This year, the Greater Columbus Arts Council hosted its fourth annual ArtPop Street Gallery, featuring billboards of artwork by six winning local artists. Chloe Schlorb, a Columbus-based artist who hails from Mansfield, was one of the six. She is a digital painter whose illustrative and realistic style empowers her to shed light on the beauty of endangered species. On her Instagram (@chloe_schlorb_art), she has a Featured Friday for endangered animals.
In her childhood, Schlorb frequently traveled to Chicago with her father. She would admire the ArtPop billboards and tell him, “I want my stuff up there one day.” He always had the same reply: “Do it, then.” Schlorb did it, then, and has no plans to slow down. Originally, she intended to design a party scene for her ArtPop submission, but decided instead to focus on her animal pieces and won with a work titled The Troubled Troubling. It features three goldfish: one sad, one annoyed and one moody.
Chloe Schlorb
Schlorb’s father was not the only one to encourage her artistic endeavors. Her family is very artistic as a whole, both visually and musically, and her grandfather worked as a cartoonist for local papers.
On top of her art-centric upbringing, Schlorb studied studio art and music performance at Capital University. Her immersion in these inspirational environments has naturally helped her develop her skills, but this background is by no means a requirement, she says, and encourages aspiring artists to use whatever means are at their disposal.
“I would say just keep working. It doesn’t matter if you go to an arts school, necessarily,” Schlorb says. “You just have to work really hard for it. You just have to work really diligently and try to block out the haters and the nonsense.”
Dealing with critics and imitators is an unfortunate, but crucial, part of the artist’s trade, Schlorb says.
“You’re going to have people that are going to copy you and mimic your style,” she says. “That’s why I switched to digital; it’s a newer style, so it doesn’t happen as much.”
Chloe Schlorb
Schlorb takes frequent trips to zoos to utilize her photography skills and to take reference pictures. Looking at nature helps her to find dimensions and visualize the concept through different perspectives of light, she says. When she is not working digitally with her stylus and tablet, she can be found sketching with graphite.
Schlorb’s glorious goldfish creation can be spotted around the city. The billboard version is on the corner of Stelzer Road and East Fifth Avenue in east Columbus, and the newsstand version is at the corner of South Third and East Gay streets in downtown Columbus. Displays at the Greater Columbus Convention Center and John Glenn Columbus International Airport are scheduled to follow.
In the meantime, to check out more of Schlorb’s work and enter her world of animals, visit her website at www.chloeschlorbart.com.
Caitlyn Blair is a contributing writer. Feedback welcome at feedback@cityscenemediagroup.com.
