About
Biography
Chantelle Allen was born in South Africa and lived there for fourteen years before her family immigrated to the United States, where she became an American citizen. She studied at Avondale in Australia and at Andrews University in Berrien Springs, Michigan, where she received her Bachelor of Fine Art and her Art Education degree.
She went on to pursue her Master of Fine Art at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco, where her thesis work was exhibited at Cafe Sapora on Lombard Street alongside fellow artist Joanna Ubach. Her work from this period — figurative paintings exploring the female nude — established the themes that would define her practice.
Allen has exhibited widely across the United States, with solo and group shows in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Carmel, and Saint Joseph, Michigan. Her 2011 solo exhibition Die Klein Schip at Conception Gallery introduced her to Midwest audiences, while her work at the Dennis Rae Fine Art Gallery in San Francisco and Art Share LA established her presence on the West Coast.
In addition to her studio practice, Allen has taught oil painting at the Krasl Art Center in St. Joseph, Michigan, sharing her technical knowledge and passion for the medium with emerging artists. Her paintings are held in private collections across the United States.
Chantelle Allen — painter and educator
Statement
Artist Statement
My work begins with the body — specifically the female body — as a site of story, memory, and meaning. I am drawn to the figure not as an object of beauty alone, but as a vessel for the interior life: the unspoken, the half-remembered, the quietly endured.
I work primarily in oil, a medium whose slowness suits the kind of attention I want to pay. The process of building up layers — of covering and uncovering — mirrors the way I think about the subjects I paint. Nothing is entirely transparent. Everything carries the trace of what came before.
Drawing and photography extend this inquiry into different registers of time and light. Where painting accumulates, drawing distils. Photography arrests. Together they form a practice that is always circling the same questions: What does it mean to look? What does it mean to be seen?
CV