Clare Price

           

Can you briefly describe what you do?

I make large scale abstract paintings, the basis for which are digital drawings created on an antiquated computer programme and projected up with transparencies and an overhead projector. This drawing becomes the skeleton or "grid" for the painting, which is either meticulously adhered to or rebelled against using spray paint acrylic gouache and household lacquers. The paintings explore the intersection between something that is very visceral and painterly, and something that is much more controlled and designed. In some parts the paintings are spare, stark and graphic; in others, the paint washes voluptuously over the tightly restrained framework exploding into action painting.

What drives you to make work?

A gnawing, irrepressible, all consuming compulsion.

Can you tell me something of your day-to-day working practices?

It varies from stretching and priming of canvas the drawing up of the pixelated drawings which takes a few hours; the steeling to commence battle with the canvas to make it work or hang together in some way; the spray painting of the initial marks that mirror the pixelated lines and then the complete immersion in the painting where things happen that are outside of you that you don't expect where time goes by and you don't know what happened to it, where you are outside of yourself, usually in a haze of paint fumes. That’s what I do it for, those moments (not the paint fumes, the being outside of yourself [although no doubt the paint fumes help]).

How long have you been working in that way?

I have been working like this for the past five years.  I came back to painting after a long absence so it still feels very new and old all at the same time as I painted when I was younger. I think a lot of the insane hunger to paint is the making up for lost time.

Which artists have had the greatest affect on your work?

Patrick Heron, Joan Mitchell, Helen Frankenthaler, Albert Oehlen, Peter Lanyon, Blinky Palermo, Wilhelm de Kooning, Ingres, Turner, Andy Warhol.

What, outside visual art, informs your practice?

Music, lyrics, sound, popular culture, reading, landscape urban and rural, film and cinematography, architecture.

How would you like people to engage with your work?

Preferably in a large white space with plenty of room to stand back.  

Have you seen anything recently that has made an impression?

I saw a room of late Picasso paintings in Barcelona.  The compositions and colours were so effortless and perfect: they were delivered with such ease and almost flippancy but were so utterly serious, profound and charged. They moved me to the core.

Do you have anything exciting on the horizon?

In November I am returning to Cortijada Los Gázquez, where I did a residency two years ago. I'll be in the mountains in Andalucia with nothing to think about but painting for 10 days.  I also have a show at Studio 1.1 next year which I am making work towards and am very excited about.  The studio is also really both exciting and overwhelming me at the moment.  Things are in flux and wide open.