Dane Chinnock | Capturing Emotions

By Norman Kolpas

Early one evening in November 2023, an approaching thunderstorm gripped Dane Chinnock’s attention as he drove north on Interstate 17 toward the rugged Bradshaw Mountains just south of Prescott, Arizona. “For 20 miles, I’d been watching it build and grow,” he recalls. “The sun was getting low, and all along the horizon edge was this golden yellow light, while the thunderhead cast its shadow across the landscape as the rain came down. It just took my breath away.” He pulled off the highway near Cordes Junction, grabbed his camera, got out of his car and snapped “maybe 50 photos, saying to myself, ‘Aw, man, someday I’ll paint that.’”

Someday came this past fall when Chinnock began to paint a sweeping 30-by-60-inch landscape. He recalls, “I was in my studio”—which occupies a generous detached building near his home on the outskirts of Georgetown, Texas, just north of Austin—“looking through my photographs deciding what to paint next. This scene came up. I decided to take the challenge.”

Having selected a snap that best captured the scene, Chinnock first completed a 6-by-12-inch color sketch “to figure out the composition and values,” which included his decision to make the painting “more of a cloudscape than a landscape.” At last, he turned his attention to the blank canvas that he first toned with a purple hue chosen “to be complementary to the overall colors of the finished painting.” Then, he continues, “I sat and stared at it for about a week, to get a feel for what I was looking at before I started even putting any paint on it.”

At last, he picked up his tool of choice: a palette knife, which lends an almost sculptural quality to the surface of his paintings and a rich expressiveness to the scenes he portrays. Over the next week and a half, for seven or eight hours a day, he gradually completed the lighter and darker parts of the high blue sky and the clouds beneath. Subsequently he painted the sheets of precipitation storming down on the shadowed mountains and hills, and finally the scrub-dotted desert valley in the foreground. Then, he notes, “I sat and looked at it again for several days more to make sure everything was where I wanted it to be, and to adjust some things.” Once he felt that if “I did anything else I was going to mess it up,” he got out his can of vibrant-hued naphthol red paint and a fine brush and added his distinctive monogram near the lower-left corner. And it was done.

Completed though the painting was, however, one element still awaited: a title. “I try to think of a word that represents what I felt when I saw the scene and while I was painting it,” Chinnock adds with deep sincerity. Seeking an unfamiliar word that would engage viewers in surprising ways, he turned to a thesaurus for inspiration. That led to calling this scene EBULLITION, representing an outburst of emotion.

That term may well, in fact, apply to the entirety of Chinnock’s oeuvre. “Whenever I look at landscapes”—or, he adds, the cityscapes he also enjoys painting—“it affects me emotionally. Sometimes I’ll start laughing, or sometimes I’ll cry, or even get angry. For some reason, it has a strong effect on me.” When he sets out to express in paint what he witnessed in the real world, he notes, “I’m trying to capture that moment, to represent and recreate it.”

Chinnock first felt a strong passion for art in 1982, at around the age of 8, after moving with his mom from Tucson, Arizona, to downtown Prescott, within walking distance of the Phippen Museum of Western Art. He says, “She was really into art, and we’d walk down there, and we always ended up at its annual Western Art Show,” held each Memorial Day weekend. His mother also painted with oils, he notes, “and those smells, and the colors themselves, always appealed to me.”

Throughout school he excelled in art, receiving encouragement from teacher Mike Murphy at Prescott High. “He created artists, and many of his students are professionals today,” says Chinnock, who notes that Murphy was a particularly stabilizing force during his teen years. He shares, “I was a difficult, rebellious kid and had a turbulent time in high school. My paintings then were just ghoulish and dark, unrecognizable from what I paint today.” Eventually, he grew so fearful of the images he felt compelled to portray that he stopped painting entirely—though, in 1993, the summer after he graduated, he experienced “a come-to-God moment” that turned his spirit and his life around.

But he left painting behind for a while. He did construction and other odd jobs, married, had children, lived in Israel for a time doing humanitarian aid and missionary work, Eventually, he returned to Arizona and launched what became a highly successful window-cleaning business.

In 2004, Chinnock began painting again in his spare time, completing “my first actual landscape. And I loved it! So, I thought, man, I can do this, and I want to keep at it.” Four years later, he decided to commit more seriously, seeking the guidance of widely respected Western landscape painter Robert Knudson (who passed away in December 2022). Chinnock recalls his mentor saying “I see your talent” as they laid out a plan of working together that spanned five years. Knudson also explained that “talent is only about 10 percent of any artist. We’re going to work on your skills, your technique and your practice.” Under Knudson’s guidance, Chinnock gained “the real fine-tuning of an artist.”

He also studied with Prescott-based British artist Paul Abbott, whose highly expressive approach to landscape and figurative painting “tapped into more of that emotional side of art I’d been into in high school.” And he sought guidance from award-winning plein-air artist Mark Hemleben, based in the old Arizona copper-mining town turned arts haven of Jerome, who told him, “Go out and paint a hundred paintings in the next year, bring me back 10 that you’re happy with, and I’ll tell you if you’re ready.” Chinnock painted in the open air “almost every day for a year, and all the lessons I’d learned from Bob Knudson came to life for me.” And then, he brought 10 paintings back to Hemleben, who told him he was ready.

All that study, guidance and effort culminated in Chinnock’s decision in late 2016 to submit a body of work to the jury for the 2017 Phippen Western Art Show. He was accepted and went on to win Southwest Art’s Award of Excellence, and the publication also chose him the following year as one of its “Artists to Watch.” He’s been juried into the Phippen and won recognition there every year since (apart from a hiatus in 2020 due to the COVID pandemic). At the 2024 event, he poignantly received Best of Show and First Place in Oils on the same weekend that his mother, who first introduced him to painting and to the Phippen all those years ago, passed away after a two-year battle with cancer. “I’ve got her old painting box here with me in my studio now,” he says with quiet gratitude.

Now at the age of 50 and with top gallery representation and major shows and awards to his credit, Chinnock can undeniably be judged to have “arrived” as an artist. Yet, he continues to challenge himself and to remain refreshingly humble. From his Texas base, he’s exploring new landscapes and cityscapes while also continuing to celebrate the desert Southwest of his earlier years. He hopes to paint European scenes as well, along with exploring portrait and figurative works and even still life paintings.

Yet, landscapes remain a subject he particularly loves. “My mentor Bob Knudson said to me, ‘If you can capture the emotion that you feel standing in front of a landscape so that someone else who stands in front of your painting feels the same emotion, then you’re a true artist.’ That’s the impact I want my paintings to have.”

Norman Kolpas is a San Rafael, California-based freelancer who also writes for various art publications. He teaches creative writing in The Writers’ Program at UCLA, UCLA Extension.

contact informationdanechinnockart.com

representationRowe Fine Art Gallery, Sedona, AZ, rowegallery.comSage Creek Gallery, Santa Fe, NM, sagecreekgallery.com

upcoming shows51st annual Western Art Show & Sale, Phippen Museum, May 24-26.

This story appeared in the February/March 2025 issue of Southwest Art magazine. Subscribe today to read every issue in its entirety.

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