Chloe Jenkins
- Anna Lilli Garai
- Nov 11
- 6 min read
Chloe Jenkins is a Canadian painter working in oil. She paints from paused film and TV stills, choosing moments that feel expressive. The spaces she paints are everyday interiors — rooms, windows, and furniture seen at a quiet distance. In works like “A Room with View” and “The Golightly Apartment,” the rooms are familiar, but not tied to any specific moment. Her process is careful, building the image in small steps through color and shape.
Q: What first made you want to stop a moving image and turn it into paint?
A: During my time making art in university, windows had been a recurring motif in my work. I decided to make this an intentional direction for my artistic exploration by making windows the subject of a painting series. I tried using collages made from photos of rooms I pulled from home and architecture magazines, but these spaces were always so empty. They lacked the unique features I was looking for, as well as any clutter or traces of human existence. That was when I thought to look at film and television, since these mediums contain spaces that are often curated to look lived-in. They are meant to look imperfect so as not to draw attention away from the action.
My sister is an actress and studied film at university. She would point out details in the movies and television we watched and teach me behind-the-scenes knowledge. Her insights slowly changed the way I viewed film and television. I became aware of how intentional everything you see on screen is. I became aware of the art of set-dressing, which involves thinking through the characters’ wants, needs, habits, and lifestyle to make a space believable to the audience.
The purpose of this work is that it goes unnoticed and is accepted as the lived reality of the characters, rather than the carefully calculated arrangement that it is. I find it exciting to isolate and recontextualize these scenes so that these objects and sets become the basis for a new narrative.
The first film I took still images from was Single White Female (1992). The lighting and colour palette used throughout the film are beautifully dramatic, and I felt so inspired to paint still images from it. The act of seeking out windows in cinema became very exciting to me. I suddenly had an unlimited source of material to work with. I found this process helped me find a distinct artistic style. I used windows as the entry point for this new subject; every paused image I captured had to have a window in it. This requirement resulted in some beautiful compositions and lighting setups. While I no longer feel restricted to the necessity of a window, it did lead me to understand that what I most wanted from my reference images was high contrast and strong directional lighting. The window also lent itself to the title for my largest body of work, “A Room with View.”
Q: Does painting feel like a way to slow time, or to rewrite it?
A: I find that my paintings slow time from my perspective, but rewrite it for viewers. When I am painting, I have the full context of the image I am recreating. I know the film it comes from, what is happening in the specific scene, and what I have cropped out of the frame. I know the characters, actors, genre, mood, and plot. All of this information influences how I perceive my own paintings — both in progress and as finished pieces. This knowledge impacts how I perceive what I have painted and the nuances of the space. This, for me, feels like a pause in time, allowing me to understand and appreciate what I am looking at in more depth than is possible given the rapid pace of moving pictures.
This experience is completely different for viewers. The only context they have is what I have painted, and perhaps the title I have given the piece, which often vaguely references the context of the scene I have sourced from. In this way, I feel as though I am rewriting time for viewers. They look into the space I have recreated, completely detached from its original context, and it becomes a new place within which they can briefly exist.
Q: Light feels like a main character in your work. What makes you decide when to exaggerate it?
A: Light is the most characteristic feature of my work, but I am only able to emphasize light when the shadows are equally exaggerated. I focus especially on shadows when creating depth in my paintings. I learned early on when painting this subject matter that, when an object is not sitting in the space quite right, it is most likely because it is not dark enough. I dedicate a significant amount of time while painting to mixing chromatic blacks. These chromatic blacks are essential to creating atmosphere in my paintings. These shades of black form the shadows that recede into space and become the backdrop for bright rays of light. There is a lot more freedom in painting light. With the backdrop set by intricate shadows, I let light become the focal point.
I am able to use my source image to understand where the light falls in a space, but also find places where a highlight could be added or enhanced. This process is much more intuitive and often involves several layers of paint to find the right colour to believably shine into the space.
Some advice I received from a painting instructor was that, if a composition looks good in black and white, it will make a good painting. It was through this lens that I started looking at every one of my paintings, and found it to be true.
The paintings I was least satisfied with were largely made up of midtones; these paintings lacked contrast. I now recognize that, whether present or not in an image, my paintings need to dwell in the lightest lights and darkest darks. From this advice, my shadows have become deeper and my highlights have become brighter, and this has become a ubiquitous feature in my paintings.
Q: In “At the Movies”, there’s a sense of quiet distance. Do you think about mood before or after the image?
A: Mood comes into consideration for me at every stage of the process. I always go into a painting with expectations of how the mood will translate from the paused image into the finished piece. In most cases, however, the painting takes on a new life, capturing an entirely different mood than was conveyed in my source image. I find this process exciting, and welcome the unpredictability. This forces me to take a step back from a finished painting and try to see it through a viewer's eyes. I am challenged to see the painting as it is, not as a product of my expectations. It is difficult, as an artist, to look at your work objectively; I have struggled with this my entire life. With practice, I have found it easier to figuratively step back from my work and look at my paintings with a sense of objectivity. One of the final steps in my process is creating a title, and for this I need to understand what viewers see in the scene so that the title can reflect this perceived setting and mood.
Q: “The Golightly Apartment” captures a kind of cinematic solitude. How do you translate that feeling into paint?
A: This starts from the moment I choose to press pause. When I see a lingering establishing shot or sweeping glimpse across the scene, I know I see potential. I love to capture moments where the actors are not in frame, or face away from the camera. In these moments, audiences can briefly divert their attention away from the action or dialogue, and let their eyes drift around the scene.
I often draw inspiration from these moments, as they become an opportunity for me to bring the background to the forefront. This is, thematically and practically, a crucial aspect to my work.
The basis of my practice pertains to spotlighting mundanity and making it beautiful. I think this is in huge part a result of the subjects I choose to paint, but also my technical execution. I put a significant amount of effort into the accuracy of line and perspective in the spaces I depict, and work to create smooth transitions between the shapes and colours that make these spaces. I want these spaces to be realistic enough for viewers to envision themselves in the space, but also have a surreal dreamlike quality to them.
Q: When you look back at your earlier works, what feels most different in how you see now?
A: When I began this series of cinematic paintings, I relied heavily on the quality of light and colour in my source image to contribute to the quality of my painting. I relied on the set-designers, set-dressers, prop masters, lighting technicians, cinematographers, and many others behind the scenes of the films I watched to create a beautiful setting for me to paint. With the experience I have now, I realize my best paintings have come from objectively uninteresting or poor-quality images. I have found that there is a certain quality to my painting style that turns a “bad” image into a beautiful painting. I now see potential in the most understated still images, and welcome the challenge it is to imagine how this image will translate into paint by the work of my hands.
