EDUCATION
B.A. (Queen’s), M.A. (Toronto), B.Ed. (Toronto), post-graduate diploma (Toronto Art Therapy Institute)

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE:  As an artist, Claudia studied Fine Arts at the Ontario College of Art, and has exhibited in public and private galleries since 1984. Claudia and her family live in Barrie, Ontario.  Claudia paints in her home studio and on location on Bone Island, Georgian Bay and Lake Penage, southwest of Sudbury. Her passion is experimental landscape and how it reflects the presence of place.

Claudia also maintains a private practice as an art therapist. Contract work in this area has extended to many support agencies in the community. For 13 years she has facilitated the art therapy and expressive art programmes of Candlelighters Simcoe, a support group for families of children with cancer. This year, she is leading a series of art workshops for members of Gilda’s Club of Greater Simcoe. The initiative is supported by the Ontario Arts Council and the MacLaren Art Centre.

Claudia combines her love of intuitive drumming and art to develop, together with area sound practitioners, expressive arts workshops for men and women.

As an educator, Claudia has been a Visual Arts teacher for grades 1 – OAC in public, separate and independent schools. For over fifteen years, she has been a recipient of “Artist in Education” grants through the Ontario Arts Council.  She has also been the instructional leader of courses and/or workshops for art galleries, museums, colleges, universities, leadership centres, art education conferences and school boards across the province. Claudia currently teaches Colour and Design one day a week at Georgian College.

ARTIST STATEMENT: Through mixed media on scarred canvas, eroded wood and stressed paper, I explore Landscapes of memory and possibility, and journeys of the mind and heart. Each painting comes into being slowly and searchingly. Compositions are suggested by the physical site, the irregularities of the painting surface and the actual process of mark-making.  Fissures, knotholes and other imperfections suggest initial carving, construction and brushwork.  Pools of pigment are then scried for contours and shapes. Configurations from the environment work themselves into the imagery: the streamlined ellipse of a canoe, the arc of a satellite in the night sky. Further markings not only record topography, but seek to mirror the physical energy of the natural forces and personalities that shape the site.

My paintings have developed as a response to the overwhelming power of nature, first in Lake Penage, northern Ontario; then in Newfoundland, British Columbia, and the Yukon; and now on Lake Simcoe and Georgian Bay, Ontario. Increasingly, the process of charting territory has become a vehicle for expressing a sense of place and a sense of self.

“It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.” – Antoine de St. Exupery

“What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset.” – Crowfoot of the Blackfoot Nation

EXHIBITION:

March’s “group of seven” from the Mad and Noisy gallery will examine methodologies of abstraction and minimalism through mediums of silver, encaustic, paper, paint, stone, and digital imagery.  Whether it’s depicting the bare essentials or altering imagery beyond the literal, each artist’s imagery celebrates the elements and principle of design, while simultaneously increasing the accessibility to the work.  We invite you to take in this ethereal collection of works that celebrate the notion of ”less is more” through accomplished studies of colour, line, shape and form.