About Claire Harrison

I am inspired by the local landscape and my work is based upon the plants in my garden that I have grown from seed.  I create brightly coloured oil paintings, highlighting the miniscule on a large scale.  I am passionate about colour and emphasise those that I see, which are created by the changing light during the day.  I want vivid colours to glow from the canvas, because I want to show that the tiny wildflower or bright beetle in a grass verge is like a jewel amongst the undergrowth.  I explore the miniature and I will often attempt to crawl under the smallest wildflower and photograph from below, as if I am an insect looking up.  I study insects and flowers through a microscope and draw the natural forms and patterns that I see around me before starting a final piece. 

Nature, however small, is magnificent and important because it is not just a vista, or a landscape; it is the interdependent relationships between all creatures. Nature is a perfectly ordered mechanism that we dismiss as an overgrown landscape full of creepy crawlies, where in fact it, is a complex, beautiful ecosystem, each organism reliant upon one another.