About Clare Woods

INTUITIVE ABSTRACT ARTIST

Clare Woods is an intuitive abstract artist based in Matakana and in Torbay, Auckland, New Zealand.

She has always painted and has vivid memories of bright colours and patterns spilling over walls from painting windows as a child. It is that freedom to be creative that has led to a successful career in design.

Clare has explored many mediums including clay, printing and fibre art. She now predominantly paints in acrylics on canvas and often incorporates mediums such as pencil, crayon or pastel in her mark-making. Clare also enjoys collage and is exploring this further.

Clares collage work is full of intense colour.  Her current collage work is created with hundreds of hand-painted and hand-cut swatches. All connected and overlapping to create something beyond where they began. Each section is as unique as a fingerprint. Like a family, blending and relating to each other. Each tells it’s own story. Designed to always create a happy, uplifting response. Clare’s work is always joyful and colourful and vibrant.

She uses techniques such as complex layering and mark-making to tell an underlining story with thick and experimental tool paint application. Similar marks and shapes, such as the arch, repeat in her work and compose a unique signature style. A fingerprint of pools, lines, paths and pattern. Nature is often a source of inspiration, as in her Landshapes series.  

Between Christmas and New Year of 2022 Clare broke her knee. During the weeks that followed Clare was unable to stand for long periods so creating new art wasn’t possible. This was an opportunity to delve into an idea that had been brewing for a while. Clare then began her Wearable Art collection seen on the Earrings page.

Clare has always created art of one kind or another including fibre art and she has taken part in many midnight yarn bombs. For the last decade she has been designing for web. If she isn’t designing or painting, Clare is walking with her husband and their black lab Harvey or busy in her web design business Woodswork Web.