Claire Price is a New Zealand-born, Brooklyn-based contemporary artist whose exuberant paintings explore beauty, sensuality, nature, and the emotional power of color.

Originally trained in photography at the University of Canterbury, Price spent more than two decades working internationally as a professional photographer in Paris and London before turning her full attention to painting in 2018. Her photographic eye continues to inform her approach to composition, light, detail, and atmosphere.

Working primarily in acrylic and oil, Price creates immersive paintings that move between botanical abundance, dreamlike landscapes, still life, and contemporary portraiture. Her work is characterized by saturated color, layered pattern, and a tension between the recognizable and the fantastical. Flowers, foliage, animals, and fragments of the natural world become portals into richly imagined spaces.

Price's work has been exhibited in New Zealand, Paris, and New York and is held in private collections internationally. Her paintings range from intimate works to large-scale statement pieces designed to command architectural spaces.

Based in Brooklyn, Price continues to develop a distinctive visual language rooted in the meeting point between nature, memory, beauty, and imagination.

ARTIST’S STATEMENT

I paint to create worlds that feel more alive than the one we inhabit.

My work is an exploration of beauty, abundance, sensuality, and the instinctive human desire to surround ourselves with things that evoke feeling. I am drawn to flowers, animals, tropical foliage, water, food, color, and the extraordinary visual richness of the natural world. These elements become raw material for paintings that are less concerned with faithfully reproducing reality than with transforming it.

Color is central to my practice. I use it emotionally as much as visually—layering saturated hues, unexpected combinations, pattern, and light to create paintings that can alter the atmosphere of a space. A painting may begin with something familiar, but I want it to open into somewhere dreamlike: a place that feels simultaneously nostalgic and imagined.

My background in photography continues to shape the way I see. I think instinctively about framing, scale, composition, light, and the moment when an image becomes visually unforgettable. Painting allows me to push beyond the photographic image and construct something more visceral and immersive.

I am particularly interested in the relationship between artwork and architecture. A painting does not exist in isolation; it changes the energy of the room around it. Large-scale works can become visual anchors within lobbies, hospitality spaces, residences, and other public environments, creating an immediate sense of identity, warmth, and wonder.

Ultimately, I want my paintings to give people something increasingly rare: a moment of visual pleasure, escape, and possibility.