Clare Price

Today I'd like to share some work by London based painter Clare Price who is having a solo show at  studio1.1 , London  from 18th May- 10th June.

These large paintings walk an interesting line between an 80's stylised sensibility and a random, even explosive expressiveness. These paintings seem to make a point of exploring that moment where control gives way to chance, where accidents are embraced. It's about the moment when the painter recognises that breakdown, possibly even failure, is the best way forward. 

Clare Price makes paintings inspired initially from drawings made on old antiquated computer programs. Marks are translated meticulously onto the canvas allowing for a grid-like structure to reveal itself. It's here that her process becomes interesting. Where control or loss of control opens the possibilities of paint and how this leads to a play with painterly concerns. I love the idea of this process and the way that the artist explores a space in which tight, almost cold compositions give way to the loose and handmade.  In her artist statement Clare Price writes: 

The paintings explore the intersection of something that is very visceral and painterly with something that is much more controlled and designed.  I use metallic sprays, garage door paint, Japlac high gloss enamels, Hammerite, Japanese acrylic gouache and oil paint. In some parts the paintings are flat, stark and graphic, in others, through the use of solvents and painting wet in wet, the colours work like washes to the point where they take on the form of water colour. There is an obsessiveness when I lay out the tight framework of the image and I will work over and between the lines to the point where there is a tension between accident and control,  sprayed marks and household paint drip voluptuously over the drawn lines breaking the spacial arrangement and reopening the composition. I imagine the structures are taken to a point of collapse hanging by their own pixelated threads.     

Suitably intrigued, I wrote to Clare and asked her about her work:

The drawings are made on an old drawing programme called Claris Works. I am interested in "the screen" having previously worked with moving image, and in new and also defunct or antique technologies.....in mistakes within the machine - of digital "drop out".  I am intrigued by something that Peter Halle said about modern emotions being different to the past  and  about feeling "freaked out or a little spacey".  The works engage with the idea of  making romantic landscapes inspired by urban and technological environments, they endeavour to make  paintings that are pertinent to our times that are romantic and emotional whilst exploring a new aesthetic. I  am very much inspired by 50s abstract expressionist painters - in particular Joan Mitchell, Helen Frankenthaler  and the late works of Patrick Heron, as well as people like Frank Stella and Jonathan Lasker and more currently artists like Alex Hubbard and Albert Oehlen.  I am informed by cinematography and the constraints of the "screen" combined with classical notions of painting.  The paintings also engage with notions of cancellation and erasure and and how we express our humanity through the constructs of technology.

"resolution"

211cm x 177cm

small work

35.5 x 30.5 cm