Over the course of her 30-year career in art, Claire McConaughy has been interpreting nature. She has painted through the lens of feminism, historic landscape painting and symbolism. Her contemporary take on nature and landscape is made of heightened color, expressive marks, loose brushstrokes, and symbolic narrative. The paintings of landscapes, trees, lakes, and skies expand their meanings and allow for multiple layers of interpretation. As Robert Curcio wrote in Whitehot magazine, “Like a theater performance, McConaughy’s paintings loosely depict how reality is a semi-manipulated situation.”

In the process of painting, McConaughy uses a combination of painted passages and fluidly drawn lines. Her practice blends a variety of marks, shapes, and images that give way to interlaced layers creating spatial tensions and surprising metaphors. These works continue in the lineage of historic landscape painting and also arise innately from McConaughy’s early experiences in rural mountain woods and extend to her life today in New York.

McConaughy lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She has exhibited in galleries including Nick Ryan Gallery, The Drawing Center, 490 Atlantic, The Painting Center, Sherry Leedy Contemporary Art, Zürcher Gallery, Red Fox Contemporary Art, Garvey-Simon West, and others. She is the recipient of a MacDowell Fellowship, Millay Arts Residency, Ucross Foundation Residency and Santa Fe Art Institute Artist’s Residency. Her work has been reviewed in Art Spiel, artcritical, White Hot Magazine, Hamptons Art Hub and other publications. She served on the editorial board and staff of the art journal, New Observations, for over a decade, has taught at several NYC art colleges and currently is a full professor at Bergen Community College. Originally from Southwestern Pennsylvania, McConaughy has lived and worked in New York for over thirty years. She earned her MFA in painting from Columbia University and her BFA from Carnegie Mellon University.