My name is Clare Trevens and I am a French artist who lives in Southern France (Provence).
I discovered painting thanks to my grandmother who was a painter as well and who gave me my first paintbrush (in this way initiating the interest I developed afterwards in painting).
My interest is to push further into the experiment and the unknown. It’s a will to find whatever you haven’t found yet, a personal search for something you know is there but still invisible at the moment.
I paint people, portraits, faces. I can’t resume myself to represent something else because I’m inexplicably drawn to it. A human being is complex enough in themselves to offer a wide range of emotions, contradictions and subtlety. I sometimes enjoy looking at a landscape painting or a still life, but I wouldn’t paint this kind of subject. Human is enough for me.
I start with a vague idea of what I’d like to do, a creative concept I’d like to explore (like painting clowns for instance). Then I work around this idea. The models are not really important, they are just an excuse to represent emotions. That’s why I consider all of the portraits I make as self-portraits. They may not represent me but I know I transfused a bit of myself in them. Painting as a cathartic process is not a novelty.
My favourite artists of the moment are Lo Chan Peng and Henrik Aa. Uldalen, two major figurative painters who really inspire me.
