[ Music plays ] Chatfield: Painting is my way of expressing myself.

I like the participation of the audience with abstract work.

It challenges them.

First, they want to try and figure it out.

It makes them question what they're looking at, and it engages them, and I like that.

[ Music continues ] I'm Maureen Chatfield.

I'm a painter, and I also teach painting, and I live in Tewksbury, New Jersey.

[ Music continues ] Nostrand: "Journey and Destination" is a solo exhibition by New Jersey artist Maureen Chatfield.

It features 17 works of art, primarily oil on canvas, that extend from work she made in the 1990s all the way through to recent pieces.

She has shared quite a few works with us for this really special exhibition.

We have organized it in two parts.

The first part is featuring earlier works that Maureen made in the 1990s, where she was recalling childhood memories of mostly trips that she took with her family when she was a child.

These are all somewhat travel stories, or travelogues, in the form of paintings.

One work I particularly enjoy is "Family Outing."

It's a story that Maureen shares about being on a family road trip and accidentally locking the car keys in the trunk of the car.

At the time, she told me that this was a rather stressful experience for her as a child, but the way that the painting is rendered almost has a playful quality, as if, perhaps, this is how it looked to her as a child.

Chatfield: The first one is from the "Out of My Mind" series.

Those are family narratives.

They led me.

After I finished them, they were kind of cathartic.

I never painted those to sell.

They were just simply for me.

They're figurative, but in a humorous way.

It is funny when you retell it, but it was not funny at the time.

Nostrand: The second section of the exhibition are depictions of places she has traveled that she created later.

So these are from the early 2000s up till more recent years.

And these are really more tranquil, luscious landscapes that depict very specific places that she has fond memories of visiting.

There's a very rich tradition of landscape painting, and I think one of the things this show demonstrates is that there's always a new and interesting way to paint something, even if it's a subject that's already been depicted.

[ Music plays ] At the Morris Museum, one of our goals is to focus and feature on New Jersey contemporary artists when we can.

And so this was a great opportunity to show a New Jersey artist who's been in the field for quite a while and has made some really wonderful work.

[ Music plays ] [ Birds chirping ] [ Music plays ] Chatfield: So, I live in Tewksbury, and it is fairly rural.

There's lots of rolling hills.

The topography is quite beautiful.

I'm surrounded by mountains.

I live on a stream with three waterfalls.

And it does impact me.

I'm about to do a painting that is basically rocks.

It won't look like rocks, but they'll be -- the shapes will be dividing the canvas, and they will be rocks in my stream.

[ Music plays ] So, the way I started painting was -- I'm an only child.

I had lots of free time, and I wound up filling it with art.

So I started painting seriously at 14.

My teacher was so great.

He wouldn't let me paint until I could mix any color he could point to.

So I learned color theory at a very early age, which is a tremendous advantage.

Color theory is the basic foundation of painting.

It's space, how you divide space and color.

And when you learn how to control color -- that is, take a color and push it through all of its values -- then you create depth with that.

When I first started painting, I did mostly landscapes.

I started painting the rooftops of buildings.

I started doing a lot of industrial painting.

Then I moved out to New Jersey, and I painted lots and lots of barns.

And then there came a point where I said, "I can basically paint anything I see, and so where's the challenge?"

You know, you always have to challenge yourself.

So I wanted to see what was inside -- just look at a blank canvas, and with no inspiration, nothing to copy, paint.

[ Music plays ] I'd use oils and acrylics.

And I paint very, very large, I paint very fast, and I like layering.

The tools that I use are bigger brushes that are a little on the loose side, and I use large trowels, palette knives -- I use oil sticks.

I hear from people all the time that they like my work even better in person, because you can see the layers, and you can't see that in a photograph.

It takes a lot of paint.

I can paint for a month on something.

I can paint for a day or two.

You never know with art.

[ Music plays ] And the first few abstracts I did, my clients would come into the studio, and they go, "I don't like that."

It took quite a long time before I could really do what I wanted.

What generally starts it for me is color.

I am attracted to color, and my bench, my workbench has tons of color.

So whatever state I'm in emotionally, I'm generally drawn to that color.

And I start with that, and then it builds from there.

It may be gestural -- I may just take a big broad stroke, or I may pour and just keep pushing the palette knife until I cover what I want to on the canvas.

I think composition is incredibly important to the painting.

There's a rhythm.

There's a pattern to the energy.

You have to create negative space.

You need tension, and the way to create tension is to not have balance.

So when I scroll, when my eye moves around the painting and it doesn't go back anywhere, just sort of looks at it... it's done.

People want to find things that they can recognize -- I've noticed that -- they like doing that.

"Oh, I know what that is."

So there is that element.

I do like when they do that.

I won't tell them with my abstract work what it is.

I want them to take out whatever they want from it.

[ Music plays ] [ Music continues ]