Showings
- 2024 December, Artists of Bordentown Art Show, all paintings on display.
- 2024, Spring Johanna Furst Studio Spring Student Show, five oil on canvas paintings.
- 2024, May Bordentown City Cats Silent Auction, Maeve of Bordentown, oil on canvas painting. (Donation)
- 2015, ’22-’24 April Shadfest Silent Auction, various Lambertville, NJ themed titles, 11″ x 17 ” posters. (Donation)
- 2017 September Flemington DIY Community Art Show, Gun Talk: Confronting the Legacy of Guns in America, Series of five Andy Warhol’s blobbed line technique. Gouache and inks on paper. Album.
Memberships
- Princeton Art Museum, 2025
- Artists of Bordentown, 2024
Statement
Being human carries the theme of my art. It is an aim to capture the human experience. At the MOMA in 1998, I fell in love with my husband while standing in a gallery full of Mark Rothko’s paintings. Rothko once said “I’m interested only in expressing basic human emotions— tragedy, ecstasy, doom….” Both Rothko’s paintings and my new-found love brought me to tears that day. Rothko achieved his goal by giving the viewer freedom to use their own imaginations. His paintings, devoid of anything resembling objects, hints at memories through color alone. He has inspired me to pay attention to natural colors.
While I paint this concept is close to my heart. I am currently reading Todd Casey’s “The Oil Painter’s Color Handbook: A Contemporary Guide to Color Mixing, Pigments, Palettes, and Harmony” in order to learn academic methods of color. The harmony and grace of circular forms is also of my interest. I am fond of Georgia O’Keefe’s and Hilma af Klint’s interplay with roundness and the use of suppleness of the feminine forms. My journey as a multimedia artist has led me down many paths. The digital world sustained me for over 46 years. Yet, it has been a conscious effort to go back to painting. I want to be delighted by tactile and optical processes again. Give my mind a resurgence of using my hands and my eyes to paint. In reality, digitals are so flat as the screens they are displayed on. Working in oils also brings culture and history. There are so many genres to study, as I search for my own style. An added benefit is relief from the lifelong anxiety felt with stressful deadlines and the newer technologies evolving at an inhuman pace. Inspired by my mentor, Johanna Furst, a prolific artist in Lambertville, New Jersey, her direction has made my rebirth encouraging and thoughtful. She is someone that is with me and is delighted to see how I grow as an artist.
Biography
Georgie Chalker was born in the Germantown section of Philadelphia. Her interest in art started by working with her father’s drafting tools and her babysitter’s art tools. She was fortunate to start art classes in high school and attended Saturday art lectures at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA). She was fascinated by the richness of culture and history on display within the wings of this world-renowned art museum. Her portfolio began to grow by influences from the diverse cultures of the city. She fantasized about a career in the heart of the city, and her father advised her to attend an art college with career options.
Education
In the late 70s, Chalker entered the Art Institute of Philadelphia (AIP), blacks away from the PMA on parkway in Center City. Graphic design was her major (AA). Her studies also included an academic foundation, photography, illustration, typography, and various other art studies.
It was an exciting atmosphere, for the classes were small and the teachers were working artists. Her mentors were successful artists in the area: painters Fred Danzinger, Harvey Silverman, photographers Bernie Cleff, and the talented illustrator, Charlie Ellis. Many instructors also augmented their salaries by teaching at Philadelphia’s prestigious institutions, including Moore College of Art, the Academy of Fine Arts, and the then known Philadelphia College of Arts.
In the 90s, while graphic design became increasingly digital. Working for a Dutch company, De Lage Landen, in Wayne, PA, Georgie obtained a web masters’ certification from Penn State and a “marketing on the web” certification from Villanova University in order to develop her first website.
Though, this was not the end of her studies. Georgie went back to school to obtain a (BA) in visual communications, with a minor in film analysis from Empire State, SUNY in her mid fifties. She interned at the University of the Arts, with Prof. Whit MacLaughlin’s drama course, as a stage archivists, videographer, and critic. This culminated into a production called of “Fatebook,” a play that started on social media and ended on stage at the Philadelphia Fringe Festival. In 2007, she was one of one hundred videographers for in the street production of “The Principles of Uncertainty.” Her graduating internship was at the Havana Film Festival in New York in 2010.
In 2023, Chalker started oil painting classes with Johanna Furst Studio. Furst is a prominant artists and philanthropist in Lambertville, New Jersey. Chalker intends to continue to work in the studio long after her retirement.