Meditation, no. 61, from The Same Body
Original oil on canvas
18 x 24 inches

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ARTIST STATEMENT

The Same Body is a visual journey of joy and grief through the female form in a series of watercolor and oil paintings.

Mary Oliver wrote:

We shake with joy, we shake with grief.
What a time they have, these two
housed as they are in the same body.

This series of figure paintings is a meditation on joy and grief and the marvel that the body holds such contradicting emotions. When my dear father died, very suddenly, in the summer of 2022, I was struck immediately by the way my insides felt so unrecognizable, yet the vessel holding them, my body, looked the same.

I’ve been wanting to make a series of figure paintings for years, and when I returned last August from a month of painting landscapes in the south of France, I was craving figure work. Rather than scheduling a model, I sat in front of the mirror in my studio and painted myself again and again, quickly falling into a contemplative state. Gnawing ruminations hovering around my grief were worn down, coming in and going out like breathwork in a meditation. From these sessions came dozens of watercolor and oil paintings which I have curated down to 65 total pieces: 60 watercolors and five oils.

This is a departure from other work you may have seen from me: it is, in a word, raw. The act of making the paintings is the point of the series, rather than the subject you see on the page. I hope you will keep this in mind as you take in the work, imagining the range of emotions I experienced as I painted, navigating both grief and also joy in the face of grief, and letting myself feel joy again. There is much joy to be found in this beautiful world, and I’ve found that the grief makes the joy all the more poignant. Might that be the crux of being alive?

Thank you for reading and looking and being here. To joy!

xo Clare