Clé Caswell
Thanks for dropping in! First, about the names. Clé is pronounced like “clay.” A nickname of my Irish-English-French Nana’s, I adopted it because she was a painter but had to create in secret, as my grandfather disallowed the presence of Art in her personal life. Yikes.
Most of my paintings are oil on canvas, using Sennelier and Williamsburg paints, and walnut oil as a medium because I do care about toxins and not dumping them into the environment. As you’ll see, I do not focus on any one category: Figurative, Landscape, Still Life, etc. For better or worse I am self-trained and an intuitive artist. This merely means that I do not know what I’m doing. Or rather, I create things that later I cannot imagine how I pulled them off. If I approach anything with too much of the scholarly attitude, I usually fall flat. Possessed by the creative state, I am—to use the words of my good friend Michael Drury, “like a crazed female Jackson Pollack,” that is, wild-eyed and drooling and highly emotional as the Muse travels through me. (Check out Drury’s phenomenal paintings here.)
My drawings are done in charcoal or Conte crayon or oil pastels, on whatever paper is available, and most are done with a naked female or male model standing mere feet from my easel, posing with brave hearts. I would like to thank them all for their gorgeousness and patience and panache.
As for my purses and mandalas…some in cloth, some in leather, all handwrought. Every stitch and hole-punch and lace and bit of beading is sewn with a lot of soul and love. Much of the cloth and beads and bangles have been collected over the course of many long lives and there’s no way in hell I would ever mass produce them. Let’s hear it for Hand Made! Okay, enough politics…go forth and enjoy the pictures, Virginia. And, yes, there is a Santa Claus.