About

Bil Chamberlin / Kaninhoved

Bil Chamberlin is a contemporary painter and designer working under the name kaninhoved — a Danish word meaning "rabbit head." The name chose itself. Rabbits kept appearing in his work, uninvited and insistent, until he stopped resisting and made them the emblem of the practice. For Chamberlin, who is proud of his Danish heritage, the word carries both personal and symbolic weight: spare, strange, and impossible to forget.

Born in Princeton, New Jersey, and a graduate of Maryland Institute College of Art, Chamberlin spent three decades shaping visual systems for IBM, Samsung, and NetApp, with an early chapter as an intern at Walt Disney Feature Animation. That career built an instinct for precision, structure, and controlled complexity. Painting became the deliberate counterforce — a space with no undo, no revision history, no frictionless perfection.

Now based in Colorado, he brings the rigor of a 30-year design career into direct collision with the raw, irreversible language of paint. The result is work that lives at the charged intersection of intuition and structure — where invention is tactile, risk is visible, and every decision leaves a mark.

His large-scale abstractions pulse with layered vitality: bold geometric bands, rhythmic dot systems, and dense color fields — turquoise, lavender, electric pink, and brooding blues — fractured by spontaneous gestures and buried histories. Works such as Rain Over There, Eight, and Stockholm 67 suggest distant storms, coded landscapes, and moments of luminous rupture, hovering between structure and instability.

Running parallel is a current of playful figurative work — Skateboard Elephant, Pink Elephant, Woman on a Bicycle, Bat Cat — where improbable characters inject humor, tenderness, and irreverent joy. These works ground the abstractions in human experience, reminding viewers that wonder often arrives unannounced.

Using recycled paint and found materials, Chamberlin builds and erases in alchemical layers, burying and unearthing marks until the surface vibrates with memory and time. His process mirrors contemporary life: mediated, unstable, and richly layered — yet deeply human.

kaninhoved originals and prints are available at kaninhoved.art. Commissions are welcome.

You can contact me anytime with questions or ideas. Most of my unique paintings are for sale, some through Saatchi Art. I'm also open to fun design projects where we can try new ideas together.