Looking at Clova’s paintings is an immersive experience.  Her choice of motif, often a fusion of interior and still life; mirrors her love of travel and the exotic but also the eclectic juxtapositions of instruments, vintage textiles and furniture in the house that she shares with her musical family.

 

Artefacts brought back from Turkey, China and Morocco inspire large assemblages in the studio and provide the starting point for rich and absorbing paintings. The interaction of exuberant colour harmonies, sensuous shapes and dancing patterns, draw one into the carefully balanced but often bold compositions.  The surfaces and textures of the arrangements are brought alive by a painterly handling, stylistically somewhere between Impressionist and Post-Impressionist.

 

Always working from life, her commitment to drawing and intense scrutiny of her subject can be traced back to a rigorous training at The Ruskin and the Royal Academy Schools and, in particular, to the teaching of Jane Dowling and Peter Greenham.

 

The paintings are in oil, gouache and the seductive but rarely used medium of distemper - a combination of warm organic glue and pigment.  An unexpected Covid-related perk has been regularly seeing one of my distemper canvases, painted fifteen years ago, on the BBC news!  Whenever they interview their favourite public health expert, the picture she commissioned from me is just behind her head.  So many people have recognised it and got in touch.

                 

TRAINING:                     

1978 - 81                  Somerville College

                                   Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, Oxford

                                   M.A. Fine Art

 

1981 - 84                 Royal Academy Schools, London        

                                  Post-Graduate Diploma in Painting

AWARDS :

 

1980                         Laurence Binyon History of Art Scholarship

1981                         Fred Elwell Prize

1982                         David Murray Landscape Scholarship

1982                          Duff Greet Prize

1983                         Landseer Scholarship

1984                         David Murray Landscape Scholarship

1983                         Richard Jack Prize

1984                         Richard Ford Spanish Scholarship

 

COLLECTIONS :      Christ Church, Oxford

                                  Radley College, Oxford

                                  Sir Brinsley Ford

                                  Lord Windlesham

 

GALLERIES AND EXHIBITIONS: 

Clova has shown extensively in London: Sue Rankin Gallery, Cadogan Contemporary, Burlington Fine Art, Darren Baker Gallery and regularly at the Mall Galleries (NEAC and RBA Annual Exhibitions) and in Oxford, where she has found many collectors. Shows in East Anglia, the Southern counties and Edinburgh have taken her work further afield in the UK. She has also found buyers overseas, notably in the U.S. and France, where she spends time each year.