Artist: Claire Milbrath
Exhibition title: The Happy Learner
Venue: Pangée, Montreal, Canada
Date: September 16 – October 22, 2022
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Pangée, Montreal
Claire Milbrath paints sanctuaries. Her scenes are dedicated to reverie and routine, half-waking in their study of how we live, and play, and pray,
and brush our teeth, and look for light in the shadows. A still life with winter squash becomes a shrine. The outdoors is romantic with swans and cypress trees. Hers is a way of looking that obliges sleepy scenes of oasis and morning solitude. Hers is a consideration for grace that is sometimes unanticipated, like a ceremony of daffodils, how they seem so earnest and dying to. Wordsworth’s “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” is easily summoned. “Ten thousand saw I at a glance,” he writes, playfully describing a host of golden daffodils, “Toss their heads in a sprightly dance.”
Grace as portrayed by Milbrath, takes place in what’s weird and unexplainable, even dark, like an inclement sky or a puddle’s reflective surface, approximating a portal elsewhere. Grace is the thing you look for— the prospect of escape, here and there: an image of a pasture on a milk carton, the funny wilt of week-old tulips, the feeling of running for cover before the rain falls. In this new series of paintings, Milbrath’s exploration of daily life is well-provided for, lush, and full of miracles.
Her figures are seeking splendor, and shelter, and small luxuries like tall grass, drip coffee, and other stuff that might come in heaps (bowls of Buck oranges, flower bouquets in milk glass). A scrum of rugby players mid-brawl could be described as a heap, and even still, in Milbrath’s imagination, the players are balletic, on top of each other affectionately, like a heap of Hugs.
As with her previous work, Milbrath’s paintings feature her two alter egos. The towheaded, muscly figure with pancake skin, often depicted in short shorts and white ankle socks. And the bichon frisé—its movements
set free or statuary (bouncing like clouds across a prairie field; paws outstretched devotedly). These alter egos harmonize with Milbrath’s surreal arcadian landscapes. The blonde figure is meditative. The bichon frisé is brave. They occupy the artist’s sloping picture plane and are secure in Milbrath’s subverted perspective. Her sense of scale is freed of burden and gives rise to interior spaces with divine and self-ruling frames of reference. The brown bathroom, red-tiled kitchen, or pink room with Tudor windows, are all flattened; their realities altered and fantastic. Her use of brown becomes magical like a bathroom housed in a tree. The red is recumbent and unnerving. Pink prospers in Milbrath’s work. Pink is familiar. Pink is a set of towels. Pink is a faded poppy. Pink is a pair of blushing cheeks. A blue kitchen is Rohmeresque, leveled with details disposed to disproportion. A porcelain egg cup appears miniature, meant for a doll house. In the same painting, one chair is vacant but not necessarily inviting. Her figures, unless otherwise stated, are unaccompanied. They are daydreamers who appear content to go at it alone. They are in no rush to snap out of it.
–Text by Durga Chew-Bose.
Claire Milbrath (b.1989, Victoria, BC) is a self-taught artist working with painting, sewing, ceramics, and drawing. Adopting an artistic style reminiscent of the Naive Painters, Milbrath incorporates large swaths of lush color to construct her compositional space, renewing the coloristic tradition with vignettes relating to unrequited love, sexual fantasies, and childhood innocence. Milbrath’s work centers around the imaginary life of Gray who serves as an alter ego for the artist. In recent years, she has exhibited at Deboer Gallery, Los Angeles (USA); Eve Leibe Gallery in London (UK); The Hole, New York (USA); and Pangée, Montreal (Canada). Upcoming group shows include Marvin Gardens in New York (USA). She is the editor-in-chief and founder of Editorial Magazine. Claire Milbrath is represented by Pangée (Montreal).
