Psychotherapist and artist Gregory Chilenski’s move to Pelham less than two years ago was a homecoming of sorts: He attended the University of Massachusetts Amherst and had lived and worked in Northampton.
While Chilenski, 67, has often painted landscapes, he is now working on portraits, in oil pastel.
Hampshire Life: What is your creative process like?
Gregory Chilenski: I’m shifting and changing my practice all the time. I integrate my creative, spiritual and psychotherapy practices into the portraits.
H.L.: What does it feel like when you’re on the right track with your work?
G.C.: It feels that a process of integration is happening. I’m moving to portraiture from painting en plein air because I want to show human nature as expressed in the unique individual.
H.L.: What did you do today that relates to your art?
G.C.: Well, the nice thing about your question is that it reminds me to ask that of myself every day, throughout the day. Presently I’m involved in large portraits of a sitter.
H.L.: How does a drawing start?
G.C.: With a more-or-less simultaneous visual experience of someone, some place, some arrangement of space. I might encounter that visually or a thought or feeling might start up a visual image inside me. It really begins when I start paying attention to my feelings and mental associations toward that person, and to the dictate of the medium itself.
In landscape that usually takes the form of spontaneously visualizing some human activity in the setting, even when there’s no one there. I love signs of human activity in the landscape, such as, for example, old fence posts among trees, an abandoned and falling down industrial site and so on.
H.L.: What do you do when you get stuck?
G.C.: Usually something else unrelated, at least
for a while.
H.L.: Why do you work in oil pastel?
G.C.: I’m a colorist from the beginning. The feel of oil and brush is so different from the feel of a naked crayon in a bare hand. I need the tactile experience, the feel of the broad gestural mark, the messy hands, the messy pastel stick, the layering and scraping. I’ve learned how to put two colors next to each other and create space with the oil crayon.
H.L.: What are your immediate goals?
G.C.: I have a show coming up in September at the Amherst Area Chamber of Commerce. Preparing for that is a learning curve for me right now. But I like being on a learning curve. That is also what happens with every portrait sitter: learning as we go. I even learn from the sitter in a self-portrait.
— Kathleen Mellen
An exhibit of Gregory Chilenski’s work will open with a reception Sept. 1 from 5 to 7 p.m., and will remain on view through Sept. 30, at the Amherst Area Chamber of Commerce Art Gallery at 28 Amity St. in Amherst.
Chilenski is the owner of Valley View Studio + Gallery in Pelham, which offers studio space for artists to teach small workshops and a gallery for showing students’ work. He can be contacted at gchilenski@gmail.com.