Rachel Spelling meticulously fills vintage paint swatch booklets with vibrant miniature paintings – Colossal



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#found objects #miniature #painting #Rachel Spelling

“A color chart is ostensibly about planning colors for your home, but if you break it down, there are so many aspects: dreams, frustrations, happiness, sadness, loss, family, hope, despair, fashion, identity… When you look my work, you see a lot of ideas all at once,” she says Rachel Spelling. Prior to 2020, the London-based artist focused on home interiors and painting elaborate murals, including a six-month project to recreate the original Chinese wallpaper pattern of Villa Pitzhanger, English architect Sir John Soane’s former country house, now open to the public. Vivid flora and fauna stretch from corner to corner, responding thoughtfully to the surface, an approach that works well even on a tiny scale.

Fascinated by the possibilities of painting and drawing since childhood, Spelling has a knack for expressing vibrant detail across a variety of surface sizes. During the pandemic, when everything stopped, she was eager for a new project, sharing that “one long day of isolation, I was at home with a very strong desire to paint some walls but no walls left to paint. There was a Farrow and Ball color chart on my kitchen table, and I suddenly realized that each sliver of paint was like a perfectly primed tiny wall, just waiting to be painted. Commercial swatches designed to help homeowners and decorators choose colors transformed into a canvas ready for interpretation.

« Stone Blue » was the name of the tile that spelled out first, meticulously reproducing a tiny fish on the rectangle. « It looked really weird and interesting, and the paint blended really well with the surface, so I painted another one and then another, » he says. By the end of the block, she had rendered small works across all 132 tiles of the chart and was intrigued by the relationship between the baffling explosion of hues and the subject balanced by the neat grid arrangement. « I really like the clash of mundane, everyday things alongside big ideas, because it’s a core feature of lived experience and one that I found hard to put my finger on until I found this way of working. »

Spelling works on a combination of new and old sample booklets, looking for vintage charts at car markets, charity shops and other places where he might find examples that remain intact and have dull enough surfaces to paint on. There aren’t many out there, since it’s the type of item that people throw away when they’re no longer needed. Finding an older one is always a thrill, as is the experience of working on a delicate and unique surface. “There is a lot of risk when I paint directly on a flimsy vintage graphic. It’s unnerving, but I think the drama of it keeps me on my toes,” she says. « There’s a fine line between damaging something old and creating something new, and I love trying to figure out where that line is! »

Spelling sells prints his shop and makes the originals available for sale a few times a year. You can see more about her website and go Instagram.

#found objects #miniature #painting #Rachel Spelling

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