Parts of a whole
Claire Oswalt
Austin
Texan painter Claire Oswalt ascribes to the theory that all art is generated by the subconscious. “People often ask me where the inspiration for my colours comes from,” she says from her studio in Austin. “And I have absolutely no idea.” After long stints in Los Angeles and New York, the 46-year-old returned to her hometown. Though the Texan capital is an enclave of creativity and progressivism in a state not famed for such things, it is a very different environment from the two megacities that dominate America’s artistic output. Still, any attempts by Monocle to impose a geographical stamp on Oswalt’s work are politely rebuffed. “I don’t feel like my location has much to do with it,” she says. “There’s a quote from the Wim Wenders’ movie Wings of Desire, in which a character says, ‘‘Behind closed eyes, close your eyes once more.’ And I feel like that’s the place from which I’m working.”
Despite this, the colours of Oswalt’s recent output seem to be more informed by the natural than the interior world. And though the scale of the collaged paintings speaks to the western US tradition of grand vistas, their nature and construction are anything but brash or broad brushstroke. Indeed, each honours “that tiny moment of making that first mark on the paper”. This first mark comes after a painstaking process involving the accumulation of dozens, or even hundreds, of pieces of paper piled high on her studio floor. “It’s quite a live thing,” she says. “When I start to move them around, that’s when these abstract pieces emerge… And the edges of these collage papers become the seams of my work.”
Oswalt attributes the methodical, even mathematical, way of producing work to her grandparents. Her grandfather was an engineer who made stained glass in his free time, while her grandmother was an oil painter. “And that kind of dichotomy of math and painterly aspects carried through for me.”
She describes the final process of bringing all the components of her collages together as symphonic. “I’m fascinated by this idea that, especially in a symphony setting, you can have one instrument, one note, and then you put it all together and you’ve created an opera.”
-Sophie Monaghan-Coombs and Alexis Self
