About | ClaireMcCarthyArtist

Claire McCarthy began painting at a very young age and has found her bearings in texture, composition and colour whilst also juggling a career as a film director.

Her vivid large-scale paintings, often of women, are spirited explosions of colour and emotion. Each piece is richly textured, layered in colour washes, hyper-real expressive faces, scratched back glazes with glints of pure gold and rivulets of drips and runs. There is a strong contrast between the tough, naive and refined in her paintings.

Her paintings are also imbued with strong cultural and spiritual influences. Having had the great privilege to live and work in many countries with rich art making cultures including India, Czech, Britain, New Zealand, Italy, North Africa and Russia, Claire draws on a rich tradition of cultural discourse and diverse expressions of the sacred.

A Film Directing graduate of the Australian Film TV and Radio School she also holds a double degree in film and design from the University of Technology, Sydney. Claire’s work as an artist looks for revisionist expressions of ‘tradition’, of the sacred and often fragile connections to self and culture. She is very much preoccupied with connecting the viewer with questions about culture, identity and place.

“I am very passionate about ‘us’ as a human species, reforging and evolving connections with our earth, with our primal expressions of the Divine, and of the rituals, mythologies and projections that surround our experience. So many cultures still carry a strong presence of the sacred - a connection with the land, their people and their cultural traditions. Daily I’m inspired by brave, instinctual and fierce creatives trying to change the world with their visions. They inspire me to try and be courageous too and to keep evolving as an artist and person.”

"As a film director the process of collaboration with other artists as well as nurturing the right circumstances to convey emotion and story is central to my work. Although painting is often a much more subjective and instinctual process, I do respect that a work will be interpreted and filtered through the audience / viewer. This excites me to communicate emotionally through the work.”

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