Cloud Burst, 2019

Claire Whitehurst

Lithographic monotype on arches BFK

Framed: H. 23; W. 20"
Unframed: H. 18¼; W. 15¼"

Artist's Statement

Suspended between recognizable forms and dreamt abstraction, my paintings rely on their physical surface to anchor themselves within a larger structure of color, texture, and symbol. Motifs often repeat, reflecting as mirages of themselves, tracing a bumpy line connecting the work and the images within it. The surfaces inform the images - leaving room for autonomy within the paintings, as if they've constructed themselves. I'm interested in the parallels between physical material and a sense of clarity and misunderstanding. I am engaged in that cloudy and lofted space where referential logic and reflective ideas conjoin. The possibility for an image to both confound and describe simultaneously is what I ask of these images.

About the Artist

Claire Whitehurst is an artist living and working in Iowa City, Iowa, where she is teaching and pursuing her MFA in Painting and Printmaking at the University of Iowa. She was born in Louisiana and raised in Mississippi, earning her BFA at the University of Mississippi, and a Post Baccalaureate degree from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art in Philadelphia, PA.

Her work has been shown in national and international exhibitions, and can be found in private collections throughout the United States, and abroad in France and Germany. She has been commissioned for public art installations in Jackson, Mississippi, and in St. Jude's Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee. She received the Stanley Foundation Grant for International Research to study the formal and sculptural qualities of cave paintings in the Dordogne region of southern France. She is also the recipient of the Mildred Pelzer Lynch Fellowship at the University of Iowa.

Her work explores the space between sense and emotion, the characteristics within the surface of objects as a mythology, and the possibility of narrative through an object's formal qualities.

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