Chase Cantwell

Chase Cantwell grew up in Trenton, NJ, majored in Painting at CW Post College, LIU and received his BFA from there he migrated to New York City in 1978.  There Cantwell came to paint storefronts and eventually portraits.  Having a day job for 25 years in the music business Cantwell took care of major recording projects and worked for just about every recording label there was. At night he went home to paint in isolation.  Eventually Cantwell would show in 1997 at Gallery Asyl in New York’s burgeoning Chelsea area.  After 9/11 he moved out of the city back New Jersey to raise his two children and then they moved back closer to New York City and he began to find his art community.  Cantwell took up encaustic painting to transform what was going on in oil only to realize that medium was excellent for him to portray an earlier love of geometrical abstraction. Stripes, Walking Lines, Curved, By Inference, and Cubes are all series involving a simple motif like the stripe and evolving it.  After a decade of working in encaustic Cantwell turned back to oil to create his Artist Portrait Project where he is painting various artists in his community to be shown February 2023 at The Painting Center in New York City.

Cantwell maintains a studio practice in West Orange, NJ and also teaches encaustic painting and oil privately and at the Visual Art Center of NJ. Cantwell is collected here and abroad.  He has been in countless exhibitions throughout the United States.