Claudia Carr is a painter. She lives and works in London and during the last twenty years she has also worked in Italy and India. She trained at the Slade and subsequently taught there. She now holds teaching posts at the Royal College of Art and the Royal Drawing School. Claudia has had solo shows at Browse and Darby and Whitfield Fine Art, and mixed shows at various galleries in London and New York.
On drawing
Drawing for me is more about exploration than re-presentation. It is a very immediate and visceral way of engaging with the world around (and inside) us. Through drawing from observation I can connect with something outside of myself in a very intimate way. There's a lot of tenderness around the intense and often protracted observation involved in trying to understand how the thing in front of you works. It is also very difficult! But maybe the wrangling that this causes is part of what makes the activity so absorbing.
I also make drawings (often fast, scrappy, diagrammatic etc) as a way of exploring and trying to figure out pictorial ideas and problems. Like most artists I use drawing as a way of thinking; thinking through the body, through the hands.
Like rubbing a genie's lamp, the act of incessantly worrying the tip of a pencil across the surface of the paper can sometimes bring up unexpected imagery (in a very open sense of the word) from below the surface of consciousness, and you can then find yourself making equally unexpected responses to what has appeared on the page. In this sense, maybe drawing is a kind of conduit between the different parts of our selves.
