High-quality, original art doesn’t have to cost you an arm and a leg — you just have to know where to look. For Chloe Fenech, the artist behind Painting Beautiful Places, that place is a shelf at L-Artigjana in Rabat, where she sells postcard-sized landscapes for the price of a nice dinner out.
It’s a niche that suits her, and it all began with a solo trip to Edinburgh.
In 2023, mid a difficult period in her life, Chloe booked a week away, alone, with no agenda beyond painting. Equipped with just the tools she could fit in her suitcase, she went anyway. “It was actually kind of the push that I needed,” she says.
Before Edinburgh, she had always painted whatever came to mind, wildlife and nature-themed, a hobby she’d had as long as she can remember. But this was the first time she painted landscapes and nothing else. In working with smaller, luggage-friendly sized canvases only, she discovered what stood out to her. She describes a mental switch going off, where she suddenly realised what she wanted to do.
“There was something about painting really small which felt more intimate,” she says of what came next.
Small wasn’t just a sentimental decision, it was practical too, being a working mum trying to capture a narrow window of daylight to paint in. But she found it was also freeing. Working within a restricted space meant fewer decisions, and turned out to be the thing that let her actually finish something. That alone, reigniting a passion and finishing what she started, helped her through that difficult season. It’s a habit that’s stuck.
These days, she spends a few days a week at L-Artigjana, a female artisan collective in Rabat, staffing the counter, chatting to customers, and working on a canvas in the gaps.
Chloe describes her current style as landscape-based but increasingly impressionistic and a little abstract, with “half real, half imagined” scenes inspired by England, Wales, Scotland, and Malta. Her technique now relies on collage and mixed media — especially paper and textile layers — built into small works to add texture, depth, and a more personal, intuitive feeling.
That intuition seems to translate to the customer, without much need for explanation. Each painting has a knack for finding the right person, one who connects with it even when they can’t quite explain why. “I’ve walked past this painting so many times and it just speaks to me,” is what Chloe recalls one of her buyers confessing. Another customer snatched up a small piece depicting a Merill, Malta’s national bird, just three days after it went up for sale. He said it was exactly perfect for his new home.
That kind of response is, for Chloe, the actual point of selling. “It’s not about the pretty picture,” she says. “It’s about everything that goes into it beforehand” — and about what she learns about herself in the process.
It’s also why she won’t do prints. To her, the idea that you need serious money just to have a decent piece of art in your home is nonsense. “Why should somebody have to have loads of money to have a nice piece of art in their home?” she argues. “My paintings are a piece of art that everyone can afford,” she adds, proof that owning something original, made by hand, doesn’t have to be out of reach.
Find Chloe, ideally in person, mid-canvas at L-Artigjana in Rabat, happy to talk about whatever she’s working on, while she works on it.
https://www.paintingbeautifulplaces.com/
