About the Artist
Oil painting captured Claire's focus long before her teen years. Then, throughout high school she painted commissioned portraits of her classmates, for their parents, and earned money to pay the board bill on her horse. Horses, dogs and other animals were the subject matter of numerous other commissioned paintings, as well. "I knew I wanted an art career when I visited galleries in Santa Fe and Taos as a child, and I found my fulfillment at an early age creating art."
Claire was born in Washington, D.C., in 1944, and grew up in Albuquerque, New Mexico, when her family moved west. She later studied informally with friends Wilson Hurley and Arthur Sussman, while still in Albuquerque. Then, in 1989, she took a workshop from Roy Andersen. Having spent time horseback on friends' ranches in New Mexico and Colorado, Claire gravitated naturally to western subject matter and landscapes. She continues to exhibit her work in numerous shows throughout the U.S.; and is represented by the Ponderosa Art Gallery in Hamilton, Montana, L-Bar Art Gallery, in Kerrville, TX and the Toh-atin Gallery in Durango, Colorado.
For more than 25 years she made her home in the mountain town of Pagosa Springs, Colorado. She recently moved to Fredericksburg, Texas in the Hill Country northwest of San Antonio. Claire has been featured in Southwest Art, (August, 1995), Art of the West, (Jan./Feb. 1988), Equine Images, (Feb./March 1995), and recently in the Appaloosa Journal (November 2000).