Meet abstract landscape painter Claire Oxley

Q: Hello Claire, it’s lovely to meet you. You’re based in Norfolk, has the county always been home?

A: I was born in Norwich, and grew up a little way out, in a village called New Buckenham, going to school in Norwich.

After my foundation year I studied at the universities of Lancaster and Oxford (Art and Music, and Musicology respectively), and then taught for many years in Lancashire and Surrey, before returning to Norfolk. The county has a way of drawing people back!

Q: Can you tell us more about your time at Norwich School of Art? How did this inform your practice?

A: I was very lucky to do what was known as a Foundation Course – a year where students could try lots of different disciplines not ordinarily offered as part of A levels at school.

But I always returned to ‘Fine Art’ painting, and that’s what I’ve continued with throughout my teaching and practice. After that, I took a joint honours in Art and Music at Lancaster University, before reading for my Master’s in Musicology at Oxford. 

Q: Seasons, skies, seas and moons inform your work, as well as local flora. Could you tell us more about your process?

A: I photograph landscapes in East Anglia a lot, and these form the basis for my works. Initially I have an idea for a piece, and start by layering paint, letting it dry between layers, usually keeping the colours very ‘clean’, but at a certain point I pay less attention to the starting point and let the painting tell me what it needs.

This is often done without thinking too much about it (in fact, this is essential!), but by responding to what’s going on. In this way, I don’t feel that I finish paintings as much as resolve – or balance – them. 

Q: You include a quote by Wassily Kandinsky on your website. Like Kandinsky, you are a synesthete. Could you tell us more about how you experience sounds and colour?

A: It took me a while to work out that I have a condition called synaesthesia. It slowly dawned on me as a child that not everyone thinks of their friends and family members as colours, or structures music visually, but the experiences of my senses are often ‘crossed over’, and this is very exciting.

Music inspires my art hugely. Currently I am working on a body of paintings that are based on composers who have worked in the region, such as Ralph Vaughan Williams, Benjamin Britten, and Thomas Morley. In this I play with the vast spectrum of abstraction, responding to the music in a more-or-less intuitive fashion.

Q: Your paintings feel alive with movement. What do you hope to convey in your work?

A: The landscape in East Anglia has terrific skies, colours, patterns – this is perhaps obvious – but for me in addition it’s the music that I experience with it – and I can’t quite explain that – but it’s something to do with the rhythms, pulses, and cycles of seasons and times.

It’s an agricultural area, and a county that’s very much connected to its physical attributes. And then there’s the sea – something to which I am very drawn.

Q: Who are the artists that inspire you the most? 

A: This is a hard question. I suspect that my work follows a tradition of Modernist painters such as Matisse, van Gogh, Klee, Gilman (a distant relative), Diebenkorn, Nash and Ravilious, the surface textures of Cy Twombly, and the musical textures of the composer Ravel.

Mondrian’s progressive abstraction of trees perhaps best sums up the way in which I can select a more-or-less representational or abstraction of landscapes.

Q: What’s on the horizon for you?

A: A Folk Song Suite is the exhibition of music that responds to composers from the region – that opens in March 2023. After that, it’s fairs and gallery appearances across East Anglia for the rest of the year!