Emma McClure

Emma McClure paints scenes of everyday life. Born in London in 1962, she did a Foundation Course at Falmouth School of Art followed by a BA Hons in Fine Art at Winchester School of Art. After this, she completed an MA in Painting at Chelsea School of Art. She started to exhibit soon after leaving college and gained early success exhibiting in annual exhibitions held in London by the Contemporary Art Society and was selected as Artist of the Day at the Angela Flowers Gallery by William Crozier, Head of Fine Art at Winchester. Subsequently, she has continued to paint and exhibit in London and Cornwall and her paintings are in collections worldwide. Her work has also been reproduced as prints and greetings cards by The Art Group and Canns Down Press.

“The subject matter for my paintings includes animals, still life and landscapes. The starting point is always something seen and ideally sketched. I live in St Ives in Cornwall and often do drawings of the landscape around the Penwith Peninsular where the moorland, farms and fields are a constant source of inspiration. Another recurring theme are the colourful and characterful exotic birds which I draw at a nearby bird sanctuary. Other paintings can be inspired by something observed by chance such as dogs and their walkers or birds in the garden. These seemingly mundane everyday encounters provide a motif which is imbued with humour or pathos. In the studio, I use the sketches and my memory of the subject as a starting point and working intuitively, often with a lot of revisions and reworking, I aim for a simplified image and hopefully, the painting will at some point just feel ‘right’.”

The Thackeray Gallery has represented Emma McClure since 2022.

You can see more of Emma’s work on her webpage: https://emmamcclure.co.uk/