GRIN

Artist Chase Hall paints his canvases with coffee, making large-scale works that examine mixed-race identity in America. Now, on the eve of the biggest show of his career, Hall is reconciling his fractured past with his blindingly bright future.

- SAMUEL HINE

WHEN I ARRIVE at Chase Hall's property in New York's Hudson Valley, I ask if he has any coffee. This is sort of a silly question, considering he paints with the stuff. The mocha hues of coffee grounds are a signature element of his figurative canvasesHall can pull up to a hundred espresso shots for one painting, brewing dozens of distinct tones based on the type of bean and the ratio between the grind and water volume. The Americano he pours me is excellent.

Cups in hand, we walk from his white clapboard house toward his studio across a field bathed in late-August light. Hall comes out here in the mornings before he picks up his brushes. Only 31 years old, Hall decided to divide his time between the libertine downtown NYC art scene and this bucolic upstate retreat at a younger age than most artists. Hall's wife, Lauren Rodriguez Hall, gave birth to their daughter, Henrietta, two months before my visit, and fatherhood has tapped him into the rhythms of life in a new way. He's been learning woodworking in order to build large, sturdy work tables for his studio, and has a newfound fascination with the flora and fauna that inhabit his 21 acres. "I have turkey families that live back here," he says as he calmly lopes through the woods. "This whole year we've been watching them grow.

That shit's been a trip. Now I'm the guy out here with my coffee in a robe, like, Where are my turkeys? Where they at?" Though he landed in New York just over a decade ago with plans to become a photojournalist, Hall is now one of the buzziest young painters in the contemporary art world. His immediately recognizable paintings are coveted by collectors and institutions, and marked by his extraordinary autodidactic fervor. "I can't draw a straight line to save my life," jokes Hall, who began doodling with coffee at his Starbucks shifts during high school.