Clare Andrews

Clare Andrews was born in Aberdeen, Scotland. She lives and works in Edinburgh and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

She specialises in painting, oil on canvas. In her paintings I use the abstract and the figurative. Large areas and shapes of flat colour interacting with realistic figurative imagery. These are intriguing and visually exciting images, found in books, magazines, newspapers and photographs, which are then combined in meaningful ways. The resulting pictures can have some sort of narrative but often this is left to the viewer to explore.

"I try not to conceptualise too much while working, it can be restricting and inhibiting. Things are better kept fluid.  Only after a painting is completed ,do I understand better what it is. I usually work in a series. Several paintings developing at the same time , under a series title, employing common elements , colours and ideas ; which are resolved in ever different ways, until  the process is exhausted."

“ Clare Andrews has always been a wittily ironic visual commentator on events and institutions [sometimes wryly bitter, sometimes celebratory]….. This should not be seen to suggest any kind of propagandist stridency, for stylistically Andrews has favoured what might be described as a comedic realism, and she has a remarkable gift for naturalistic observation. Her work has never lacked either poetry or visual wit….. This brings Andrews’s presentation towards a level of abstraction that is new to her work, and which increases its political relevance the more for its [relative] lack of circumstantial narrative content. It is its emblematic clarity that…gives the images - as images - a more universal, symbolic, resonance.” Mel Gooding  October 2013