Chase Langford’s Elephant Walk 2 and Elephant Walk 3 extend his long-running Morphic Series in an unusual direction—quite literally. While many Morphic paintings unfold horizontally, retaining an implicit connection to panoramic landscape, coastlines, and the broad sweep of terrain, the Elephant Walk paintings emphasize a distinctly vertical movement. Forms rise, descend, overlap, and funnel through the compositions, giving the works a sense of upward growth as well as geological depth.
The title originated with the first Elephant Walk, commissioned for an exceptionally large hallway—one so expansive, Langford joked, that an elephant could walk through it, although none ever has. The playful title ultimately proved surprisingly apt for the paintings themselves: their substantial forms seem to progress through the canvas like a loosely assembled procession.
In Elephant Walk 2, saturated pinks dominate, punctuated by crimson, orange, burgundy, turquoise, and flashes of green. Large irregular shapes stretch vertically while narrow channels of contrasting color weave between them. Some passages suggest cliffs, fissures, or geological strata; others have an almost figurative presence, as though abstract bodies were moving through a crowded space. Elephant Walk 3 is more compressed and fiery, its reds and corals creating a denser network of interlocking forms. Turquoise contours repeatedly surface between the warmer colors, sharpening edges and creating an energetic visual current.
Both paintings retain the geographic vocabulary fundamental to Langford’s work. His background in cartography continues to inform his use of boundaries, layered shapes, and terrain-like contours, while the Morphic Series moves those sources toward an abstraction that suggests dimensional space rather than literal maps.
Yet the Elephant Walk compositions also reach backward to Langford’s earlier Coldwater Series, which preceded and helped lead toward the Morphic paintings. The Coldwater works are characterized by tangled, lyrical forms inspired by the rhythms of Coldwater Canyon. Here, that influence reappears in the paintings’ bouquet-like structures: elongated shapes gather, separate, and flare outward like stems, leaves, or petals.
The result is a compelling variation within the Morphic Series. Rather than asking the eye to travel across a landscape, Elephant Walk 2 and 3 invite it to climb through one—transforming Langford’s familiar language of geography into something simultaneously geological, botanical, architectural, and unexpectedly animate.
In Amalfi 4, Chase Langford transforms the dramatic geography of Italy’s Amalfi Coast into a dense, vertically charged abstraction. Inspired by time the artist spent along the coast in 2015, the painting reflects the unusual experience of a
landscape in which towns seem less constructed across the land than stacked upon it. Buildings cling to cliffs, roads and stairways switch back across precipitous slopes, and mountains descend almost directly into the Mediterranean. Langford
translates this sensation of compression, ascent, and descent into a composition that appears to be continually shifting under the eye.
Broad passages of Mediterranean blue dominate the painting, but they are fractured by whites, deep navy, coral, red, green, and flashes of yellow. Forms overlap, collide, and cascade downward, creating an almost architectural density. The strong central blue shape suggests both a monumental figure and a steep landmass, while smaller fragments evoke
terraces, rooftops, rocky outcroppings, vegetation, and glimpses of water. Nothing resolves completely into representation; instead, the painting occupies a compelling territory between remembered place and invented form.
The pronounced verticality distinguishes Amalfi 4 within Langford’s larger body of work. Many of his paintings originatein maps, geological formations, coastlines, and aerial perspectives, encouraging the viewer to imagine looking down upon a landscape. Here, that cartographic impulse is effectively turned upright. Geography becomes elevation, and the
layered organization of a map becomes the experience of looking up and down the extraordinary terrain of the Amalfi Coast.
Like Langford’s other geographically inspired abstractions, Amalfi 4 is less a depiction of a specific view than an accumulation of impressions. It suggests how a place is remembered: through color, movement, spatial relationships, and fragments of visual experience. The result is simultaneously landscape, map, architecture, and abstraction—a vivid reconstruction of the Amalfi Coast through the artist’s distinctive visual language.