Avy Claire

Born in Summit, NJ, Avy Claire decided to become an artist at a young age. Her parents encouraged her dreams throughout her childhood by enrolling her at the Summit Art Center (now the Visual Art Center of New Jersey), where she attended many classes, including figure drawing and painting, still life, portrait and plein air painting, printmaking, and ceramics. She went on to pursue formal art studies at Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh, graduating cum laude with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Painting.

Nature has always been a primary influence for Claire. From an early age, she had the sense that trees were her guardians. Her childhood drawings focused on flowers and trees depicted as characters in costumes, as in theatrical productions.

In 1971 she traveled to the coast of Maine, a trip that initiated a pursuit of what she calls “the liminal space between sea and sky, a space that I wanted to go inside and explore.” It is that space that began a lifelong search of what lies beyond what the naked eye can see.

Claire’s abstract paintings feature rhythmic layers of brush strokes and colour to express what is beyond the obvious, exposing the human collective unconscious, a place where all people connect, while embodying a physical process mimicking the energy and dynamics found in nature. She calls this process “lifting the veil.”

Claire explains, “My time in the studio is a process of reaching. I search through layers of gesture with a goal of landing somewhere I haven’t yet been. I feel tasked to make things visible, to re-present the subtle magic of nature. As an artist, if I can share some piece of beauty, some way to understand the connectedness of all things, then I feel I have done my job.”

Claire’s search relies on working a few paintings at once, setting individual paintings aside to consider over time. Some works can take years to be realized, while others are realized more quickly.

Avy Claire’s paintings have been exhibited at the MoMing Gallery (Chicago, IL), Topaz Arts (Queens, NY), Concept Art Gallery (Pittsburgh, PA), the Hostetter Arts Center (Martinsville, NJ), the Portland Museum of Art (ME), the Center for Maine Contemporary Art (Rockland, ME), and in many galleries across the United States. In Maine she is represented by Cynthia Winings Gallery in Blue Hill, where she resides.

Claire is thrilled to exhibit a curated collection of work exclusive to Details Fine Art Gallery.

“Painting is not any one particular story but the place where all stories happen.”  —Anonymous