CHASE VALENTIN
BRITISH ARTIST & PRODUCER

Becoming An Artist
Chase Valentin was born and raised in Wales. He studied Graphic Design at Wrexham but left to join gothic circus Laughter In The Garden with whom he explored multiple aspects of design, production and stagecraft. Aged twenty-one he moved to London, working first at the BBC then training in PR promotion with Liz Bolton Associates. In 1990 he began working as a freelance media and events stylist, involved in multiple roles on the UK's indie art, fashion and music scene.
Through extensive collaboration, travel and study, Valentin's mind began to consider the potential of life as an artist. Exploring first with clay and line drawing, he produced hundreds of raw sketches and developed Raku firing techniques to produce sculptural pieces for exhibition. Support and inspiration to shape a living through art came from many directions, but two summers spent in Russia (1993/94) with practitioners of the St. Petersburg New Academism movement gave him the impetus to make that leap. Oil paint became his primary medium, and two years later, with an empty Kensington apartment serving as studio and gallery, and a £5000 commission to produce work, opened the doors on his first solo show.
Over the next two decades Valentin acted as his own impresario, independently promoting annual collections and staging them as 'events' in both traditional galleries and alternative spaces. With the support of patrons and media interest, his exhibitions proved successful, and through commissions and sponsorship he was able to secure his (still current) studio in central London. In 2001 and he took up residence in the Languedoc region of France and eighteen months later moved to the outskirts of Spain's third largest city, Valencia, where he lived for seven years.
Expansion
In 2009 Valentin moved to Portugal. Having already demonstrated in his paintings an instinctive desire to explore different forms of expression, the city of Lisbon offered the perfect environment to further expand his practice. The capital's thriving theatre scene offered multiple challenges across design, direction and production, while in tandem he established Irisbranca, a studio enterprise whose purpose was to probe the expressive applications of digital media. The resulting projects involved solo and collaborative projects in filmmaking, photography, music and publishing. In 2015 he was invited to mentor students of Lisbon’s Lusofona and Bellas Artes universities through a cross-discipline exploration of arts practice.
In 2017 he returned to the UK and a year later settled in Fishguard, on the south west coast of his native Wales. As a result of its remoteness, arts initiatives were largely community-based and embraced enthusiastically. Finding himself drawn to music and performance, much of his effort was directed towards the handling of the town's theatre and annual fringe music festival, staging, promoting and hosting events, producing shows and developing content for performance. During the Covid lockdown of 2020 he took the opportunity to extend his knowledge of music engineering and production, which ultimately led to his current experimentation with songwriting.