Skip to main content

Claira Heitzenrater









We were obsessed with Claira Heitzenrater’s work when we first saw her creations incorporating gold paint. She creates a personification of a household object staging them as portraits, using saturated hues, beautiful brushwork, and subtractive mark making.

Claira Heitzenrater is a contemporary painter & educator living and working in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She holds an MFA in painting from Edinboro University and a BFA in studio art from Indiana University of Pennsylvania. She has been featured in issue 13 of Create! Magazine, volume 38 of Studio Visit Magazine, issue 11 of Fresh Paint Magazine, as well as various regional publications. She has completed residencies at SparkBox Studio in Picton, Ontario, Canada and the Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, Vermont. Claira currently works as a teaching artist in design at the Manchester Craftsmen’s Guild in the north side of Pittsburgh.

She eloquently explains how her portraits of objects focus on female empowerment:

Women are powerful. That goes without saying, our contemporary culture still requires a reminder of our innate power in everything we interact with. In my paintings, I honor the women before me; the homemakers, the mothers, and the witches, to name a few. I employ varying degrees of abstraction and renderings to reinforce transient female experiences with my observed forms. I apply and scrape away paint, removing portions of the composition to create “ghosts” within the picture place, which functions as not only a present spirit or manifestation, but also a plane, which function as not only a present spirit or manifestation, but also a memory of powerful women of the past. I deliver content to the viewer via the use of surrogate objects, being viewed from their outside perspective, their relationships mimicking that of human portraiture. These objects flaunt their deterioration from use, supporting the emotionality of each piece. Though people of all genders are represented by household objects, I choose to focus on all women and woman-identifying individuals, honoring their strength, power, and wisdom in the odjects society used to retrain them within the home, a tongue-in-cheek response to patriarchal society by putting objects of the homemaker, the mother, and the witch on a pedestal.

Find Claira online at www.clairaheitzenrater.com and on Instagram @c.l.a.i.r.a


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Jo Illustrates!

Work featuring great color, architecture, an eye for design, and fun shops?! Yes please! If this intrigues you as much as us, check out Jo Illustrates! Jo Illustrates! is a project by a Sydney based artist who dabbles in illustration; she draws inspiration from a past life of studying graphic design and architecture, working in a graphic style that is detail orientated. Jo was kind enough to give us some insight into how she approaches her work: I use a combination of copic markers, paint pens and felt tip markers in my work and find the materials I use inform the type of art I create. Almost as if they are in charge and it's my job to figure out how to form an image from their application. I find approaching my art in this way is not only expressive, but methodical and puzzle like.  I am inspired by architecture, music, travel, design, pattern and colour. You can see more of her work on Instagram   @_jo_illustrates or on Etsy  http://w
8 comments
Read more

Nancy Gruskin

  Modern still life and figural paintings capturing the beauty in daily experiences, Nancy Gruskin's work creates a narrative with beautiful brushwork and use of color. We love the gestural quality and implied forms  of her work, adding a fresh perspective to classic still lives.  Nancy Gruskin is a figurative and still life painter from Concord, Massachusetts.   She received a B.A. in Art History and Studio Art from Connecticut College and an M.A. and a Ph.D. in Art History from Boston University.   After teaching architectural history for several years, she now devotes herself to painting full-time.   Her paintings emerge from everyday experiences and familiar views and are based on direct observation, photographs, invention and memory.   Gruskin has shown her work across the United States and has an upcoming exhibition in Australia.   She teaches painting at the Concord Center for the Visual Arts.    More of her work can be viewed at www.nancygruskin.com
1 comment
Read more

Zeke's Lunchbox

The beautiful, fantastical, colorful creatures of Zeke’s Lunchbox, stole our hearts at first sight! Inspired by everything from pop art to retro science fiction, she creates mesmerizing scenes creating an escape from reality.   Zeke's Lunchbox is an art pseudonym for Melbourne based artist, Julia Rich. Under this name she creates work that is influenced by kitsch art and the space age while extrapolating ideas with imagery from everything B-grade. The work is triggered by schlock artists and draws inspiration from illustrators of Goosebumps and The Garbage Pail Kids. Zeke's Lunchbox is primarily a painter, illustrator and street artist specializing in portraiture of alien-like women and strange creatures that reside on distant planets. Zeke's work has been exhibited in a multitude of local and international group shows, including Miami Art Basel, Booty Worship (United States) and Soft Matter (U.K.). Some local highlights inclu
2 comments
Read more