Chad Etting paints belted trousers, clapboard houses and the memories that old photographs carry

Chad Etting has been painting since he was sixteen. He is now 42, and between those two points, he has worked as a high school teacher, an administrative assistant, a financial specialist, and a pharmacy technician. Nobody in his family is an artist.

He grew up in Connecticut, away from the pull of New York City – "no one in my town was commuting there for work," he says – and his main focus growing up was soccer. He was a goalkeeper and captain of his college team. Art was the real passion, but it was something practised outside of class, on his own terms, without much institutional scaffolding.

In recent years, that commitment has started to show itself publicly. Chad has exhibited in the US and Europe, built a following on Instagram and taken on brand collaborations. "Painting has always been my vocation," he says. Everything else has been in service of it.

What Chad paints is a particular strain of American imagery – the belted trousers, the wristwatch glimpsed below a cuff, a clapboard house in flat winter light, the interior of a pickup truck or a man standing alone on a pavement. Many of the images begin in thrift-store books or online archives, found photographs that "elicit a response" in him so strong that he feels compelled to recreate them.

The source material often overlaps with the visual language of preppy clothing catalogues and Ivy League nostalgia – imagery he is drawn to precisely because of its constructed nature. "In advertising, there is a tendency to glorify the prep school or Ivy League look," he says, "but spend some time on an Ivy League campus, and you will see many other ways of dressing." 

What interests him is the gap between that projected world and the actual one – and the feeling that survives the gap anyway. "It communicates a reality that exists nowhere else but in feeling," he says. "And it's the imagery that carries this feeling through time and generations."

Two small canvases, both 8x10 inches, stand out among his recent works. The first is of a bearded man, arms folded, leaning against a car and looking slightly to one side. It is notable, Chad explains, for what it includes: the head. In the past, his figures have typically been cropped at the shoulders, making the subjects feel anonymous and mysterious. Showing the face, even a face at that scale, on that small a canvas, felt like new territory for Chad. "This painting is also an example of my recent fascination with leaving the white of the gesso untouched in areas of the painting."

The second is of his dog Rosie, who died around two months before he painted her. He worked from a photograph but barely needed it. "Her image is with me internally," he says. "She was a kind and sweet dog, and this comes through in the painting." The small white figure sits on a grey-blue ground, still and patient and very much present. Rosie is now marked in time forever on the canvas.

This summer brings group shows in New York and Connecticut, and a solo exhibition in Los Angeles in the autumn, which he describes as something he is genuinely excited about.

Above all else, and whatever comes next, Chad describes painting as a celebration – something more emotional than just a painting made with a brush, which he hopes viewers can feel even from a distance. "I hope my audience feels optimism when they view my work. I think of paintings as energy transfers. I want viewers to get a taste of how free I feel when painting. I see painting as a celebration."