Claire Oxley’s work is distinctive through its colour intensity and rhythmic mark making. Taking inspiration from surrounding landscapes, her starting point is often the passing seasons and wide, changing moods of her East Anglian home. ‘I make paintings that chart and describe the seasons, skies, seas, moons, fields, flowers, and foliage of the area: canvases of energy and flux. These works are felt and heard as much as seen, stirring memories and experiences from these vast counties. Unexpected colour combinations stimulate, and bring energy to interior spaces.’ 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. A synaesthete (which, in Claire’s case, means that colour and sound are experienced interchangeably) she uses environment, music and seasonal rhythms as a starting point for many pieces. Following a vibrant tradition of Modernist painters such as Matisse, Van Gogh, Klee, Gilman (a distant relative), Diebenkorn, Nash and Ravilious, shifting hues and patterns are at the heart of her works.
Claire regularly exhibits in Norfolk and Suffolk, London, and across the UK. Her paintings are bought by global collectors. Commissions, in a wide variety of sizes, are welcomed.
The craving for colour is a natural necessity just as for water and fire. Colour is a raw material indispensable to life. At every era of his existence and his history, the human being has associated colour with his joys, his actions, and his pleasures. –Fernand Leger, “On Monumentality and Colour”, 1943