Claire Smith was born in Portsmouth in 1969.
She completed her foundation in art and design at Portsmouth College of Art, and then studied Fine Art, printmaking and painting at Falmouth School of Art for 3 years, graduating with a BA Honours degree in 1991.

Claire’s work has primarily been based in her local landscape, previously Kristiansand southern Norway, San Francisco and now Stavanger.

«I work between digital and physical media. Initially I would use digital sketching to save paint and time. When I became uncertain of how to proceed with a painting, I would photograph it, and put it into a sketching app. This enabled me to experiment more freely, with the image, adding layers of drawing and photos.

After some time, I found that the layers I could achieve by combining photos, paintings and digital sketching on one plain, was something which pushed my work in new and unexpected directions. This process creates elements of chance, random collisions of images, which create new realities for me to work from.»