Lewis Chamberlain: From the Pocket of A Ghost
Recently, Lewis Chamberlain had been working on a drawing of a dragonfly soaring over a landscape. The insect that served as his model was dead when his daughter brought it home after a swim. “A friend found this huge dragonfly. It was dead. They threw it around all over the place,” Chamberlain explains. “She brought it back and it’s in perfect condition. I’ve dried it out.”
Chamberlain set up the dragonfly on a shelf in his studio as part of a scene that also included a church, a river, and some trees. “It’s slightly too high up for me to be able to see it from the angle that I’m drawing it at,” Chamberlain says. “So the dragonfly itself I’ve taken photographs of, and I will draw that largely from photographs.”
Incorporating a mix of objects—everything from old toys to dead bugs to simple paper constructions—Chamberlain builds unusual scenarios that he then depicts in impeccably detailed drawings. “All my work is logical in the sense that everything is there,” says the British artist, who rarely adds anything to a drawing that is not part of the scene that he composed. “Everything works physically in a logical sense, but I hope that it has an air of being unreal or not logical.”
His images are like eerie dreams set in locations that are as familiar as they are foreign. “I guess it gets us to question the world we live in by seeing another world which is slightly alien to that,” he says. “It reflects the world but, at the same time, it’s slightly unreal or slightly illogical. It’s neither here nor there.”
Raised in the countryside of northeastern England, not far from the city of Hull, Chamberlain took to drawing early in life. His first subjects included the insects and found objects that he encountered near his childhood home. “I found things from nature, broken bits of pottery, and old toys and stuff down by the river Humber, which is a sort of huge industrial river estuary,” he says. “Stuff would wash up there all the time, so there was always so much subject matter. I guess there wasn’t much else I could do with it other than draw it.”
He adds, “I always had an interest in detail and objects, strange objects in unfamiliar places. That’s something that’s continued throughout my work now.”
But Chamberlain’s style shifted during the course of his education. “It just wasn’t the thing to do in art school in the ‘80s, to be doing very small, detailed drawings,” he recalls.
“Everybody else was doing big, expressionist landscapes and what have you. My work changed quite a lot then. I painted more than I drew,” Chamberlain continues. “I painted and I worked on a larger scale and my work was more abstract, organic shapes from what I remember from my childhood, the landscapes that I experienced growing up in that part of the country.”
Chamberlain eventually found his way back to drawing. After university, while living in a “derelict flat” in London, he found inspiration in his surroundings. “I turned very much to the environment that I was in, which was the building itself that I lived in. So the walls and the doors and the window frames, the view from it to some extent, the carpet, the stains on the ceiling, bits of wiring sticking out here and there,” he says. “I was there for something like twelve years, maybe more, so I worked all the time, every day and every night.”
At one point, Chamberlain drew a mannequin that was set up in the corner of his studio. Then he moved on to drawing dolls, and later, toys.
With his unexpected mix of found objects, Chamberlain creates open-ended narratives. Take “The Beasts of the Earth,” which includes a snow globe with the Madonna and child inside, a piece from his wife’s collection, surrounded by an assortment of dead insects. “I like the idea of that religious, Christian thing with the dead creatures around it,” he says. “I’m not making any specific statements about religion or God or anything. It’s not praiseworthy and it’s not critical. It is what you make of it.”
It’s not just the objects themselves that draw in viewers, but also how intricately they are drawn. “I’m still drawing in a very detailed, very measured way where everything is very carefully prepared beforehand,” says Chamberlain.
EVERYTHING WORKS PHYSICALLY IN A LOGICAL SENSE, BUT I HOPE THAT IT HAS AN AIR OF BEING UNREAL OR NOT LOGICAL.”
“If I have to change my work halfway through, that causes huge issues. I like to know exactly what I’m doing and I like to plan ahead.”
For “Woman Falling from an Airplane,” Chamberlain built the scene inside a dark cardboard box. That’s frequently how he works and he will shine bright lights on different angles.
“I think that with that drawing, I was quite deliberate about what I wanted. I wanted to draw a figure. I wanted to draw that doll actually,” Chamberlain explains. He shares that his father, also an artist, goes to charity shops to source objects that Chamberlain might like to draw. Once, his father scored a Barbie doll on one of those excursions. Chamberlain removed the head and attached it to another doll’s body. “I changed the hair and everything. So it’s been butchered around a lot,” he says. He thought of having the character fall from a balloon or a rocket before settling on an airplane. “Falling from an airplane is more relatable than falling from a balloon to most people, I think.”
The sets that he builds aren’t quite as elaborate as museum dioramas, he notes. “I deliberately don’t do that. I don’t make things well,” he says. The slide’s ladder in “Woman Falling from an Airplane” was made of balsa wood, while the slide itself is paper. In the foreground, you’ll see a curve that could either be a river or a road— “it’s just a winding line to lead the viewer into the drawing,” Chamberlain says. That’s also made of paper. The streetlamp in the foreground is “a piece of wire with something stuck on the end.”
