We’re delighted to have a new collection from landscape painter Claire Oxley for January 2022, which is now on show. Her new collection is lending a wonderfully fresh, airy feel to the lower gallery, with her focus on swaying grasses and wide skies. The perfect tonic for those seeking solace and calm in nature.
A collection highlight is ‘Dewpoint Grasses’ which combines strong, almost neon corals, as though soft grass seed heads are catching the sinking sunlight; these flecks of light are contrasted with softer, more muted ochres of a meadow shaded at dusk.
Claire Oxley's work is distinctive by its colour intensity and rhythmic mark making. Taking inspiration from her surrounding landscape, her starting point is often the passing seasons and wide, changing skies of her East Anglian home. 'I create paintings that chart and describe the rhythms, seasons, skies, seas and fields and foliage of East Anglia; landscapes of energy and flux. These are works that are felt and heard and much as seen, stirring memories and experiences from these vast counties. Unexpected colour combinations are intended to inspire, and bring energy to interior spaces.'
A synaesthete (which, in Claire’s case, means that colour and sound are ‘felt’ interchangeably) she uses environment, music and seasonal rhythms as a starting point for many pieces. Following a vibrant tradition of Modernist painters such as Mattise, Van Gogh, Klee, Gilman (a distant relative), Diebenkorn, Nash and Ravillious, shifting hues and patterns are at the heart of her works. Soundscapes, landscapes and mindscapes are instruments for expressing composition, emotion, and understanding. Much of her work is centred on East Anglia; its skies, sounds, fields, coastline and seasonal cycles are a constant inspiration. She is, above everything, a composer of colour.
Claire lives in Norwich, Norfolk, and studied at the Norwich School of Art, and the Universities of Lancaster and Oxford. She regularly exhibits in Norfolk and Suffolk, London, and Oxford.
Claire Oxley's work is on show now: Click here to see more
