Clare Margiotta

Visit Sandy Spring Friends Meeting’s Lyceum Gallery our latest exhibit, featuring the artwork of Clare Margiotta.

Artist Statement:

I am inspired by nature and the world around me. Old buildings and windows capture my interest. I work with color, shape, light, and texture. I prefer blending my own colors rather than using color directly from a tube.

Exploration of varied media has always appealed to me. I use watercolor, oil, acrylic, and gouache paint, as well as pastel and colored pencil. I have also explored several printmaking methods (etching, block printing, and monoprints). I enjoy mixed media collage using assorted papers (including candy wrappers and wine labels), used coffee filters and tea bags, stamps, and dried flower petals and insect wings.

I don’t set out to create a mood or atmosphere, but they emerge as I am working. My work varies from realistic (you know what it is) to abstract shapes that appeal to me and may evoke varied images to the viewer.

A friend once wrote the following response to viewing a selection of my work:

“How does an artist say what she does when she paints? From Clare I do not hear the art-opening-party voices—self important and technically astute and full of themselves and what they are ‘trying to do.’ Her voice is hesitant as she searches for words for something that comes from ‘a place without words.’ These paintings come from her meditation practice—her way of looking at her connection with her home, her surroundings, things she loves and enjoys and that catch her eye.

“Things in time, things in space—are emerging and also going out of the world, the constant process is lovingly allowed to happen on the page. Paper is just paper; color just color—until colors are touched to paper in a wash of water that makes me think of the play between the artist and the materials and the subject—there’s a triangle, a trinity, not a hierarchy of the three—and this is why they feel—or cause me to feel—so peaceful. The artist does not need to exert control, but the paintings are not exactly ‘channeled’—there’s a sense of the mind of the artist—a sense of materials, a sense of the flowers, trees, strawberries, the natural world that inspired the paintings. There’s a feeling of respect for the materials and the subject matter—I sense the quiet, hidden (maybe not so hidden—but not shouted from the rooftops) love and peace in these works.”