Jonni Cheatwood is a Los-Angeles based painter whose practice is a labor-intensive process, sewing canvases with found textiles that reference both interior and exterior spaces. As these canvases are stretched the different fabrics create unexpected textures and shapes, adding a further level of abstraction. As viewers attempt to distinguish between the painted canvas and the printed textile, they are drawn in, finding themselves encompassed by the large-scale canvas and scenes.
As Cheatwood dives deeper into figuration, his loose brushwork and gestural abstraction subtlety convey the full range of emotion experienced by the subjects in his portraits, as well as the viewers of these scenes. The texture of his brushstrokes combined with the sharp lines of their forms has allowed the artist to create characters that are at once unrecognizable while still universally relatable.
As a self-taught artist, Cheatwood’s process is one of experimentation and steady evolution over time. It is a dynamic undertaking that spans mediums and aesthetics, creating textured and color-filled pieces that greet the viewer head-on, ready to engage in conversation. Cheatwood’s works evoke a warm, nostalgic sensation like browsing through one’s family book photographs, and although the people depicted in his works aren’t specifically always based on his own relatives or friends, the works are still about people he can relate to.
Jonni Cheatwood was born in 1986 in Thousand Oaks, California. He graduated from Arizona State in 2011. He currently lives and works in Los Angeles, California