The streets of Walkerville hold a certain charm, one that feels creatively alive with art and culture. Beyond the historic buildings and the tales of the past, there’s an artistic current running through the neighbourhoods that house artist co-ops, writers’ workshops, and an annual art festival that’s been running for over 40 years. Windsor-based painter Chloe Chlumecky knows this charm firsthand.
Her studio sits on Erie Street, a few kilometers and a lifetime of memories away from the streets of South Walkerville that first appeared in her early paintings. “Coming back to Windsor will always ground and inspire me to keep working,” she says. “Sometimes the most powerful inspiration comes from the places you know best.”
It’s a philosophy that started forming long before she ever picked up a paintbrush. As a kid, Chloe would park herself in front of the TV and draw cartoon characters, recruiting her friends to join in while she tried to teach them. Even then, something in her was drawn toward close observation. “I’ve always been interested in closely observing the world around me,” she reflects. That instinct would eventually become the foundation of everything she makes.
Her formal training began at Walkerville Collegiate, where the school’s arts program gave her the encouragement and structure to take her work seriously. From there, she went on to study Visual Arts at the University of Windsor in the Armouries building downtown, a fitting setting, as it turned out, for the kind of rigorous, technique-driven education that would shape her into the painter she is today. “I had the opportunity to learn from some amazing professors who challenged me to develop both my technical skills and my artistic voice,” she says.
It was also at university that Chloe made the switch from acrylic to oil paint. The decision wasn’t arbitrary. “For what I was trying to achieve in my paintings, acrylic felt very synthetic,” she explains. Oil paint, by contrast, gave her the flexibility her work demanded. Because her paintings are so rooted in atmosphere, light, and subtlety, she needed a medium that could hold nuance and allowed her to build delicate transitions and communicate warmth through texture and luminosity. Oil paint, she says simply, “has a depth that helps me capture the warmth I’m trying to communicate.”
The real turning point in Chloe’s artistic development, though, came during an unexpected stretch of stillness. COVID lockdowns forced everyone to find ways to spend the time at home. While some turned to sourdough bread and TikTok dances, Chloe turned to her canvas. Suddenly she was noticing the way afternoon light moved across a kitchen table, the objects she’d lived with for years without really seeing, the mundane moments that ordinarily dissolve into background noise. “That period had a huge impact on the direction of my work and where it stands today,” she says.
Her process now begins with what she calls her iPhone “sketchbook” a camera roll full of captured moments that stopped her in her tracks whether it’s a bedroom at the end of the day, someone sitting in a familiar room, sunlight dancing on an ordinary surface. “I’ll take a reference photo because something about the light or the feeling of the moment catches my attention,” she says. But the photograph is never the destination. In the studio, she strips away the documentary quality of the image and works instead toward the feeling underneath it; the emotion that made her reach for her phone in the first place. “I’m interested in those everyday experiences that don’t seem significant at the time but become meaningful when you look back on them.”
Though her work is deeply autobiographical, Chloe is careful to leave the door open for viewers to walk in and find themselves there too. “I hope they leave enough space for viewers to connect them to their own experiences,” she says. “I think we’ve all had those quiet moments at home or in familiar places that stay with us long after they’ve passed.”
To learn more about Chloe, please visit her website www.ChloeChlumecky.com
