taking inspiration from the underlying processes of Fractuals discovered by Professor Benoit Mandelbrot, I have produced a series of painting applying these abstract principles to painting in oil. Like the sea forms cliffs, like water and light interplay, my painting technique
Produces naturalistic forms because the way I paint reproduces how nature is formed.
The late Professor Mandelbrot, one of the greatest mathematicians, who I counted as a personal friend, discovered this world, our world, which while physically solid is not actually solid in terms of straight lines and sides.
While we might walk 10 meters across a lawn, but an ant must walk the same path only longer as he must climb up the crinkles and down cracks along the way. How long is a coastline when it bays have bays, which in turn have bays, into infinity?
Oil and canvas are an especially compatible media for this work and produce the kind of beautiful images that fractuals are famous for, although these fractual images are purely created by hand with none of the pixel cheating and printing shenanigans so common now in art.
Art unknowingly has been trapped into these Cartesian dimensions, that is to say solid dimensions, even Picasso with cubism still only dealt in whole dimensions even though there were more than 3.
This beauty is something I have been searching for in my work for my whole life. I refuse to paint ugly painting, the world has enough already.
Yet to say I paint paintings is a bold statement, but the underlying mathematical beauty that is the basis of my work shines through.
My paintings will not make you sad, will not leave you desolate and will not you lonelier. Their organic-ness, their lightness, is all a reflection of a universal principle that fits everything together .
Therefore I feel privileged to be painting in fractual dimensions and must thank Benoit for inspiring me with his work to create mine .

Clem won his school’s final year art prize much to most pupil’s consternation.
He was the only child to study pottery at his school and the school rebelled when it discovered the A level had a 13 hour exam. He made pots for them, vases that looked like alien plant intent on turning into body snatchers or triffids. He was thanked and they were consigned to a large cupboard.
This however didn’t disappoint Clem. He was intent on his art in a self absorbed way that looked through education to the classics of the time. Modern art of the post impressionists through daring work that spanned the wars to the Pop-sters making art from reproduced Brillo packets, none seemed to look to education for its inspiration, why then should he look there?
He drew without looking at his marks, struggling to be like a virtuoso pianist able to play without recourse to watching his fingers.
He was interrupted.
Accidentally he became one of the pioneers of computer gaming.
He was there, just eighteen at the invention of a media whose accelerated lifecycle rampaged from text to infinite colors, resolution and movement in a telescoped timeframe of a few years.
Swept headlong in the earliest days of the digital revolution through music, art, animation, design.. it was sink or swim. He swam.
Computer games, multimedia, multiplayer environments, he was there scoring firsts, always and ever innovating.
…and he always drew
…and then he began to paint.
Oil painting felt right. It felt like eating a big cream cake. But there are only so many cream cakes you can store.
So Clem took Andy Warhol’s advice, “hang it on the wall.”
He did and it sold.
Clem says, “ugly art is easy, beautiful art not so. I paint images you can live with, that will never bring you down. It took me my life to be able to do it.”
His art comes from maths, the breakthroughs of his late friend Benoit Mandelbrot rendered by process, iteration, canvas and oil.
“People see nature and their memories in my paintings. It is there.”