Chantal Joffe interview
By Alastair Sooke
'I paint fast, in a kind of frenzy,” says the 46-year-old British artist Chantal Joffe. “It’s such a great state. I’ve never taken heroin but I imagine that’s what drugs are like. You feel so…” She searches for the right words. “It’s a sort of ecstasy. But it’s also sad, because you know it’s going to end."
Abruptly she gets up from her paint-spattered chair and scuttles across her large warehouse studio beside a canal in north London. She moved here six months ago, after 10 years in a smaller, adjoining space. “To begin with I felt like a rat in a field,” she says.
She wants to show me a series of pastels that will be seen in her new solo exhibition at the Victoria Miro Gallery in Mayfair. Diminutive oil paintings honouring the American “confessional” poets Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath and Robert Lowell, whom she has read all her life, will also be on display.
“I was so excited when I was making these,” she says, looking down at her ferociously bright pastels depicting women and young girls. It is relatively rare to come across images of men in Joffe’s work. “Truthfully, I don’t find them interesting to look at,” she tells me, “which isn’t to say I don’t think they’re attractive.”
“Pastel is such a pure form,” she continues. “It’s just raw, intense pigment. I couldn’t stop. Sometimes I would make 10 in a day. Then, just like that, I came in [to the studio] and I couldn’t make another one. They were dead. And now I’ve got to hit my head against a wall for another few weeks to find some other way through.”