Hello! My name is Heather Chontos, I am a painter and would very much love to work on the star map. It is an amazing opportunity to directly collaborate and crate something that inspires my work all the time. My website is www.heatherchontos.com
As a painter, Heather Chontos focuses her studio practice on the ambiguity and unique beauty of abstract expressionism. Chontos creates artwork that explores compositions of invisible light, a secret language to her that is expressed only through various mediums, color palettes, forms, and marks. With relentless movements and a focus on gesture, Chontos connects color, form, and mark making. These forms are interpretations of her surrounding environment, delicate details, vulnerable landscapes, and moments of light. Through these works she inspires a deep emotional connection to her impulsive mark making, which allows for an intimate dialogue with the viewer. Chontos is driven by an intuition that guides each gesture, building complex movement between the layers of her work.
Chontos does not use traditional applications of paint such as brushes or other standard tools. Instead, she uses manipulated scraps of plastic, for example, a hotel room key cards. These chosen painting tools have the perfect flexible edge that allow for a direct impact on the materials at hand. This creates a great amount of saturation and tactility for the penetrative marks and fields of color. Chontos is also able to draw varying lines with fine edges, allowing the most direct involvement of her hand. In addition to gesture, she desires to create depth through layers. The use of extra canvas or paper stitched to the surface and the incorporation of paint and glue to create layers are two examples in which Chontos expresses a flat surface as having dimension. The different materials allow for different levels of color and saturation.
