Chrissie Gutsell

Chrissie Gutsell is an artist based in Elsworth, Cambridgeshire, whose practice spans painting, writing and textiles. Her work is largely spontaneous and expressive: an intuitive, emotional response to subjects that are often themselves drawn from literature or art. She paints the colours and textures of the natural world, from flowers and landscapes to discarded, rusting objects, and uses psychogeography to explore layering, repetition and multiple images in an abstract or semi-abstract idiom. Her series Cyane responds to the Greek myth of the nymph Cyane as reimagined in Lucy M. Boston's poem 'The fount of Cyane, Syracuse / A Revolt Against Gothic'.

Between 2009 and 2013, while living in West Berkshire, she studied watercolour with Ella Clocksin and oil painting with Emily Ball, and was a member of New Greenham Arts, with whom she exhibited in Newbury and Basingstoke and co-curated two group shows. In 2017 she graduated in Creative Arts from the Open College of the Arts, her final year combining painting with creative writing in poetry. Away from the studio she enjoys travelling, walking and cold-water swimming.