Contemporary Figurative Painter

Clova Stuart-Hamilton is a figurative painter based in Oxford where she has her studio. She trained at the Ruskin and the Royal Academy Schools in the 1980s, winning a number of major prizes and scholarships. She has shown extensively in London: Sue Rankin Gallery, Cadogan Contemporary, Burlington Fine Art, Darren Baker Gallery and regularly at the Mall Galleries (NEAC and RBA Annual Exhibitions) and in the Thames Valley, where she has found many collectors. Shows in East Anglia, the Southern counties and Edinburgh have taken her work further afield in the UK. Her paintings are in collections abroad, notably in the U.S. and in France where she spends several months each year. She has had a long relationship with Eastwood Fine Art and exhibits regularly at their Hampshire gallery.

Always working from life, her commitment to drawing and intense scrutiny of the subject can be traced back to a rigorous training at the Ruskin and the Royal Academy Schools in the 1980s and, in particular, to the teaching of the painters, Jane Dowling and Peter Greenham. Although most visible in her uncommonly large and searching pencil drawings, and the rhythmic and assertive oil pastels, the primacy of drawing underpins all the painted work.

The paintings in oil, gouache and the seductive but rarely used medium of distemper (a combination of warm organic glue and pigment) probe worlds of unusual and distinctive colour harmonies; whether more muted and subtle, as in the French Interiors and the Winter Flower Compositions or rich and sensuous, as in the Bengali, Ottoman and Tuscan Still lives and Music Room Interiors, as she responds to the particular mood and atmosphere of a subject.

Her choice of motifs, often a fusion of interior and still life, reflect an admiration for the French Post Impressionist painters and the Scottish Colourists, but also mirror a life spent with a family of musicians in Oxford and a passion for travel, architecture and foreign cultures.

 "Painting in the moment, from life, is becoming increasingly rare - but for me, it is an addiction.  To note the nuances of light, form and colour and then to wrestle the conundrum of distilling the three-dimensional onto a flat surface is challenging.  However, the urgency of capturing an iris bud as it opens, a quince before it rots or an evanescent shadow, induces a heightened engagement for which the photograph is no substitute."   C.S-H