ARTIST Chantal Joffe has a fantasy of owning her own studio on the Hastings seafront, with a view of the waves crashing on the beach.

For now though the closest she can manage is sitting on the beach at low tide and painting the light.

“Those paintings are awful,” she laughs. “I just like sitting on the rocks and trying to paint. It’s the sheer incredible nature of the sea – I love getting off the train at St Leonards, walking down the hill and seeing the sea filling the horizon. England is so spoilt for the seaside – you almost stop noticing it, but it is everywhere.”

Rather than landscapes, Joffe’s focus has always been portraiture, usually of other women.

And this new exhibition at the Jerwood has been selected by Joffe and co-curator artist Rose Wylie from portraits she has painted by the sea.

“The sea is not always obvious,” she says of some of the images. “It just creeps in around the edges.

“I come down to Hastings and St Leonards every holiday and at weekends. I love painting children by the sea – I love the wildness and the way their hair blows.”

In recent years Joffe has moved away from portraits inspired by fashion magazine cuttings to focus on more personal work of herself, her family and her friends, usually working from photographs.

“When you paint people or your own family there is something very different than painting from magazines,” she says. “I felt the need to do that, somehow the ugliness and the realness talks to me. In a way it feels like I’m going backwards – when I started painting I only painted from life, and painted people I knew.

“My focus is getting narrower and narrower – I like making self-portraits. I don’t have to filter them and worry about how the subject feels. I can really go for it!”

One thing that hasn’t changed is the format of her paintings – which can vary wildly in size, from small canvases to giant three-metre tall works which require her to use scaffolding in the studio.

“I love to work big,” she says. “Some of the paintings in the exhibition are very large.

“I can’t seem to make the figures fit in a medium-sized painting.

“Working big is very physical – there is less control and it becomes more unexpected.

“It’s hard to think about how I paint when I’m not painting. I can’t think properly unless I’m doing it. When you’re really painting you lose yourself.”

Ahead of curating this Jerwood exhibition Joffe and Wylie have been painting pictures of each other.

“She did a brilliant drawing of me which I love,” says Joffe. “She hasn’t seen my painting of her. I loved her exhibition [Big Boys Sit In The Front which opened the Jerwood in March 2012]. It’s a real privilege to work with her.”

It’s only one of four exhibitions Joffe is putting together in 2015. Cheim And Read gallery in New York is hosting a selection of her self-portraits in May, and her work is also going on show at London’s National Portrait Gallery in June.

Her second New York exhibition, at the Jewish Museum in May, has been commissioned by curator Jens Hoffmann focusing on Jewish women in history.

“It’s only people whose work I know and get excited by,” says Joffe. “I’m painting Susan Sontag, Diane Arbus and Gertrude Stein – people I have an affinity with.

“Painting these women you imagine what it’s like to be in their head – it can be quite upsetting sometimes, especially with Diane Arbus [the photographer killed herself in 1971].

“What I like about painting is you can do what you want, you can play as many games as you like. Nobody can tell you you’re wrong or right.”

Duncan Hall