More About Claire McCarthy

Born in Croxteth, Liverpool, Claire McCarthy inherited an environment where youthful hopes and dreams were laid bare against the backdrop of 1970’-80’s urban Britain. For every grey cloud the threat of blue skies were never too far away. A place where housing estates, punctuated with high rise towers, oversaw ordinary lives. Witnessing people who found they had little choice but to flourish or flounder amidst years of social and political change, decay, and regeneration.

From here McCarthy’s passion has become the spirituality of the living city. The artist portrays the colours and shadows that provide a backdrop to the choices we make in a modern urban life. She captures for us the heady pace of transition where it collides sometimes violently, sometimes perfectly with an expression few have mastered.

At the age of 12 years she would spend a lot of her free time to learn how to use watercolour and paint country landscape scenes and flowers, based on the styles of well known artists of the time.

From the mid 1990's she focused on the ways we live, relate and inhabit our world. Many of her paintings depict the atmospheric streets, bringing light to the idea of space and movement. Her work will provoke a sense of future, past and present converging at one moment, telling a story about the intimacy we have with our synthetic surroundings.

Claire believes that art creates happiness and enjoyment, as well as a sense of beauty that might not always be apparent to the casual observer. Her aim is to create works which show the light, love and honesty of a modern urban environment too often beset with kneejerk fear and angst. McCarthy gives us much more than this. Her work gives us an important insight into the urban spiritual existence necessary for the continued renewal of our human environment.

It was during the 1990’s, McCarthy obtained her Fine art Degree in Liverpool; She also teaches art in schools across Merseyside.