Visual artist Clare Chinnery Follow.Art Card

About me

Clare Chinnery is a British artist living and working on the Wirral, whose practice sits at the charged intersection of beauty, impermanence, and emotional truth. Working primarily in oil paint, layered, scraped, dragged, and pushed into sculptural presence, she creates abstract still lifes that pulse with movement and mood. Her work draws deeply from the visual language of seventeenth‑century Dutch Vanitas painting, but she approaches the tradition with a contemporary, quietly rebellious edge. Flowers, vessels, skulls, and symbolic objects become her vocabulary for exploring the tension between abundance and decay, life and death, tenderness and resilience.

Clare studied Fine Art Painting at Liverpool John Moores University and has exhibited widely for more than two decades all over the UK including London, Tate Liverpool, and the Royal Cambrian Academy. Her work is held in private collections internationally.

At the heart of Clare’s practice is a desire to capture atmosphere, that fleeting emotional charge that sits between memory and sensation. She works instinctively, building surfaces through thick impasto, gestural sweeps, scratched marks, and bursts of spray paint that bring electricity to the canvas. Her compositions often begin with classical still‑life arrangements, but she disrupts their politeness with movement, texture, and a refusal to keep things tidy. The result is work that feels alive: luminous blooms pushing against dark grounds, bouquets that surge forward rather than sit still, memento mori that celebrate life as much as they acknowledge its fragility.

Her floral paintings, in particular, carry a punk sensibility, beauty with teeth, softness with a spine. They reject the saccharine sweetness often associated with the genre, instead embracing the wildness, urgency, and emotional complexity of living things. Clare paints flowers not as decorative objects, but as metaphors for resilience, impermanence, and the glorious business of being human.