And that’s part of the point. Chamberlain isn’t trying to make replicas of specific places. “I like the idea that art can take us out of the world that we live in, out of the world that is familiar to us,” he says.
With time, Chamberlain has altered parts of his process. “When I was in college, I worked from life and, especially the few years after that, I was absolutely against the idea of working with photographs,” he explains. “I’ve changed that very much now. I work from photographs. I work from life. It makes no difference to me whatsoever. I think the restrictions that you put on yourself by saying you shouldn’t work from photographs are just ridiculous.”
In “Night Air,” Chamberlain brings together his built worlds with the real one. He set up the scene outside and took photos, which included the landscape surrounding the doll and her box. Then he brought the doll’s world back into the studio and used similar lighting to draw both from the still life and the photograph.
“With objects and dolls, if possible, I try to draw from life because it’s easier than just relying on photographs,” he says. “If I have photographs, I print them out on a crappy printer and you don’t have a lot of information there. That can work.” He adds that this method can work better for backgrounds, where he might not want to go into heavy detail.
FALLING FROM AN AIRPLANE IS MORE RELATABLE THAN FALLING FROM A BALLOON TO MOST PEOPLE, I THINK.”
While scenes that Chamberlain builds are typically the basis for his drawings, that’s not always the case. Take, for example, his drawing “The Chair,” where a chair and a small potted plant sit on a patio at night, light pouring through the windows of the home behind them.
Early in 2023, Chamberlain and his family moved to a town near Brighton. “I’ve never lived in a town. I’ve lived in a city. I’ve lived in villages, but I’ve never lived in a town,” he says. The scene here is based on photographs of Chamberlain’s own garden, with his house in the background. The chair in the drawing belonged to Chamberlain’s late mother, who—like Chamberlain and his father and brother—was also an artist. “Her drawings were more detailed than mine are, actually,” he remarks.
Initially, Chamberlain considered referencing his mom in the title of the work. “I did think about calling it my mother’s chair, because with the tree behind it, there’s sort of a suggestion of a presence there,” he says.
But, Chamberlain notes, he also doesn’t like to be too descriptive with the titles and prefers to keep the meaning more open to interpretation. “I don’t want it to be too personal to me,” says Chamberlain. “They are drawings for other people to look at. Just because I do them doesn’t mean that they are about me or about my experiences. The fact that it’s my mum’s chair is, in a way, irrelevant. It could be somebody else’s mum’s chair.”
Chamberlain photographed the scene and drew from those images. “It simply wasn’t practical in January in the freezing cold to sit there for hours at night,” he says.
The details in “The Chair,” from marks on the patio in the foreground to the signs of domestic life faintly visible through the windows in the background, are impressive. “I work in a way that is very detailed. It is what I do. And I’ve come to realize that’s how I naturally, instinctively do work,” says Chamberlain. “It’s entirely impractical. If you want to actually make a living from your work, have exhibitions, there’s a limit to how much detail you can put in, but I find that it’s extremely difficult to get away from that detail. I often want to. I often become frustrated by it, but it is instinctively the way that I work.”
I LIKE THE IDEA THAT ART CAN TAKE US OUT OF THE WORLD THAT WE LIVE IN, OUT OF THE WORLD THAT IS FAMILIAR WITH US…”
Amidst his current projects is a drawing that has been in progress for several years. It began with a mannequin head that was intended for Chamberlain’s daughter to practice using makeup. “She never used it once. It stayed around the house for years,” he says.
Chamberlain intended to take the object to a charity shop and then realized that the head might fit his work. The problem, though, was that it was far too clean. “So I took it a nearby forest and I left it there for something like two-and-a-half years. When I came back, it was quite incredible. It had grown over. It was full of insects and dead leaves, snails and all sorts of stuff. The skin had changed and was very blotched.”
Back at home, Chamberlain placed the head in a shed for another six months to dry it out, then placed it on white piece of paper. “All these objects fell off of it, which I loved,” he says. He added moths, flies, and some other odds and ends to it and began drawing.
The work-in-progress is stunning, with Chamberlain capturing a head of doll’s hair that has since transformed into something closer to a bird’s nest, all tangled with leaves and twigs and hanging over one eye.
The duration of the project isn’t just the result of a multi-part process, but also the priorities of a working artist. “I don’t know how long I’ve been drawing it for. It’s time consuming and I need to make a living,” he says. “As most artists know, you can’t just sit there and spend years and years on one thing and not do anything else at the same time. [You have to] make a living.”
Still the work continues. “I go back to it occasionally when I can, but I need to sell my work in the meantime… so I need to work on smaller things that don’t take four years… in order that I can make a living… in order that I can then go back to spending some time on something that takes four years.”*
This article was published in print in Hi-Fructose issue 69. Get a copy of the full issue here and thanks for supporting our independent publication.
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