Lleu, Claire Swinford, Gouache on Paper
Artist Statement
My paternal great-grandmother Hazel Lawyer Spencer was a painter. When I started painting in my early twenties, my mother showed me some of Grandma Hazel’s still lifes, which had been stashed in the back of a closet under the stairs. I don’t know how Hazel learned to paint, or why, or whether she painted cowboys and pink roses because they had deep significance for her as a Midwest farm wife or whether she would’ve painted something else if she thought she could get away with it. But I wish I knew the story. I found myself responding strongly to the premise of 50%of the Story: Women Expressing Creativity because it points up the importance of wielding one’s own power as a storyteller in times and places where no one else is saying the things you want to say. Storytelling is fundamental to the human experience, but having space in which to share the stories that matter most to us is sometimes rare. This is especially the case if those stories are complex, painful or challenging to the status quo. Finding a way to tell those personal stories through paintingg can be extraordinarily powerful. I make paintings as a way to think about identity as it is shaped by the past. I’ve found that the process of turning an image into a painting is a way of accessing a deeper understanding of the stories we tell ourselves about who we are, where we come from and what we want. I frequently use my relatives as my subjects, but my paintings seem to bring up deeply felt memories, images and feelings even for people who have never met my family. The act of sharing my paintings with others becomes a way of recognizing how our stories are connected. Frequently, we end up noticing commonalities in both our truths and our falsehoods.
Artist Bio
Narrative figure painter Claire Swinford has been making work in the Pikes Peak Regions since 1999, when her illustration of a fish won the Lewis-Palmer School District sixth grade art scholarship contest. More recently she was named 2016 Rising Star by the Pikes Peak Arts Council and was the 2016 Creative Industry recipient of the Mayor of Colorado Springs’ Young Leader Award. Recent solo exhibitions include Surface Gallery, Kreuser Gallery, the Cultural Office of the Pikes Peak Region and the Machine Shop. Group exhibitions include UCCS Galleries of Contemporary Art, the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center at Colorado College, the Modbo and the Colorado Springs Pioneers Museum. Curatorial credits include Manitou Springs Arts Council, the participatory sculpture installation UNITY COS, and the Sci-Fi Show at SPQR, an immersive exhibit involving 40 visual, literary and performing artists. Her bodies of work explore, respectively, femme world-building and liminality through the trope of textiles, an deconstructing the concept of a shared past through the nostalgic visual cues of Kodachrome slide decks.
