Biography
Claerwen James, born in 1970, originally trained as a molecular
biologist at Oxford University and Cold Spring Harbor, NY. She
graduated from the Slade School of Fine Art in 2003, and has won
various awards, most notably the Slade School's own Melvill
Nettleship Prize for Figure Composition. Introduced to Flowers
gallery by Andrew Stahl as part of our Artist of the Day programme
in 2004, she has gone on to have numerous solo exhibitions both
here in the UK and the US.
All of the portraits originated as photographs: some scavenged,
some taken by the artist, who believes that the awkwardness of the
photographic moment is crucial to the painful, elegiac quality of
the paintings. Among the images used are those from Claerwen James'
own childhood.
In 2006, Francis Spufford wrote that Claerwen James' subject
matter is, in a sense, the photographic moment, when a point in
time is snatched from the flow, "sealed into stillness and set in
strange relationship to the continued life. . . which we do not see
in photographs but which they always imply, giving the medium its
mortal edge."
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