Chloe Saron
AQ is our series of hardcover catalogs celebrating extraordinary women artists. Available on Amazon. Visit the AQ Catalog Webpage to learn more.
Chloe Saron, featured in AQ Volume VI, is an oil painter from Baltimore, Maryland. Though trained traditionally with a background in realism, Chloe prefers working without references and blurs or “fogs” her paintings. The intention is to force the viewer to perceive the scene in its entirety, without the distractions of small detail. The viewer can grasp the scene as a moment and pull from a personal memory—a place, a feeling, or a time. Her goal is to give the viewer a moment of peaceful reflection, to combat the fast, bright, and hard-edged world we live in.
Through automatic painting, she has pulled from her experiences living in Wyoming, Vermont, Maryland, Colorado, Southeast Asia, the Caribbean, Australia, Europe, and the Adirondack Mountains.
She has been featured in multiple blogs and publications, including Maine Home + Design, Artist Closeup Magazine, Maine Today Media, and The Next Gen Collector list for the Spring 2025 Affordable Art Fair.
Chloe is represented by KW Contemporary Art in Kennebunkport, Maine, and Manor Mill Gallery in Monkton, Maryland. She has exhibited at the Affordable Art Fair in New York City, Field Museum, S.P.A.C.E. Gallery, Argazzi Art, Teton Gravity Research, and on Artsy.
Chloe has a BFA in Painting from Towson University. She also studied at the School of Creative Arts in Tasmania, AUS, and is currently earning an MFA at Maryland Institute College of Art.
www.chloesaron.com
What inspired you to become an artist, and how did you decide to commit to this path?
Art has always been a big part of my life. My grandmother was an oil painter, and every visit to her home was met with the smells of her studio and the many still lives, landscapes, and portraits she would be working on. Inspired by her and my natural gravitation to drawing, I started taking classes very early on and continued through college. After I graduated, I worked for the “other side,” in a contemporary art gallery in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. There, I was surrounded by many world-renowned artists. After four years of admiring the modern styles, I embarked on a journey to find my way of expression. It took two years to master the technique that felt most fulfilling and exciting. In 2020, my “Modern Romantic” series debuted with a solo show at KW Contemporary Art, which was well received and launched my practice.
Could you share the story or concept behind your recent work?
For the past five years, I’ve been making purely landscapes. I really indulged in the spontaneity of my process and what scene could be pulled from my subconscious, while making sense of the piece with the colors, light, and composition. Viewing each as an abstract arrangement that can be read as a landscape. But at the end of 2024, I started to paint more concise subject matter—floral arrangements, rooms, figures. I had been part of an amazing group of artists that got together to do figure studies, and my drawings there melted into my automatic painting in my oil work. Figures and florals are so organic and funky and expressive, and I loved the way my practice could weave them in. It opened a box for me, and I’m excited to continue to explore different subjects in my work.
What role does experimentation and exploration play in your artistic practice?
What excites me with this series is the rebellion of it. I am going against my traditional training and my past hyper-realistic work. I have no image to refer to, my compositions change constantly until the paint is just about dry. It is time-sensitive and easy to lose it when you go too far. You must know when to stop but also be willing to squeeze in a new element, risking the entire piece as you do it. The result is never as expected, and the knowledge that it cannot be recreated in its exactness is so special. After years of realism, this is finally a process that pushes me, scares me, excites me, and fulfills me.
What message do you hope your art conveys to the world?
I want my work to allow viewers to take a pause—a breath away from the hard lines and loud noise constantly hitting us. The modern world is bright, literal, fast, equally devastating, beautiful, and exciting. I want to complement that. Balance it. Evoke a sense of nostalgia in an unconventional way, create a reflective puzzle in the viewer’s mind. I want to give my audience a true opportunity to escape the busy, information age that we find ourselves in.
Share a mantra or favorite quote that keeps you going.
It sounds obvious but it’s just my honest mindset. “Keep creating.” Just keep making something, anything that feels fulfilling. It doesn’t even have to be tangible. I have two beautiful young sons that happily fill up most of my days, but I struggled for the first few years with the desire to make art as I used to be able to do freely whenever I wanted. But that mantra has transcended to mean anything. Create beautiful memories with my children, create a new experience in a new place so that you can hold onto it and pull from, create meaningful art, create a simple craft, create a moment with a loved one, create a new hobby, just keep creating and experimenting and you’ll find the diamonds you didn’t know you could make. It’s so easy to lean into the endless television shows or let AI do the thinking for you. To stay creative in any form is what will keep us moving forward, feeling fulfilled, grateful, and excited for the future.
