Chantal Joffe Paints Moments of Motherhood and Grief

16.05.2024 - 15:11 / nytimes.com

Based in Tucson, Ariz., the boutique Desert Vintage has specialized in rare designer clothing since Salima Boufelfel and Roberto Cowan took it over in 2012. Many of their offerings — a century-old Fortuny evening robe or an Azzedine Alaïa suede wraparound top, for example — “can be a bit demanding to wear,” says Boufelfel. So when she landed in New York to open their Orchard Street outpost in 2022, she set out to complement their period pieces with her own designs. The collection, which is named Ténéré (“desert” in Tuareg) in a nod to both Boufelfel’s Arizona origins and Berber heritage, is meant to be worn across seasons and settings: There are airy crinkled chiffon dresses, sleeveless caftans stitched with antique African trade beads and double-pleated Italian-linen trousers. The silk lounge sets — available in a range of sandy shades, as well as a poppy red — are modeled after Desert Vintage’s best-selling 1920s loungewear ensembles, which, Boufelfel notes, “always fly out the door and look amazing on everyone.”

For the British painter Chantal Joffe, “art is a way of understanding life.” So when she experienced the loss of her parents and brother-in-law around the same time that her daughter left for college, it became a way of processing their absence. In her new exhibition, “My Dearest Dust,” currently on view at Skarstedt Gallery on New York’s Upper East Side, Joffe explores themes of motherhood and grief, capturing the bittersweet intimacies of daily life with vivid hues of yellow and green. Her self-portraits depict moments of private sorrow — the artist bathing, lying in bed or walking the dog — interspersed with domestic scenes and paintings of her daughter, Esme, whose childhood Joffe previously documented in her work. “Painting is a very visceral thing,” says Joffe. “And in the end, it isn’t a picture at all. It’s an experience.”

When Casey Axelrod-Welk moved from New York, where he held clinical positions at Weill Cornell Medical Center and Mount Sinai Hospital, to Los Angeles in 2018, the nurse practitioner traded internal medicine for dermal fillers and skin-correcting lasers. “I guess you could say L.A. changed me,” he jokes. In December, Casey and his husband and business partner, Nick Axelrod-Welk, who co-founded the website Into the Gloss and the brand Nécessaire, opened Contrapposto, a cosmetic dermatology clinic in West Hollywood. Inside a 1937 John Elgin Woolf-designed building, the original moldings and 14-foot ceilings are offset by custom stainless-steel cabinetry. An array of antique accents — including 1930s Swedish Art Deco hand mirrors, William Spratling sterling silver Nautilus bowls and a Pierre Jeanneret chair in the main treatment room — were selected by the interior