Claire Cansick

Claire Cansick

Claire Cansick grew up into a working class family of carpenters and keen gardeners in Great Yarmouth on the Norfolk coast. At the age of 7 she came second in a drawing competition, it ignited a spark and she began drawing in earnest. Her growing obsession with art was encouraged by her grandad Randall, a Dunkirk veteran who grew up in the Great Yarmouth rows and often framed and hung her childhood drawings.

She has been very lucky in having a consistent flow of excellent art teachers along the way; notably Mr Hill at secondary school who’s humour and enthusiasm she adored. She developed a love of life drawing under Heather Allen which has continued into some of her more recent work. And was encouraged to explore new avenues and ways of both thinking about and making art with the expertise of the tutors at Great Yarmouth College of Art.

Claire continued her studies at Norwich School of Art & Design specialising in printmaking. After finishing her degree in 1996, there was a pause while Claire raised her two daughters at home in the watery heart of the Broads National Park. But art was never far from her mind. Initially working in a makeshift home studio and having no access to printmaking equipment Claire began experimenting more with paint and is self-taught as a painter.

In 2012 Claire began showing her work in Norwich galleries and group shows This is in turn lead to her managing and curating two galleries in Norfolk where she gained experience and extended further into network of fellow artists and the arts community of East Anglia. Now painting full time, in 2016 she joined The Arborealists, an esteemed group of artists who centre their work around the subject of the tree. The group was formed by former Southampton Museum curator Tim Craven after a critically successful show titled Under the Green Wood and Claire has exhibited with them extensively around the UK and Europe.

Claire paints predominantly with oils on canvas, sometimes switching the substrate for wood panels or traditional gesso boards. She starts each piece by working quickly with a large brush or cloth, moving paint roughly and with energy across the canvas. Once dry she builds thicker layers of paint using the texture and strokes to create form, depth and distance, often referring to silhouettes of trees and objects against a the wider landscape. The final stages are built by adding varying amounts of detail.

Nature is her primary subject, with an emphasis on beauty and power of elemental forces; her focus has been primarily on water in its reflective capacity, but also the earth and the growing environment, air, and the play of light and dark within skies and cloud, and more recently the power of fire. One theme that runs through a lot of her paintings is the latency of memory; the diffusion the experience of growing up and living in these watery landscapes with expansive skies.

Claire is also conscious of climate change and its threat; she has observed and recorded this through her work based on travelling in Asia. Her work delves into our perceptions of the relationship between nature and us, reflecting her own interactions and merging them with emotional responses and memories, while manipulating colour to transform reality into an almost hypnotic dreamlike state, exploring how the mind adjusts reality into a reflection of wonder, filtered through the enhanced and embellished hazy distortion of memory.

Colour is a defining inspiration to Claire, she has an enhanced sense of colour and its nuance and power. Deciding what to paint often begins and ends with colour interactions, and forms part of the immersion in the emotional response to a landscape, applying heightened or imagined colour in order to express a depth of feeling. There has to be emotion involved for Claire to paint a subject, simply painting something for effect or representation is not an option.

She was influenced by Joseph Albers ‘Interaction With Colour’ which had a profound effect on how she viewed the palette the world presented, this idea that colour is more than science and has a magic quality is emblematic in her work. She is open about her influences, painters such as Edvard Munch, Billy Childish, Matthew Wong and many others are all stylistically referenced in her work.

Nick Stone
Art Director, The Rialto

Exhibitions

2022 A Sense of Place, Bermondsey Project Space, London December - January
The Architecture of Trees, Gallery East Woodbridge November - January
Galvanise, Spitalfields Studios, London July
British Painting 3, London June
Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, London June- September
Avant Gardeners, Houghton Hall, Norfolk May- September
Trees and the Sacred, The Hostry, Norwich April -May

2021 Celebrating Trees, St Margarets Church of Art Norwich Oct – November
Trees and Woodland of Exmoor, Lanacre Barn Gallery, Somerset November
Embassy, St Marys Works, Norwich September
Summer Exhibition, The Yare Gallery, Gt Yarmouth August - September
Sir John Hurt Art Prize, Holt (Finalist) July-August
Crossing The Liminal, Hampstead Garden Gallery London June-July
Somewhere Unexpected, Norwich Castle Museum May - September
Being with Trees, Gustavo Bacarisas Gallery, Gibraltar March - May

2020 Recollection In Colour Solo Show Chappel Galleries, Essex October - November
Richard Jeffries Museum Swindon 2 – 31 May The Arborealists
Trees and Woodland of Exmoor and Dartmoor The Museum of Somerset Taunton 1 May – 4 July
Fake News, Offshoot Gallery London 5 March 2020
National Memorial Arboretum 6 December – 29 March Arborealists

2019 Art Fair East Norwich 20 November – 1 December
The Affordable Art Fair Hampstead 9-12 May Jackson’s Painting Prize finalist with Backwater Dream
Young Gallery Salisbury 2 – 24 August The Arborealists
Paint in Progress, Anteros Arts Norwich 18 – 30 March Group show curated by Andy Reeve
Spring Art Show, The Forum Norwich April Group
Collégiale Sainte-Croix de Loudun, France 8 March The Arborealists
New Year Selection 2019, Chappel Galleries, Colchester January 5 – February 24

2018 Art Fair East Norwich November 29 – December 2 St Andrews Hall Norwich
St Ives Society of Artists Mariners Gallery, Cornwall 29 September – November The Arborealists
Flatford Mill, East Bergholt Suffolk September-October The Arborealists
Black Swan Arts, Frome 21 July – 2 September The Arborealists
John Davies Gallery, Moreton-in-Marsh, Gloucestershire 7 July – 4 August The Arborealists
Wells Maltings Trust: Connection. Wells, Norfolk 26 June – 30 September Gentleness Clears The Soul awarded Highly Commended.
Halesworth Gallery, Suffolk 28 April – 16 May Group
Spring Art Show The Forum Norwich 11-15 April 2018 Annual Group

2017 Spring Art Show The Forum Norwich 5-9 April 2017 Annual Group
ArtRooms, National Open Art, Melia White House Regents Park London 20 – 23rd January
Playhouse Theatre Norwich 1-30 October Solo

2016 Riverside Art & Glass Drawing Show 4 – 17 July 2016 Awarded honourable mention by Colin Self
Spring Art Show The Forum Norwich 7-10 April 2016 Annual Group

2015 Paint, The Undercroft Norwich November 2015 Group
Obverse, The Playhouse Theatre Norwich 1-30 August 2015 Solo
Paint, The Forum Norwich April 2015 Group

2014 Perspectives, Yallops Gallery Norwich October 2014 Claire Cansick, Brian Korteling, Helen Shepherd
Pennoyer Open Art, Diss April Group
The Weekender, The Forum Norwich 14-16 February 2014 Group
Draw, The Playhouse, Norwich 2 – 31 January 2014 Solo

2013 1+1=11 The Forum Norwich 31 August – 6 September 2013 Group
Paint, The Forum Norwich 24-29 March 2013 Group

2012 Paint, St Margarets Church of Art, Norwich March 2012 Group