Chloé Grimes-Biltis
Fine Art - painting & printmaking
Glasgow School of Art
Specialisms: Painting / Drawing /
Location: Glasgow, United Kingdom
Chloé Grimes-Biltis
First Name: Chloé
Last Name: Grimes-Biltis
Specialisms: Painting / Drawing
Sectors:
My Location: Glasgow, United Kingdom
University / College: Glasgow School of Art
Course / Program Title: Fine Art - painting & printmaking
About
I was born in Glasgow and raised between Scotland and the United States. My work is fueled by desire and the urge to recreate exotic encounters, inviting the viewer to experience a sense of hunger, intimacy and emotional resonance. Returning frequently to the landscapes of my hometown in South Florida, my paintings reflect swamps, beaches and the exotic wildlife which inhabit them. My current practice centres on the psychological tension between desire and threat, and temptation and restraint, focusing on the dangerous allure of venomous siphonophores. Following an encounter with a Portuguese man o’ war washed up on shore, I became increasingly fascinated in these creatures. Beautiful yet carrying a lethal sting, they embody a contradiction that drives my work. Through hyperreal oil paintings, I aim to create images of them that feel seductive yet ambiguous, inviting prolonged close looking to become totally immersed in their unusual form. I am interested in how images can become sites of longing, experience and storytelling. Drawing from scientific and documentary imagery, I turn natural objects into surreal encounters that evoke curiosity. By saturating colour and emphasising wetness and translucency, my paintings feel almost bodily, playing with a viewer’s drive for desire by arousing a natural craving to touch. This tangible experience allows my creatures to become vessels of forbidden desire. I have worked extensively on found, sometimes unprimed boards, allowing oil to leach into the surface and create stains that suggest real moisture. I recently transitioned to painting on linen, a light sensitive material in which I build intense levels of detail. Through material enquiry, I play with the dialogue between man-made and natural worlds, seeing echos of the man o’ war within man-made environments. This creates an illusion of perception between what is familiar and unfamiliar, investigating how much of the creature can be shown before attraction becomes unsettling. Expanding in scale has allowed me to depict the most captivating man o’ war which overwhelm and hypnotise the viewer through inescapable beauty. Ultimately, my paintings seek to entice while effectively hiding the true toxic forces behind their imagery, creating spaces where viewers confront their own impulses and experience deep sensory pleasure.
My degree show featured a series of large-scale oil paintings depicting the Portuguese man o’ war, a beautiful sea creature carrying a lethal sting. It becomes both alluring and ambigious as the work explores the tensions between temptation and threat. In hyper-real detail, I exaggerated colour, translucency and wetness, transforming them into something seductive and otherworldly, arousing curisoity and a natural drive for desire within viewers. The paintings isolate the man o’ war against bare linen backgrounds, heightening its presence and encouraging close looking. Real sand covered the floor, letting viewers enter a surreal encounter and experience a sensory reaction dominated by the creatures' scale, inviting one to approach the man o' war while unaware of its true danger.
Competitions
